CHAPTER XXVI.

DICK’S VISION.

When Dick Rowan came home the first time after his mother’s marriage, both she and her husband had desired him to select a chamber in their house which should always be his. He chose an unfurnished one nearly at the top of the house, and, after several playful skirmishes with his mother, who would fain have adorned it with velvet and lace, fitted it up to suit himself. It was large, sunny, and quiet; and there was but little in it besides an Indian matting, an iron bed, a writing-table, wicker chairs, and white muslin curtains, that did not even pretend to shut out the light. There was nothing on the walls but a book-case and a crucifix, nothing on the mantelpiece but a clock. The young man’s tastes were simple, almost ascetical, and he protested that he could not draw free breath in a room smothered in thick upholstery. Sunshine, fresh air, pure water, and cleanliness--those he must have. Other things might be dispensed with.

In this chamber Dick lay now, his body a prey to fever, his mind wandering in wild and tumultuous scenes. He was at sea, in a storm, and the ship was going down; he was wrecked, and parched with thirst in a wilderness of waters; he was sailing into a strange port, and suddenly the shore swarmed with enemies, and he saw huge cannon-mouths just breaking into flame, and flights of poisoned arrows just twanging from their bows; he was at Seaton again, a poor, friendless boy, and his father was reeling home drunk, with a rabble shouting at his heels. And always, whatever scene his fancy might conjure up, his ears were deafened by the strong rush of waves, adding confusion to terror and pain.

One day, when he had been crying out against this torment, a pair of cool, small hands were clasped tightly about his forehead, and a voice asked, low and clear, “Doesn’t that make the waves seem less, Dick?”

He left off speaking, and lay listening intently.

“There are no waves nor storm,” the voice said calmly. “You are not at sea. You are safe at home. But your head aches so that it makes you fancy things. What you hear is blood rushing through the arteries. I am going to put a bandage round your head. That will do you good.”

Dick turned his head as Edith took her hands away, and followed her with his eyes while she took a few steps to get what she wanted. She smiled at him as she stood measuring off the strip of linen, and making up little rolls of linen to press on the arteries of the temples; and though her face was thin and white, and her eyes filled, in spite of her, when she smiled, the image was a cheerful one in that darkened room. She wore a dress of green cloth, soft and lustrous, and had a rosebud in her hair. The effect was cool and sweet. As she moved quietly about, the patient gazed at her, and his gaze seemed to be wondering and confused, rather than insane.

She drew the bandage tightly about his head, pressed hard on the throbbing arteries, and sprinkled cold water on the linen and his hair. She had observed that he started whenever ice was put to his head, and therefore kept it cool, and avoided giving a shock.

“You are sick, and I am going to make you well,” she said. “You are not to think, but to obey. I will do the thinking. Will you trust me?”

“Yes, Edith,” he answered, after a pause, looking steadfastly at her, seeming in doubt whether it were a real form he saw, a real voice he heard.

“This is your room, you see,” she said, laying one hand on his, and pointing with the other. “That is your book-shelf, there is your table and your crucifix. You know it all; but sickness and darkness are so confusing. Now, I’m going to give you one little glimpse of out-doors, only for a minute, though, because it would hurt your head to have too much light.”

She went to the window, and drew aside the thick green curtain, and a golden ray from the setting sun flew in like a bird, and alighted on the clock. Those sick eyes shrank a little, but brightened. She returned, and leaned over the pillow, so as to have the same view through the window with him. “That green hill is Longwood,” she said; “and there is the flagstaff on the top of Mr. B----’s house, looking like the mast of a ship. Now I shall drop the curtain, and you are to go to sleep.”

So, as his feverish fancies rose like mists, her calm denial or explanation swept them away; or, if the delirium fit was too strong for that, she held his hand, to assure him of companionship, and went with him wherever his tyrannical imagination dragged him, and found help there. When he sank in deeps of ocean, he heard a voice, as if from heaven, saying, “He who made the waves is stronger than they. Hold on to God, and he will not let you go.” If foes threatened him, he heard the reassuring text: “_The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the protector of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?_” If he groped in desolation, and cried out that every one had deserted him, she repeated: “_For my father and my mother have left me, but the Lord hath taken me up_.” “_Expect the Lord, do manfully, and let thy heart take courage, and wait thou for the Lord._”

She followed him thus from terror to terror, imagining all the bitterness of them, trying to take that bitterness to herself, till they began to grow real to her, and she was glad to escape into the wholesome outer world, and see with her own eyes that the universe was not a sick-room.

Hester had come up, and she called and took Edith out for a drive every day; and sometimes she went home to Hester’s house, and played with the children a while. She found their childish gayety and carelessness very soothing.

“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.”

“Strauss?” repeated her father doubtfully. He thought the name sounded familiar.

“Mendelssohn, I mean,” corrected she, with the greatest hardihood, and shook a shower of sparkling notes from her finger-ends.

Miss Ellen was one of the progressive damsels of the time.

Mr. Williams looked toward the door, and smiled pleasantly, seeing Miss Yorke come in, and she returned his greeting with one as friendly. There was a feeling of kindness between the two. This gentleman was not very gallant, but, being in his wife’s confidence, and aware therefore that Edith had been looked on by her as a culprit, he had taken pains to make her feel at ease with him. Moreover, in common with a good many other middle-aged, matter-of-fact men, he had a carefully-concealed vein of sentimentality in his composition, and was capable of being deeply interested in a genuine love affair. With a great affectation of contempt, Mr. Williams would yet devour every word of a romantic story at which his daughter would most sincerely turn up her nose. It is indeed on record, in the diary of the first Mrs. Williams, that her husband sat up late one night, on pretence of posting his books, and that, after twelve o’clock, she went down-stairs and found him, as she expressed it, “snivelling over” _The Hungarian Brothers_. “Which astonished me in so sensible a man as John,” the lady added.

Edith took a chair by a window and looked out into the street, and Mr. Williams turned over the book on his knee. It was a volume of sermons which he was in the habit of pretending to read every Sunday afternoon. Intellectually, Mr. Williams was sceptical; and had one propounded to him, one by one, the doctrines he heard preached every Sunday, and asked him if he believed them, he would probably have answered, “Well, no, I don’t know as I do exactly”; but early education by a mother whose religion was earnest if mistaken, and that necessity for some supernatural element in the life which is the mark of our divine origin, impelled him to an observance of what he did not believe, for the want of something better which he could believe.

When Dick waked again, the first object he saw was his mother’s face, full of tearful joy. She smiled, quivered, tried to speak, and could not.

“Poor mother! what a trouble I am to you!” he said, and would have held his hand out to her, but found himself unable to raise it. He looked, and saw it thin and transparent, glanced with an expression of astonished inquiry into his mother’s face, and understood it all. “I must have been sick a long time, mother,” he said.

She kissed him tenderly. “Yes, my dear boy. But it is all over now, thank God!”

“Poor mother!” he said again. “I must have worn you out. Have you taken all the care of me?”

“No! Edith was here,” she answered timidly. “She is a good nurse, Dick.”

“Edith?” he echoed with surprise; and, after a moment’s thought, added quietly, “Yes, I recollect seeing her. She helped me a great deal, I think, dear child!”

“Would you like to see her?” his mother asked. “She has only just left the room.”

“Not now, mother,” he answered. “She will come presently. I cannot talk much now.”

He closed his eyes again, and lay in that delicious trance of convalescence, when simply to breathe is enough for contentment--the lips slightly parted, the form absolutely at rest, the eyes not so closed but a faint twilight enters through the lashes--a sweet, happy mood. When his mother moved softly about, Dick lifted his lids now and then, but was not disturbed. Sometimes, before closing them again, his half-seeing eyes dwelt a moment on some object in the room. After one of these dreamy glances, there entered through his lashes the vision of a face that seemed to cry aloud to him a piercing summons.

He started up as if electrified, and stretched his arms out. “Stay! stay!” he cried, and saw that it was no vision, but a pictured, saintly face, with tears on the cheeks, and lips from which a message seemed to have just escaped.

“Dick, what is the matter?” his mother exclaimed in terror.

He sank back on the pillows. “I saw it before, and thought it was a dream,” he whispered. “I was thinking of it as I lay here.”

“The picture?” his mother asked. “Edith hung it there. I will take it away if you don’t like it.”

“I do like it,” he answered faintly. “It is a blessed, blessed vision.” He lay looking at it a while, then slipped his hand under the pillow and found a little crucifix that he had always kept there. At the beginning of his illness his mother had taken it away, but Edith had returned and kept it there, seeing that he sometimes sought for it. He drew it forth now, pressed it passionately to his lips, then, holding it in the open palm of his hand, on the pillow, turned his cheek to it with a gesture of childlike fondness. “O my Love!” he whispered.

“Shall I tell Edith to come in?” his mother asked, catching the whisper.

“Not now, not to-night, mother,” he answered softly.

But the next morning he asked to see the whole family, with the servants, and, when they came, thanked them affectionately for what they had done for him, taking each one by the hand. When Edith approached, a slight color flickered in his cheeks, and he looked at her earnestly. Her changed face seemed to distress him. “Dear child, I have been killing you!” he said.

At his perfectly unembarrassed and friendly address, Edith’s worst fear took flight. If Dick had reproached or been cold to her, she would have defended herself without difficulty; but if he had shrunk from her, she could scarcely have borne it.

The doctor was quite right in saying that their only difficulty would be in keeping their patient quiet, for Dick insisted on sitting up that very day.

“The doctor wishes you to lie still,” his mother said.

“And I wish to get up,” he retorted, smiling, but wilful.

“The Lord wishes you to lie still, Dick,” Edith said.

He became quiet at once. “Do you think so?” he asked.

“Father John will tell you,” she answered, as the door opened to give admittance to the priest.

Of course Father John confirmed her assertion. “Everything in its time, young man,” he said cheerfully. “This enforced physical illness may be to you a time of richest spiritual benefit. You have now leisure for reading and contemplation which you will not have when you go out into active life again. You must let Miss Edith read to you.”

Before leaving his penitent, the priest proposed to give him Holy Communion the next morning; but Dick hesitatingly objected. “Not that I do not long for it, father,” he made haste to add; “but I wish to recollect myself. Like St. Paul, _I desire to be dissolved and be with Christ_, but I wish to endure that desire a little longer, till I shall be better prepared to be with him.”

Seeing the priest look at him attentively, he blushed, and added: “Of course I do not mean to compare myself with St. Paul, sir,” and was for a moment mortified and disconcerted at what he supposed Father John would think his presumption.

“There is no reason why you and I may not have precisely the same feelings that St. Paul had,” the priest said quietly.

Edith found letters in her room from Seaton. Her aunt wrote that they were busily making the last arrangements for their moving, and gave her many kind messages from her friends. The house in Seaton had been leased advantageously, and they hoped that the lessee might be able to buy it after a while, as he wished to. They were to bring all their household with them, Betsey, Patrick, and the young Pattens. The prospect of being left behind had so afflicted these faithful creatures that she had not the heart to desert them.

Clara wrote a long, gossiping letter. “I must tell you what an absurd little stale romance is being acted here,” she wrote, “for mamma is sure to tell you nothing about it. Prepare to be astonished by the most surprising, the most bewildering, etc. (see Mme. de Sévigné). Mr. Griffeth has proposed for Melicent, and Melicent is willing, so she says! Papa and mamma are frantic, and Mel goes about with a persecuted, inscrutable look which distracts me. I sometimes think that she is only pretending in order to have a fuss made over her, but one cannot be sure. You know she always prided herself on her good sense and judgment, and my experience is that when such persons do a foolish thing,

‘They are So (ultra) cinian, they shock the Socinians.’

“We highfliers commit follies with a certain grace, and we know when we reach the step between the sublime and the ridiculous; but these clumsy sensible people are like dancing elephants, and have no conception how absurd they are. (Did you ever observe that people who have no _un_common sense always claim to have a monopoly of the common sense?)

“It seems that Mel has had no intercourse with the man lately, except what we have known, but he has been giving her some of those expressive glances which are so effective when one has practised them long enough. ‘Oh! those looks which have so little force in law, but so much in equity!’ Mamma said that she would rather see a daughter of hers married to Mr. Conway than to Mr. Griffeth, for Mr. Conway had principle if he was not clever, and Mel made a pretty good answer. ‘There is always hope,’ she said, ‘that an irreligious person may be converted, but there is no conversion for the commonplace.’ Mel thinks Mr. Griffeth remarkably intellectual, and papa ridiculed the idea. The little man, he said, resembled Cæsar in one respect, for whereas Cæsar wore the laurel wreath to cover his bald pate, the minister took refuge in verbiage to hide his baldness of thought. This having no effect, I gave the ‘most unkindest cut of all.’ I reminded her that he had tried both you and me first, and we didn’t know how many more. Her reply was to hand me a copy of Browning’s _Men and Women_, open at “Misconceptions.” She had marked the words:

“This is the spray the Bird clung to, Making it blossom with pleasure, Ere the high tree-top she sprang to, Fit for her nest and her treasure.”

“But I thought that her smile was something like that of one who is taking medicine heroically, a sort of quinine-smile.

“There is but one way if we do not wish to have this howling dervish in the family: we must exhibit, as the doctors say, a counter-irritant--that is, find Mel another lover. I am convinced that she will never voluntarily relinquish one romance except in favor of one more.”