Part 31

There were those who spoke of her wanderings in lonely places as an unsafe exposure. One sometimes met doubtful characters about the neighborhood, and stories were told of occurrences which might well frighten a young girl, and make her cautious of trusting herself alone in the wild solitudes which surrounded the little village. Those who knew Euthymia thought her quite equal to taking care of herself. Her very look was enough to ensure the respect of any vagabond who might cross her path, and if matters came to the worst she would prove as dangerous as a panther.

But it was a pity to associate this class of thoughts with a noble specimen of true womanhood. Health, beauty, strength, were fine qualities, and in all these she was rich. She enjoyed all her natural gifts, and thought little about them. Unwillingly, but over-persuaded by some of her friends, she had allowed her arm and hand to be modelled. The artists who saw the cast wondered if it would be possible to get the bust of the maiden from whom it was taken. Nobody would have dared to suggest such an idea to her except Lurida. For Lurida sex was a trifling accident, to be disregarded not only in the interests of humanity, but for the sake of art.

“It is a shame,” she said to Euthymia, “that you will not let your exquisitely moulded form be perpetuated in marble. You have no right to withhold such a model from the contemplation of your fellow-creatures. Think how rare it is to see a woman who truly represents the divine idea! You belong to your race, and not to yourself,--at least, your beauty is a gift not to be considered as a piece of private property. Look at the so-called Venus of Milo. Do you suppose the noble woman who was the original of that divinely chaste statue felt any scruple about allowing the sculptor to reproduce her pure, unblemished perfections?”

Euthymia was always patient with her imaginative friend. She listened to her eloquent discourse, but she could not help blushing, used as she was to Lurida's audacities. “The Terror's” brain had run away with a large share of the blood which ought to have gone to the nourishment of her general system. She could not help admiring, almost worshipping, a companion whose being was rich in the womanly developments with which nature had so economically endowed herself. An impoverished organization carries with it certain neutral qualities which make its subject appear, in the presence of complete manhood and womanhood, like a deaf-mute among speaking persons. The deep blush which crimsoned Euthymia's cheek at Lurida's suggestion was in a strange contrast to her own undisturbed expression. There was a range of sensibilities of which Lurida knew far less than she did of those many and difficult studies which had absorbed her vital forces. She was startled to see what an effect her proposal had produced, for Euthymia was not only blushing, but there was a flame in her eyes which she had hardly ever seen before.

“Is this only your own suggestion?” Euthymia said, “or has some one been putting the idea into your head?” The truth was that she had happened to meet the Interviewer at the Library, one day, and she was offended by the long, searching stare with which that individual had honored her. It occurred to her that he, or some such visitor to the place, might have spoken of her to Lurida, or to some other person who had repeated what was said to Lurida, as a good subject for the art of the sculptor, and she felt all her maiden sensibilities offended by the proposition. Lurida could not understand her excitement, but she was startled by it. Natures which are complementary of each other are liable to these accidental collisions of feeling. They get along very well together, none the worse for their differences, until all at once the tender spot of one or the other is carelessly handled in utter unconsciousness on the part of the aggressor, and the exclamation, the outcry, or the explosion explains the situation altogether too emphatically. Such scenes did not frequently occur between the two friends, and this little flurry was soon over; but it served to warn Lurida that Miss Euthymia Tower was not of that class of self-conscious beauties who would be ready to dispute the empire of the Venus of Milo on her own ground, in defences as scanty and insufficient as those of the marble divinity.

Euthymia had had admirers enough, at a distance, while at school, and in the long vacations, near enough to find out that she was anything but easy to make love to. She fairly frightened more than one rash youth who was disposed to be too sentimental in her company. They overdid flattery, which she was used to and tolerated, but which cheapened the admirer in her estimation, and now and then betrayed her into an expression which made him aware of the fact, and was a discouragement to aggressive amiability. The real difficulty was that not one of her adorers had ever greatly interested her. It could not be that nature had made her insensible. It must have been because the man who was made for her had never yet shown himself. She was not easy to please, that was certain; and she was one of those young women who will not accept as a lover one who but half pleases them. She could not pick up the first stick that fell in her way and take it to shape her ideal out of. Many of the good people of the village doubted whether Euthymia would ever be married.

“There 's nothing good enough for her in this village,” said the old landlord of what had been the Anchor Tavern.

“She must wait till a prince comes along,” the old landlady said in reply. “She'd make as pretty a queen as any of them that's born to it. Wouldn't she be splendid with a gold crown on her head, and di'monds a glitterin' all over her! D' you remember how handsome she looked in the tableau, when the fair was held for the Dorcas Society? She had on an old dress of her grandma's,--they don't make anything half so handsome nowadays,--and she was just as pretty as a pictur'. But what's the use of good looks if they scare away folks? The young fellows think that such a handsome girl as that would cost ten times as much to keep as a plain one. She must be dressed up like an empress,--so they seem to think. It ain't so with Euthymy: she'd look like a great lady dressed anyhow, and she has n't got any more notions than the homeliest girl that ever stood before a glass to look at herself.”

In the humbler walks of Arrowhead Village society, similar opinions were entertained of Miss Euthymia. The fresh-water fisherman represented pretty well the average estimate of the class to which he belonged. “I tell ye,” said he to another gentleman of leisure, whose chief occupation was to watch the coming and going of the visitors to Arrowhead Village,--“I tell ye that girl ain't a gon to put up with any o' them slab-sided fellahs that you see hangin' raound to look at her every Sunday when she comes aout o' meetin'. It's one o' them big gents from Boston or New York that'll step up an' kerry her off.”

In the mean time nothing could be further from the thoughts of Euthymia than the prospect of an ambitious worldly alliance. The ideals of young women cost them many and great disappointments, but they save them very often from those lifelong companionships which accident is constantly trying to force upon them, in spite of their obvious unfitness. The higher the ideal, the less likely is the commonplace neighbor who has the great advantage of easy access, or the boarding-house acquaintance who can profit by those vacant hours when the least interesting of visitors is better than absolute loneliness,--the less likely are these undesirable personages to be endured, pitied, and, if not embraced, accepted, for want of something better. Euthymia found so much pleasure in the intellectual companionship of Lurida, and felt her own prudence and reserve so necessary to that independent young lady, that she had been contented, so far, with friendship, and thought of love only in an abstract sort of way. Beneath her abstractions there was a capacity of loving which might have been inferred from the expression of her features, the light that shone in her eyes, the tones of her voice, all of which were full of the language which belongs to susceptible natures. How many women never say to themselves that they were born to love, until all at once the discovery opens upon them, as the sense that he was born a painter is said to have dawned suddenly upon Correggio!

Like all the rest of the village and its visitors, she could not help thinking a good deal about the young man lying ill amongst strangers. She was not one of those who had sent him the three-cornered notes or even a bunch of flowers. She knew that he was receiving abounding tokens of kindness and sympathy from different quarters, and a certain inward feeling restrained her from joining in these demonstrations. If he had been suffering from some deadly and contagious malady she would have risked her life to help him, without a thought that there was any wonderful heroism in such self-devotion. Her friend Lurida might have been capable of the same sacrifice, but it would be after reasoning with herself as to the obligations which her sense of human rights and duties laid upon her, and fortifying her courage with the memory of noble deeds recorded of women in ancient and modern history. With Euthymia the primary human instincts took precedence of all reasoning or reflection about them. All her sympathies were excited by the thought of this forlorn stranger in his solitude, but she felt the impossibility of giving any complete expression to them. She thought of Mungo Park in the African desert, and she envied the poor negress who not only pitied him, but had the blessed opportunity of helping and consoling him. How near were these two human creatures, each needing the other! How near in bodily presence, how far apart in their lives, with a barrier seemingly impassable between them!

XXIII. THE MEETING OF MAURICE AND EUTHYMIA.

These autumnal fevers, which carry off a large number of our young people every year, are treacherous and deceptive diseases. Not only are they liable, as has been mentioned, to various accidental complications which may prove suddenly fatal, but too often, after convalescence seems to be established, relapses occur which are more serious than the disease had appeared to be in its previous course. One morning Dr. Butts found Maurice worse instead of better, as he had hoped and expected to find him. Weak as he was, there was every reason to fear the issue of this return of his threatening symptoms. There was not much to do besides keeping up the little strength which still remained. It was all needed.

Does the reader of these pages ever think of the work a sick man as much as a well one has to perform while he is lying on his back and taking what we call his “rest”? More than a thousand times an hour, between a hundred and fifty and two hundred thousand times a week, he has to lift the bars of the cage in which his breathing organs are confined, to save himself from asphyxia. Rest! There is no rest until the last long sigh tells those who look upon the dying that the ceaseless daily task, to rest from which is death, is at last finished. We are all galley-slaves, pulling at the levers of respiration,--which, rising and falling like so many oars, drive us across an unfathomable ocean from one unknown shore to another. No! Never was a galley-slave so chained as we are to these four and twenty oars, at which we must tug day and night all our life long.

The doctor could not find any accidental cause to account for this relapse. It presently occurred to him that there might be some local source of infection which had brought on the complaint, and was still keeping up the symptoms which were the ground of alarm. He determined to remove Maurice to his own house, where he could be sure of pure air, and where he himself could give more constant attention to his patient during this critical period of his disease. It was a risk to take, but he could be carried on a litter by careful men, and remain wholly passive during the removal. Maurice signified his assent, as he could hardly help doing,--for the doctor's suggestion took pretty nearly the form of a command. He thought it a matter of life and death, and was gently urgent for his patient's immediate change of residence. The doctor insisted on having Maurice's books and other movable articles carried to his own house, so that he should be surrounded by familiar sights, and not worry himself about what might happen to objects which he valued, if they were left behind him.

All these dispositions were quickly and quietly made, and everything was ready for the transfer of the patient to the house of the hospitable physician. Paolo was at the doctor's, superintending the arrangement of Maurice's effects and making all ready for his master. The nurse in attendance, a trustworthy man enough in the main, finding his patient in a tranquil sleep, left his bedside for a little fresh air. While he was at the door he heard a shouting which excited his curiosity, and he followed the sound until he found himself at the border of the lake. It was nothing very wonderful which had caused the shouting. A Newfoundland dog had been showing off his accomplishments, and some of the idlers were betting as to the time it would take him to bring back to his master the various floating objects which had been thrown as far from the shore as possible. He watched the dog a few minutes, when his attention was drawn to a light wherry, pulled by one young lady and steered by another. It was making for the shore, which it would soon reach. The attendant remembered all at once, that he had left his charge, and just before the boat came to land he turned and hurried back to the patient. Exactly how long he had been absent he could not have said,--perhaps a quarter of an hour, perhaps longer; the time appeared short to him, wearied with long sitting and watching.

It had seemed, when he stole away from Maurice's bedside, that he was not in the least needed. The patient was lying perfectly quiet, and to all appearance wanted nothing more than letting alone. It was such a comfort to look at something besides the worn features of a sick man, to hear something besides his labored breathing and faint, half-whispered words, that the temptation to indulge in these luxuries for a few minutes had proved irresistible.

Unfortunately, Maurice's slumbers did not remain tranquil during the absence of the nurse. He very soon fell into a dream, which began quietly enough, but in the course of the sudden transitions which dreams are in the habit of undergoing became successively anxious, distressing, terrifying. His earlier and later experiences came up before him, fragmentary, incoherent, chaotic even, but vivid as reality. He was at the bottom of a coal-mine in one of those long, narrow galleries, or rather worm-holes, in which human beings pass a large part of their lives, like so many larvae boring their way into the beams and rafters of some old building. How close the air was in the stifling passage through which he was crawling! The scene changed, and he was climbing a slippery sheet of ice with desperate effort, his foot on the floor of a shallow niche, his hold an icicle ready to snap in an instant, an abyss below him waiting for his foot to slip or the icicle to break. How thin the air seemed, how desperately hard to breathe! He was thinking of Mont Blanc, it may be, and the fearfully rarefied atmosphere which he remembered well as one of the great trials in his mountain ascents. No, it was not Mont Blanc,--it was not any one of the frozen Alpine summits; it was Hecla that he was climbing.

The smoke of the burning mountain was wrapping itself around him; he was choking with its dense fumes; he heard the flames roaring around him, he felt the hot lava beneath his feet, he uttered a faint cry, and awoke.

The room was full of smoke. He was gasping for breath, strangling in the smothering oven which his chamber had become.

The house was on fire!

He tried to call for help, but his voice failed him, and died away in a whisper. He made a desperate effort, and rose so as to sit up in the bed for an instant, but the effort was too much for him, and he sank back upon his pillow, helpless. He felt that his hour had come, for he could not live in this dreadful atmosphere, and he was left alone. He could hear the crackle of fire as the flame crept along from one partition to another. It was a cruel fate to be left to perish in that way,--the fate that many a martyr had had to face,--to be first strangled and then burned. Death had not the terror for him that it has for most young persons. He was accustomed to thinking of it calmly, sometimes wistfully, even to such a degree that the thought of self-destruction had come upon him as a temptation. But here was death in an unexpected and appalling shape. He did not know before how much he cared to live. All his old recollections came before him as it were in one long, vivid flash. The closed vista of memory opened to its far horizon-line, and past and present were pictured in a single instant of clear vision. The dread moment which had blighted his life returned in all its terror. He felt the convulsive spring in the form of a faint, impotent spasm,--the rush of air,--the thorns of the stinging and lacerating cradle into which he was precipitated. One after another those paralyzing seizures which had been like deadening blows on the naked heart seemed to repeat themselves, as real as at the moment of their occurrence. The pictures passed in succession with such rapidity that they appeared almost as if simultaneous. The vision of the “inward eye” was so intensified in this moment of peril that an instant was like an hour of common existence. Those who have been very near drowning know well what this description means. The development of a photograph may not explain it, but it illustrates the curious and familiar fact of the revived recollections of the drowning man's experience. The sensitive plate has taken one look at a scene, and remembers it all,

Every little circumstance is there,--the hoof in air, the wing in flight, the leaf as it falls, the wave as it breaks. All there, but invisible; potentially present, but impalpable, inappreciable, as if not existing at all. A wash is poured over it, and the whole scene comes out in all its perfection of detail. In those supreme moments when death stares a man suddenly in the face the rush of unwonted emotion floods the undeveloped pictures of vanished years, stored away in the memory, the vast panorama of a lifetime, and in one swift instant the past comes out as vividly as if it were again the present. So it was at this moment with the sick man, as he lay helpless and felt that he was left to die. For he saw no hope of relief: the smoke was drifting in clouds into the room; the flames were very near; if he was not reached and rescued immediately it was all over with him.

His past life had flashed before him. Then all at once rose the thought of his future,--of all its possibilities, of the vague hopes which he had cherished of late that his mysterious doom would be lifted from him. There was something, then, to be lived for, something! There was a new life, it might be, in store for him, and such a new life! He thought of all he was losing. Oh, could he but have lived to know the meaning of love! And the passionate desire of life came over him,--not the dread of death, but the longing for what the future might yet have of happiness for him.

All this took place in the course of a very few moments. Dreams and visions have little to do with measured time, and ten minutes, possibly fifteen or twenty, were all that had passed since the beginning of those nightmare terrors which were evidently suggested by the suffocating air he was breathing.

What had happened? In the confusion of moving books and other articles to the doctor's house, doors and windows had been forgotten. Among the rest a window opening into the cellar, where some old furniture had been left by a former occupant, had been left unclosed. One of the lazy natives, who had lounged by the house smoking a bad cigar, had thrown the burning stump in at this open window. He had no particular intention of doing mischief, but he had that indifference to consequences which is the next step above the inclination to crime. The burning stump happened to fall among the straw of an old mattress which had been ripped open. The smoker went his way without looking behind him, and it so chanced that no other person passed the house for some time. Presently the straw was in a blaze, and from this the fire extended to the furniture, to the stairway leading up from the cellar, and was working its way along the entry under the stairs leading up to the apartment where Maurice was lying.

The blaze was fierce and swift, as it could not help being with such a mass of combustibles,--loose straw from the mattress, dry old furniture, and old warped floors which had been parching and shrinking for a score or two of years. The whole house was, in the common language of the newspaper reports, “a perfect tinder-box,” and would probably be a heap of ashes in half an hour. And there was this unfortunate deserted sick man lying between life and death, beyond all help unless some unexpected assistance should come to his rescue.

As the attendant drew near the house where Maurice was lying, he was horror-struck to see dense volumes of smoke pouring out of the lower windows. It was beginning to make its way through the upper windows, also, and presently a tongue of fire shot out and streamed upward along the side of the house. The man shrieked Fire! Fire! with all his might, and rushed to the door of the building to make his way to Maurice's room and save him. He penetrated but a short distance when, blinded and choking with the smoke, he rushed headlong down the stairs with a cry of despair that roused every man, woman, and child within reach of a human voice. Out they came from their houses in every quarter of the village. The shout of Fire! Fire! was the chief aid lent by many of the young and old. Some caught up pails and buckets: the more thoughtful ones filling them; the hastier snatching them up empty, trusting to find water nearer the burning building.