Chapter LVII: The Heart of Stone

For a minute there was a hard, dead silence in that room.

Mrs. Canfield leaned back exhausted, her eyes closed, her face trembling all over, while Waldon sat with a bar of sunlight striking through the blinds across his face, through which his eyes shone with sinister brightness.

The lady opened her eyes at last, and turned them wistfully upon him.

“Is it contempt or pity that you feel for me?”

“Pity!” he exclaimed, with ruthless sincerity; “what pity can be claimed for a person who forgets all dignity, and disgraces her own womanhood?”

A cry broke from the poor creature who was bending toward him, and she fell back upon the couch as if crushed down by a blow.

“Don’t! don’t!” she gasped, holding up both her shivering little hands, as if to ward off a second assault. “I think you have killed me with this!”

“You have told the truth, I suppose, and I thank you that so much of honor, at least, has been left. Your daughter is ignorant of her disgrace, and I am forbidden to tell her why our engagement is broken. I can pity _her_.”

“Broken! broken! No! no! You write such beautiful, generous things—it cannot be in your mind to break her young heart as you have crushed mine? She is noble, good, white as an angel! My sin has not touched her—my sorrow has only fostered her tenderness. Oh, sir, think of me as you please, but you will never find another like her!”

“But you, who have sinned, are her mother.”

“I cannot help that! God let her live and grow beautiful—so good and beautiful that it seemed as if He were blessing me when I deserved only punishment. He scarcely sent me a trouble till you came and made her love you. Then I suffered. She will never know how I suffered; for it was my duty to give her up, and I was pledged to tell this to the man she wished to marry. It was hard—cruelly hard; and now, instead of pity, you threaten to break up her life. But you did not mean it. No wonder you hated me at first—I sometimes hate myself—but you are generous, and you love her.”

“But she has been associated with you all her life, and, ignorant of any reason why she should not, will continue to crave your society.”

Mrs. Canfield started up, and, supported by her elbow, searched his face for the cruel meaning of those words.

“You mean—you mean—”

“Yes, I mean that no wife of mine shall ever associate with a woman who has degraded herself!”

“You would take her entirely from me! Sir, I am her mother!”

“You have just told me as much.”

“And I love her better than my own life—better than my hopes of salvation—from the morning when he lay dead before me until now, she has been the one object in which my poor life has centred; but if you demand it, if it will make you love her better, I will give her up utterly—will go away back to the old farm-house, and all alone mourn the sin you have hurled upon me like a rock. You shall never be troubled with the sight of me. I will never leave the farm. Mr. Canfield left me well off, and very soon you will have everything, even to the farm. I would give it up now, only the will forbids it.”

The poor woman saw a change come over the man’s face—he was relenting. She started to a sitting posture, and held out her clasped hands, imploringly.

“You will think of this—deprived of her I shall not live long, then you will have everything. Only now and then—once in a year or two—she might come to see her grandparents. Not me—I will not ask that; but they are good old people, and love her so—or, perhaps, you would let me dress like a servant, and come through your basement, as if I wanted a place—just to look at her in her happiness a little, as the years creep along. It would not hurt you, and I shall be so desolate.”

“That you might be seized with a fit of weak penitence, and tell my wife of her own disgrace. No, madam, I will not marry a woman who has a mother living whom I cannot openly receive in my house. That you have no right to ask of me.”

The woman fell back with a piteous moan; her hands trembled apart, and dropped down limp and pale, one dragging on the carpet.

Waldon took that poor little hand in his, and laid it on her bosom. Some small touch of compassion seemed to possess him at last, but while she lay, with broken moans on her lips, his footsteps, as he paced the room, shook the floor and the couch.

“Oh, if I were dead! If I could only have dropped down and died without telling him,” moaned the poor woman.

“Dead!” repeated Waldon, unconscious that he was speaking. “Yes, if she were dead, there would be a difference.”

She heard this cruel speech, and stopped moaning. It had entered her heart like a rusty arrow, and rankled there. Waldon still walked up and down the room, but she lay motionless, turned to marble as it seemed. At last the stillness struck him, and he went up to the couch. Her eyes were wide open, her lips parted till he could discern the edges of her still perfect teeth.

The deathly pallor of that face frightened Waldon. Was the woman dying? Had he killed her? It was an unpleasant thought. He looked around for some restorative, but the room being a pretty summer parlor, contained no perfume flasks or water, save that in vases, which newly-plucked roses were drinking. He tried a door which was unlatched. Some heavy substance leaning against it moved, and at the second push it swung open, revealing a bed-chamber dimly lighted, and cool as a snow-bank. On the marble slab of a dressing-table some toilet bottles glittered. He seized one and went out, leaving the door unlatched.

Mrs. Canfield was still lying motionless, but her eyes were closed, and under them lay soft, purple stains; the lips that he had left apart were closed, and were firmly pressed like the cold marble mouth of a statue, embodying resolve and pain.

Waldon poured some cologne water into his curved palm, and bathed that forehead with it tenderly; for this man combined in his singular being the delicacy of an angel and the coarseness of a brute. Sometimes these contrasts chased each other through his nature so swiftly that you could hardly make sure which he was, a seraph or a fiend.

After a long time Mrs. Canfield opened her eyes, and looked into the face bending over her—not wistfully, as she had a little time before, but with a fixed, steady gaze, as if she had nothing to hope or fear from the man’s compassion or wrath.

“Are you better? I am sorry that my words wounded you so deeply,” he said.

“Yes, I am better. It is all over.”

Waldon was surprised. There was no appearance of weakness in the woman now.

“That is well,” he said, throwing away the flowers from a tall champagne glass, into which he poured some water that he had brought from the next room, and a little of the cologne. “Drink; it will give you strength. Some other time we will talk this matter over, and you will understand better how impossible it is for me—”

The poor lady interrupted him by seizing upon the glass with both hands, and eagerly swallowing its contents. Then she sat upright, and spoke with considerable steadiness.

“There is little more to be said. I have a question to ask. Russell Waldon, do you love my daughter for her own sake, wholly, entirely?”

“Love her! yes—wholly, entirely!”

“But for me you would marry her?”

“But for you, and what you have told me, I would marry her to-morrow.”

“To-morrow!” repeated the woman, with a wan smile. “No, that would be giving me so little time—to-morrow—only twenty-four hours. You are in haste, sir.”

“You are confused,” he said; “but for what you have told me—”

“No, it is you that misunderstand; but tell me this once again—you love my child?”

“Yes! Why ask me to repeat it?”

“I had a little—just a little doubt once; but now that she has saved your life, things seem different. That was a brave act. You should love her dearly for it; so should Mary Noel, for she saved her, too. But all that has not won you to forgive a poor sinful woman, who—”

Here that pale face began to quiver again, and tears swelled under the almost transparent eyelids.

“We will not speak of that,” answered the man.

“No, it is useless, and troubles you; but I had something to add. Give Bertha a little time—a month—perhaps you would not begrudge me six weeks. Do not let her guess that her mother is so much in the way. Something may arise—of course, the past never can be changed; but sometimes a great deal happens in a month—say six weeks—that is so little out of your life. Let everything rest as it is between you till then. Make no resolutions; be in no haste to strike her down; and I charge you, never let her know that for one moment you thought of giving her up—that is, after you are married, if it comes to that. You promise?”

Waldon took the hand she held out to him, with some real feeling.

“Yes, I promise to change nothing in our relations during the time you mention.”

“Thank you. But remember, under no circumstances are you to tell her what I have revealed to-day.”

“My promise is already given.”

“True; I had forgotten. The time seems so long since you came into the room here. How swiftly pain hurls one forward! Hark! that is Bertha’s voice, and she is laughing. How can she laugh? how can she laugh?”

There came another sweet peal of merriment, and a voice cried out:

“Waldon—Mr. Waldon! Come to the window; mamma must keep you no longer! You only asked ten minutes, and here it is an hour!”

Waldon pushed a leaf of the blinds open, and through the opening came a rose-bud, heavy with moss, which just grazed his face, and fell into the room.

“Hand that to mamma as a compensation for giving you up. She will find a kiss in the moss. Then come, for we are getting tired of each other here.”

Waldon waved his hand from the window, laid the bud in Mrs. Canfield’s lap, and left the room.

The moment he was gone the woman he had tortured to death arose from her couch, and hiding herself back of the blinds, looked out upon the two girls, who waited together on the lawn. How fresh and beautiful they were! How full of life—the bright, sweet life she must never know again! To her they seemed as angels in a heaven, from which one sin had shut her out.

This thought gave the poor woman a little gleam of hope, but she shook it off as a weakness. Bertha loved the man. Every look, every word betrayed the depth and strength of her devotion. With what a proud sense of appropriation she leaned upon his arm, clasping both hands over it, and almost touching his shoulder with her cheek, while Mary Noel paused to tie the little straw gypsy, from which a purple corn flower had just fallen.

“She loves him! she loves him!” sighed the poor mother, and stealing back to her couch, she turned her face to the wall, and lay there in dead silence, grasping Bertha’s rose in her hand so closely that it was crushed out of all shape.

While that wretched woman had dropped down in her despair, the girl Lydia stood in the next room, peering through the blinds, and shaking her clenched fist at Waldon, who was passing, with the ladies, on his way to the river.

“You Ishmaelite—you puffed-up Moab—you grass-fed Nebuchednezzer! You—you—oh! if I only had a fist full of hard names to pitch at you! That might keep me from bursting out and telling them all I know, that I’ve been peeping through key-holes and door-cracks, and hearing things that make my blood run cold! Oh, my poor mistress! why didn’t she tell me, if it must come out, and not that—that handsome beast—that stony-hearted cuss? There! I’ve swore, and it’s done me good!”