Chapter XV: The Denouement

Nothing could have happened better for Mildred and her cause than the long and dangerous illness which followed that visit to Hugh’s office. It was early September then, but the cold November rain was beating against the windows of her room when at last she was able to sit up and carry out her purpose. She had been very ill, first with the fever taken from her husband, and then with nervous prostration, harder to bear than the fever, for then she had known nothing of what was passing around her, or whose were the voices speaking so lovingly to her, or whose the hands ministering to her so tenderly, Bessie, who called her sister, and Alice, who was scarcely less anxious and attentive than Bessie herself. She did not even know the white-haired woman who sat by her day after day, with her blind eyes turned toward the tossing, moaning, babbling figure on the bed, whose talk was always of the past, when she was a girl and lived at home, and bathed her mother’s head and cooked the dinner and scolded Tom and Bessie and kissed and petted Charlie. Of Hugh she seldom spoke, and when she did it was in the old, teasing way, calling him a red-haired Scotchman and laughing at his big hands and feet. To all intents and purposes she was the Mildred whom we first saw shelling peas in the doorway, and the names of her husband and Gerard and Alice never passed her lips. Every morning and evening Hugh walked up the avenue, and ringing the bell asked, “How is Mrs. Thornton?” Then he would walk back again with an abstracted look upon his face, which to a close observer would have told of the fear tugging at his heart. The possibility that Mildred could ever be anything to him, if she lived, did not once enter his mind, but he did not want her to die, and the man who had seldom prayed before, now learned to pray earnestly for Mildred’s life, as many others were doing.

Hugh had done his work well, and told Mildred’s story, first to her mother, Bessie and Tom, then to Gerard and Alice, and then to everybody, giving it, however, a different coloring from what Mildred had done. She had softened her husband’s part in the matter and magnified her own, while he passed very lightly over hers, and dwelt at length upon the pride and arrogance of the man who, to keep her family aloof, wrung from her a promise, given unguardedly and repented of so bitterly. Thus the sympathy of the people was all with Mildred, who, as the lady of Thornton Park, had won their good opinion by her kindness and gentleness, and gracious, familiar manner. That she was Mrs. Giles Thornton did not harm her at all, for money and position are a mighty power, and the interest in, and sympathy for her were quite as great, if not greater, than would have been the case if it were plain Mildred Leach for whom each Sunday prayers were said in the churches and for whom inquiries were made each day until the glad news went through the town that the crisis was past and she would live. Hugh was alone in his office when the little boy who brought him the morning paper said, as he threw it in, “Mis’ Thornton’s better. She knows her marm, and the doctor says she’ll git well.” Then he passed on, leaving Hugh alone with the good news.

“Thank God,—thank God,” he said. “I couldn’t let Milly die,” and when a few minutes later one of his clerks came into the front office, he heard his chief in the next room whistling Annie Laurie, and said to himself, with a little nod, “I guess she’s better.”

It had been a very difficult task to tell Mildred’s story to Mrs. Leach and Tom and Bessie, but Hugh had done it so well that the shock was not as great as he had feared it might be. As was natural, Mrs. Leach was the most affected of the three, and within an hour was at Mildred’s bedside, calling her Milly and daughter and kissing the hot lips which gave back no answering sign, for Mildred never knew her, nor any one, until a morning in October, when, waking suddenly from a long, refreshing sleep, she looked curiously about her, and saw the blind woman sitting just where she had sat for days and days and would have sat for nights had she been permitted to do so. Now she was partially asleep, but the words “Mother, are you here?” roused her, and in an instant Mildred was in her mother’s arms, begging for the pardon which was not long withheld.

“Oh, Milly, my child, how could you see me blind and not tell me who you were?” were the only words of reproof the mother ever uttered; then all was joy and peace, and Mildred’s face shone with the light of a great gladness, when Tom and Bessie came in to see her, both very kind and both a little constrained in their manner towards her, for neither could make it quite seem as if she were their sister.

Gerard and Alice took it more naturally, and after a few days matters adjusted themselves, and as no word was said of the past Mildred began to recover her strength, which, however, came back slowly, so that it was November before she was able to see Hugh in her boudoir, where Tom carried her in his arms, saying, as he put her down in her easy-chair, “Are you sure you are strong enough for it?”

“Yes,” she answered, eagerly. “I can’t put it off any longer. I shall never rest until it is done. Tell Hugh I am ready.”

Tom had only a vague idea of what she wished to do, but knew that it had some connection with her husband’s will, the nature of which he had been told by Gerard.

“She’ll never let that stand a minute after she gets well,” Tom had said, but he never guessed that she meant to give up the whole.

Hugh, who had been sent for that morning, came at once, and found himself trembling in every nerve as he followed Tom to the room where Mildred was waiting for him. He had not seen her during her sickness, and he was not prepared to find her so white and thin and still so exquisitely lovely as she looked with her eyes so large and bright, and the smile of welcome on her face as she gave him her hand and said, “We must finish that business now, and then I can get well. Suppose I had died, and the money had gone from Gerard and Alice.”

“I think it would have come back to them all the same,” Hugh replied, sitting down beside her, and wondering why the sight of her affected him so strangely.

But she did not give him much time to think, and plunging at once into business, told him that she wished to give everything to Gerard and Alice, dividing it equally between them.

“You know exactly what my husband had and where it was invested,” she said, “and you must divide it to the best of your ability, giving to each an equal share in the Park, for I think they will both live here. I wish them to do it, for then we shall all be near each other. I shall live with mother and try to atone for the wrong I have done. I have enough to keep us in comfort, and shall not take a cent of what was left me in the will.”

This was her decision, from which nothing could move her, and when at last Hugh left her she had signed away over a million of dollars and felt the richer for it, nor could Gerard and Alice induce her to take back any part of it after they were told what she had done.

“Don’t worry me,” she said to them. “It seemed to me a kind of atonement to do it, and I am so happy, and I am sure your father would approve of it if he could know about it.”

After that Mildred’s recovery was rapid, and on the first day of the new year she went back to the farm house to live, notwithstanding the earnest entreaties of Gerard and Alice that she should stay with them until Tom and Bessie came, for it was decided that the four should, for a time at least, live together at the Park. But Mildred was firm.

“Mother needs me,” she said, “and is happier when I am with her. I can see that she is failing. I shall not have her long, and while she lives I shall try to make up to her for all the selfish years when I was away, seeking my own pleasure and forgetting hers.”

And Mildred kept her word and was everything to her mother, who lived to see, or rather hear, the double wedding, which took place at St. Jude’s one morning in September, little more than a year after Mr. Thornton’s death. The church was full and there was scarcely a dry eye in it as Mildred led her blind mother up the aisle, and laid her hand upon Bessie’s arm in response to the question, “Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?” It was Mildred who gave Alice away, and who three weeks later received the young people when they came home from their wedding journey, seeming and looking much like her old self as she did the honors of the house where she had once been mistress, and joining heartily in their happiness, laughingly returned Tom’s badinage when he called her his stepmother-in-law. Then, when the festivities were over, she went back to her mother, whom she cared for so tenderly that her life was prolonged for more than a year, and the chimes in the old church belfry were ringing for a Saviour born, when she at last died in Mildred’s arms, with Mildred’s name upon her lips and a blessing for the beloved daughter who had been so much to her. The night before she died Mildred was alone with her for several hours, and bending over her she said, “I want to hear you say again that you forgive me for the waywardness which kept me from you so long, and my deception when I came back. I am so sorry, mother.”

“Forgive you?” her mother said, her blind eyes trying to pierce the darkness and look into the face so close to hers. “I have nothing to forgive. I understand it all, and since you came back to me you have been the dearest child a mother ever had. Don’t cry so, Milly,” and the shaky hand wiped away the tears which fell so fast, as Mildred went on:

“I don’t know whether the saints at rest ever think of those they have left behind; but if they do, and father asks for me, tell him how sorry I am, and tell Charlie how I loved him, and how much I meant to do for him when I went away.”

“I’ll tell them. Don’t cry,” came faintly from the dying woman, who said but little more until the dawn was breaking, and she heard in the distance the sound of the chimes ringing in the Christmas morn. Then, lifting her head from Mildred’s arm, she cried joyfully:

“The bells,—the bells,—the Christmas bells. I am glad to go on his birthday. Good-bye, Milly. God bless you; don’t cry.”

They buried her by her husband and Charlie, and then Mildred was all alone, except for the one servant she kept. Bessie and Alice would gladly have had her at the Park, but she resisted all their entreaties and gave no sign of the terrible loneliness which oppressed her as day after day she lived her solitary life, which, for the first week or two, was seldom enlivened by the presence of any one except Gerard and Tom, who each day plowed their way through the heavy drifts of snow which were piled high above the fence tops. A terrible storm was raging on the mountains, and Rocky Point felt it in all its fury. The trains were stopped,—the roads were blocked,—communication between neighbor and neighbor was cut off, and though many would gladly have done so, few could visit the lonely woman, who sat all day where she could look out toward the graves on which she knew the snow was drifting, and who at night sat motionless by the fire, living over the past and shrinking from the future which lay so drearily before her.