After two weeks, visitors were allowed to come to Hilltop and drink tea while they inquired after Mr. Lindsey’s health. After three weeks, the General and Mrs. Kingsley were permitted to see the sick man, smile at him, and say a word or two. But it was not until six weeks had passed that Amalie felt that she need not spend the night with Mr. Lindsey, and she and Dorothea divided between them the daylight hours of care.
Dorothea, her brother, Philip, Amalie and Alfred now met at dinner. But their conversation was desultory, rising out of deep pits of weariness, and was punctuated by long and brooding silences. Alfred began to inquire kindly of his son what he was doing these days, and Philip’s soft and timid voice would answer. Amalie began to look at Philip with her old tenderness and concern and expressed her regret that he had had to abandon his music. Dorothea questioned him rigorously about his meals, his walks, and his lessons. He knew they were all being kind, but that he was really far from their thoughts. Even Jerome was abstracted, eating in preoccupation. No one, not even Dorothea, saw how he glanced at Amalie, and what tight lines sprang out about his pale mouth as he studied her furtively.
Mr. Lindsey grew stronger as March came in with its traditional roar. But a dark apathy had fallen on his family, the aftermath of terror and devotion and work. He became quite cheerful and joked about his indestructibility, but their responding cheer was forced. He felt something exhaustedly restless and depressed in the house, but convinced himself that this was his imagination.
Dorothea read to him, but he soon put a stop to this. Her harsh and monotonous voice tired him. But Amalie’s voice, deep and clear and flexible, soothed him, and he would listen to her for hours. He would watch her with deep fondness, the sight of her face in the firelight soothing and sweet to him.
One day he said: “My dear, do come here for a moment.” She put aside the book and smilingly approached the bed. He looked up at her with understanding silence and regret. “You are very thin and pale, my love,” he said. “I have been too much for you, I am afraid.”
“No, Uncle William. You are never too much for anyone,” she answered gently. She saw his hand groping for hers, and took it. Her fingers were warm and strong.
“Tell me,” he said, “that you are happy, love.”
She smiled down at him. “Indeed I am, now that you are getting so well.”
But he sighed and released her hand. Still looking at her, he said: “You must promise me to walk in the air, now, and take rides. Otherwise I shall reproach myself that you are so thin and pale. You look quite haunted, my poor child.”
“I promise,” she said, comfortingly.
It was a Sunday afternoon, and upon Mr. Lindsey’s insistence, she left him for an hour or two. She did not wish to speak to anyone, for a deep melancholy had come over her. She put on the sealskin jacket which Alfred had bought for her in Saratoga, and her heavy gown of brown wool, and her fur-trimmed bonnet. She thrust her hands into her muff and stole downstairs.
She passed the library. Alfred, overcome with weariness, had fallen asleep in a chair before the fire. Philip was doing his lessons silently under the light of one lamp nearby. Dorothea was sleeping in her room. Jerome was nowhere to be seen. Amalie, not wishing to speak to anyone, crept out of the house, closing the door noiselessly behind her.
It was five o’clock. The snow had retreated to a white line against the brick walls of the garden, and lay in leprous patches on the hillside. The trees were still bare, massed together in a tangled thicket about the house. But the sky was a pure ultramarine, profound and deep, and the evening star rose in it like a point of silver flame.
Amalie walked slowly down the slope to the copse of pines where she had stood with Jerome on that December night before her marriage. She could see the countryside lying below her, cupped in dark hills. She saw the glint of a distant dark-blue stream, winding down one of the western hills. Above those hills burned a lake of dull crimson fire, streaked with sea-green and dimmed gold. The earth was profoundly still, but a strange, strong promise exhaled from it, like a wide and welling breath. For the first time she heard the far twittering of birds, restlessly flying from one bare tree to another. Nothing revealed the promise that stirred deep in the ground and in the pure chill air, but Amalie felt it like a tide rising from the wet and muddy land, still devoid of color and movement. The earth was murmuring in its heart. Amalie saw the huge lacework of a distant poplar outlined against the poignant clarity of the ultramarine sky, and she stood for a moment and looked at it with tears in her eyes.
She reached the copse of pines. They dripped with moisture. The tips of their fronds were turning a brighter green. She pushed through them, and they whispered to her in her passage, and she felt the water on her cheek, like rain. They had an odor now, pungent and fresh. Her feet sank into the earth, over the softness of the needles.
She reached the other side, then stopped abruptly. For there, smoking and looking at the sky, stood Jerome.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Amalie did not move. But Jerome said, quietly and casually, not turning to her with even the slightest motion of his head: “Good evening.”
Instinctively, she half turned away, then halted, feeling ridiculous, and understanding that for a moment her memory of another night in this spot had overpowered her reason, had spurred her on to irrational absurdity. She had eaten many dinners with Jerome these past weeks, had discussed his father’s condition with him in the mornings, had asked his advice on homely problems, had smiled at him in hallways, had conversed with him about Philip. Their relationship had been coolly friendly and casual, and they had rarely been alone. Yet, her first instinct now was to run away, and she despised herself for the impulse.
She emerged fully from the copse of trees and said indifferently: “Good evening. The air is nice, isn’t it, after the winter?”
He turned to her and smiled courteously. “You ought to feel it is nice. You have not had much opportunity to enjoy it.”
She laughed a little. “Everyone seems intent on making me feel myself a martyr. I am not, really.”
He still smiled at her. In the pellucid air of the evening she could see him clearly now. He had become thinner, his face had a grayish pallor and tenseness and his eyes were tired. She realized then that she had not, in fact, looked at him directly for a long time, that he had not impinged on her awareness but had been only a shadowy figure in that house of terror and grief and anxiety. But now he seemed imminent, too close, too sharp, to her, alone with her as he was on this long quiet hillside and in this thin palely bright air of early evening. Solitude, prolonged and hushed, surrounded them; the pines whispered faintly but eagerly of new life. From the valley below came the thin, far barking of a dog.
Then, all at once, as he stood beside her, with that polite smile and with those aloof eyes, she became conscious that her heart was beating with strong and painful rapidity, that her breath felt like a surge of suffocating air in her constricted throat, and that there was a spinning sound in her ears and the most unbearable tearing anguish in her breast.
Worst of all, there was a most curious consciousness in her of her very self, her flesh, the outlines of her face, the spasmodic clenching of her hands in her muff. And that consciousness extended to him so that he momentarily became more imminent, more intense in her awareness, until the only reality in the transparent and echoing silence was this man himself.
His voice came to her dimly, and with gravity: “I have not thanked you before, for your care of my father. But I cannot thank you fully. That would be impossible.”
She spoke huskily through her constricted throat: “It was nothing. I am so very fond of him. He is so good.”
“And he is very fond of you,” he said, and she had never heard his voice so gentle and so kind.
She looked down at the valley and did not answer. But she saw nothing of the delicate lights which had begun to twinkle below. The earth appeared to move in long undulations under her feet; the sky, no
w amethystine and purely cold, appeared to widen, to extend into limitless horizons. Her lips were numb, for her heart had subsided into tremendous slow beats as if it were stifling, and the sickening anguish which filled her had become a physical and crushing thing.
Jerome regarded her profile, which revealed nothing at all except the sunken expression about her pale lips. A light and frigid wind stirred the pines, and a tendril of her black hair played against her cheek. She stood motionless, her hands in her muff, her eyes fixed on the valley below.
“He will live, now, they think,” he said.
“Yes.”
“And you will have your well-deserved rest.”
She lifted her eyes and looked at him fully, and he saw how dilated they were and full of some strange and involuntary emotion like terror or torment. But she saw only that he was smiling at her with brotherly regard and friendly interest. She moistened her dry lips, and murmured: “I am not very tired at all.” And the sickness increased in her until she felt faint and exhausted and overcome with some mysterious and listless grief, so heavy, now, that she had a vague but poignant fear of falling.
He looked away from her, and his face was more gray in the gathering dusk. “It is almost spring, and we can forget what has happened,” he said.
We can forget, she said to herself.
“There was a time,” he said, musingly, “when I was afraid that time itself had stood still and we were all imprisoned forever in winter, and should never escape. When I came out here tonight it was with the sensation that I had been released and was free again. I was quite surprised to realize that spring is actually here and that I am alive.”
“Yes,” she said dully.
“Soon,” he continued, “the valley will be hidden in trees, and the grass will be green on these hills, and the sun will be warm. I haven’t seen our garden in the summer, for some years. I have pleasant anticipations of it. I never thought the idea of a garden could be so pleasant. But after one has left pain and dread behind, he becomes aware of how real life is, and how beautiful it can be.”
But never again, for me, she thought. Never, never again. And now she had the sensation that she had been buried under great stones, forever shut from the light of the new sun and the sound and sights of the new earth.
“It is agreeable to think that we can now talk of other things besides my father’s illness, and can make plans,” he was saying. She knew that he was smiling, but could only wonder if the darkness which was deepening slowly about her was real or imagined.
He said: “It is fairly settled that Sally Tayntor and I are to be married in September.”
She opened her mouth, but the thickness of her throat kept back her voice. She thought: I must go back. If I do not, I shall cry out, or scream, or die in this place. She drew in a deep breath, as if a smothering weight had been partially removed from her lips. She found that she could speak again:
“That will please your father, I know.” Her voice sounded in her own ears as if it came from a great distance, and from another throat.
“It will please everyone, especially me,” he said lightly. “Sally is a very dear girl.”
He flicked with his cane at a black and sodden leaf on the wet earth. Amalie could not take her eyes from it. It seemed part of herself.
Jerome glanced back at the house. He could see only the red roof glimmering against a sky which was now darkly blue, broken with the points of new stars.
“The house will be filled again,” he said, and his tone was pleasant and light. “You and Alfred, I and Sally. It has been quiet too long, I suspect.”
“Yes.”
He looked at her bent head and white profile, glimmering now in the pure and solitary dusk. His mouth opened a little, drew back on his teeth in a spasmodic grimace of pain, and the muscles contracted along his jaw. They stood in silence, not moving, though the air about them was pregnant and charged, and full of bitter misery.
Then Jerome moved a step closer to her. She felt his approach, rather than saw it, and started. She raised her eyes, and again he saw her stark anguish and motionless despair.
“I am sorry, Amalie,” he said, softly. “I hope you have long pardoned my insolence to you.”
She did not answer. She only gazed at him in her speechless suffering, and he knew she could not speak.
“It was vicious and unpardonable of me,” he said. “I can only say, in self-extenuation, that I was a fool. I’d like to know that you do not think too harshly of me.”
“No,” she whispered. And then: “Oh, no.”
“You are very good,” he said gravely. “I never knew how kind and how good you are. But now I know. You have forgiven me, then?”
Her lips moved, but he heard only a rustle. He held out his hand to her. She stared at it dully for a moment, then withdrew her hand from her muff, and gave it to him. It was as cold and stiff as ice.
“Shall we go back, now?” he asked, very gently. “I thought I just heard the dinner bell.”
They moved through the pines, and the drops of moisture fell thickly on their faces. Lights glowed from the windows of the house. Smoke plumed along the dark eaves. They climbed the slope together. They entered the warm hall, and Amalie went up the stairs alone. Jerome watched her go, and his face was closed and inscrutable.
Someone had lighted the lamp in her bedroom. It threw its soft light on the carpet, on the quiet furniture. A fire crackled in the grate.
Amalie sat down on the bed. Her whole body was trembling, as if it had been struck a savage blow. She stared at the fire, and the red light lay in the sockets of her eyes. Then she turned on her side and lay down, fully clad as she was.
“O God,” she said aloud, in a strange sharp voice. “O God, God.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It was on April 2nd that Brigadier General Wainwright Tayntor celebrated the betrothal of his daughter, Miss Sally Atchison Tayntor, to Mr. Jerome Lindsey, the marriage to take place on September 15th, 1869.
Miss Sally’s father was jubilant; Miss Sally, herself, a constant glow of blushes and delight; Riversend, amazed. The General and his daughters went to New York to look over the latest Parisian concoctions, both for the celebration of the betrothal and for Miss Sally’s trousseau.
The day of the great celebration was particularly felicitous. There had been a heavy fall of snow a day or two before, but this had disappeared with promptitude. The pale gray sky of the morning had by five o’clock given way to the most delicate blue, and the countryside was vivid with new green, the air fresh and fragrant. By half past six, when the guests began to arrive, the General’s mansion was lit from top to bottom. Relatives from Boston, Philadelphia and New York were already snugly quartered in guest bedchambers, and the local conservatories had been stripped to fill all the rooms, so that they resembled summer bowers. Extra servants had been engaged; one of the great drawing-rooms had been pressed into service as an auxiliary dining-room, and though the guests would not dine until eight, the five immense tables were already aglitter with silver, gold-decorated crystal and candles, and enormous platters loaded with hams and cold beef and fowl.
All agreed that for lavishness of entertainment, for food, for music, for the splendor of women’s gowns, for hilarity and wine and handsomeness, the reception was unsurpassed in the history of Riversend. As for the bride, in her pale-blue Worth gown, looped with pink velvet rosebuds, her beauty, it was admitted, was dazzling. She seemed to be surrounded by an aura of radiance, her impudent liveliness somewhat subdued under the dazing impact of happiness. The bridegroom-to-be was according to the ladies, devastating. There were some carpers who said all this display and jollity was “unrefined” and not at all “elegant,” for restraint was conspicuously, lacking. But then, that was probably envy.
Never, the ladies sighed, was there so devoted a gentleman as Mr. Lindsey. He hung upon the steps of Miss Sally with ardor. And how handsome he was! There was no false note in the whole evening. Even Miss Do
rothea Lindsey, noted and disliked and avoided in the past for her grimness and silent disapproval of everything, appeared almost gay. She had actually emerged from her constant grays and blacks, and wore a gown of deep purple foulard, enlivened by gold buttons on the basque, and quite extremely bustled. Many ladies exclaimed, behind their fans, that they had had no idea that she was so presentable a creature. Of course, they said, it was unthinkable that Miss Dorothea might have resorted to shameful art to give color to her usually pallid complexion, but her color was really remarkable! It was true that she was very old, almost forty, in fact, but there was such an air about her now that to a casual eye she might have appeared much younger. Her dark hair, only slightly threaded with gray, had been expertly dressed, and curled bangs were arranged over that austere forehead. Several bachelors became interested. After all, it was quite a handsome creature, and there was no inconsiderable fortune in the background.
Few had ever heard Miss Dorothea laugh, and when she did so, now, somewhat heavily and reluctantly, many of those who had known her almost all her life turned their heads to discover who was the stranger in their midst. They were quite amazed to discover that the merriment emanated from Miss Dorothea.
Mr. Lindsey had insisted upon being present. Emaciated, weak and exhausted though he was, he sat and smiled and conversed with his old friend the General, and kissed Miss Sally whenever she halted prettily beside him. His white face glowed; it was as if some pressure and fear had been removed from him. When he was alone with the General again, he imparted to his friend some information which made the old soldier beam with pleasure and satisfaction.
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