"I have kept you here a good while," I said. "After a moment or so drop your handkerchief, and as I return it to you the letter will be with it.
Or, better, if you choose to trust me, we"ll not do that, but as soon as I get into the house I"ll burn it."
"I can trust you," she replied, "but----"
"What; the Baron--when he misses it? O I"ll settle that."
She gave a start as though I had shouted.
I thought it a bad sign for the future, and the words that followed seemed to me worse. "Isn"t it my duty," she asked--and her eyes betrayed unconsciously the desperateness of her desire--"to explain to him myself?"
I answered with a question. "Would that be in the line of retracement, Mrs. Fontenette?"
"It would!" she responded, with solemn eagerness. "O it would be! It shall be! I promise you!"
"Mrs. Fontenette," said I, "consider. If his wife"--she flinched; she could do so now, for the sudden semi-tropical darkness had fallen--"if his wife-or your husband"--she bit her lip--"knew all--would they think that your duty? Would it take them an instant to refuse their consent? Would they not firmly insist that it is your duty never again to see him alone?"
Her only reply was an involuntary moan and a whitening of the face, and for the first time I saw how deep into her soul the poison had gone.
"My friend," I continued, "you must not think me meddlesome--officious. I can no more wait for your permission to help you than if you were drowning. Perhaps for good reasons within _me_, I know, better than you, that you-and he--are on a slippery incline, and that whether you can stop your descent and creep back to higher ground than either of you has slipped from is not to be told by the fineness of your promises or resolves. I cannot tell; you cannot tell; only G.o.d knows." ...
"Please, sir," said a new maid--in place of one who had gone home fever struck and had died--"yo" lady saunt me fo" to tell you yo" little boy a sett"n on de back steps an" sayin" his head does ache him, an" she wish you"d "ten" to him, "caze she cayn"t leave his lill" sisteh, "caze she threaten with convulsion"."
XV
Mrs. Fontenette and the maid silently ran in ahead of me; I went first to the mother. When I found Mrs. Fontenette again she had the child undressed and in his crib, and I remembered how often I had, in my heart, called her a coward.
She saw me pencil on a slip of paper at the mantelpiece, and went and read -"You mustn"t stay. He has the fever. You"ve never had it."
She wrote beneath--"I should have got it weeks ago if G.o.d paid wages every day. Don"t turn me off."
I dropped the paper into the small firegrate, added the other from my breastpocket, and set them ablaze, and the new maid, entering, praised burning paper as one of the best deodorizers known.
So my dainty rose-neighbor stayed; stayed all night, and all the next day and night, and on and on with only flying visits to her home over the way, until we were amazed at her endurance. The little fellow was never at ease with her out of his wild eyes. Her touch was balm to him, and her words peace. Oh, that they might have been healing also! But that was beyond the reach of all our striving. His days were as the flowers and winged things of the garden-kingdom, wherein he had been--without ever guessing it-- their citizen-king.
It awakens all the tenderness at once that I ever had for Mrs. Fontenette, to recall what she was to him in those hours, and to us when his agonies were all past, and he lay so stately on his short bier, and she could not be done going to it and looking--looking--with streaming eyes.
As she stood close by the tomb, while we dumbly watched the masons seal it, I began to believe that she blamed herself for the child"s sickness and death, and presently I knew it must be so. One of those quaint burial societies of Negro women, in another quarter of the grounds, but within plain hearing, chose for the ending of their burial service--with what fitness to their burial service I cannot say, maybe none--a hymn borrowed, I judge, from the rustic whites, as usual, but Africanized enough to thrill the dullest nerves; and the moment it began my belief was confirmed.
My sin is so dahk, Lawd, so dahk and so deep, My grief is so po", Lawd, so po" and so mean, I wisht I could weep, Lawd, I wisht I could weep, Oh, I wisht I could weep like Mary Mahgaleen!
Oh, Sorroh! sweet Sorroh! come, welcome, and stay!
I"d welcome thy swode howsomever so keen, If I could jes" pray, Lawd, if I could jes" pray, Oh! if I could jes" pray, like Mary Mahgaleen!
My belief was confirmed, I say; but I was glad to see also that no one else read as I read the signs by which I was guided. At the cemetery gate I heard some one call--"Yo" madam is sick, sih," and, turning, saw Mrs.
Fontenette, deathly white, lift her blue eyes to her husband and he get his arm about her just in time to save her from falling. She swooned but a moment, and, in the carriage, before it started off, tried to be quite herself, though very pale.
"It"s nothing but the reaction," said to me the lady who fanned her, and we agreed it was a wonder she had held up so long.
"Hyeh, honey," put in the child"s old black nurse, in a voice that never failed to soothe, however grotesque its misinterpretations, "lay yo" head on me; an" lay it heavy: da.s.s what I"m use-en to. Blessed is de pyo in haht; she shall res" in de fea" o" de Lawd, an" he shall lafe at heh calamity."
I was glad to send the old woman with them, for as we turned away to our own carriage, I said in my mind, "All that little lady needs is enough contrition, and she"ll give away the total of any secret of which she owns an undivided half."
But a night and a day pa.s.sed, and a second, and a third, and I perceived she had told nothing.
It was a terrible time, with many occasions of suspense more harrowing than that. Our other children were getting on, yet still needed vigilant care; the Baron was to be let out of his room in a day or two, but my fat neighbor had come down with the disease, while his wife still lay between life and death--how they finally got well, I have never quite made out, they were so badly nursed--and all about us were new cases, and cases beyond hope, and r.e.t.a.r.ded recoveries, and relapses, and funerals, and nurses too few, and ice scarce, and everybody worn out with watching-- physicians compelled to limit themselves to just so many cases at a time, to avoid utterly breaking down.
As I was in my fat neighbor"s sick chamber one evening, giving his nurse a respite, word came that Fontenette was at my gate. I went to him with misgivings that only increased as we greeted. He was dejected and agitated. His grasp was damp and cold.
"It cou"n" stay from me always," he said in an anguished voice, and I cried in my soul, "She"s told him!"
But she had not. I asked him what his bad news was that had come at last, but his only reply was,
"Can you take _him_? Can you take him out of my house--to-night--this evening--now?"
"Who, the Baron? Why, certainly, if you desire it?" I responded; wondering if the entomologist, by some slip, had betrayed _her_. There was an awe in my visitor"s eyes that was almost fright.
"Fontenette," I exclaimed, "what have you heard--what have you done?"
"My frien", "tis not what I "ave heard, neitheh what I "ave done; "tis what I "ave got."
"Got? Why, you"ve got nothing, you Creole of the Creoles. Your skin"s as cool as mine."
"Feel my pulse," he said. I felt it. It wasn"t less than a hundred and fifty.
"Go, get into bed while I bring the Baron over here," I said, and by the time I had done this and got back to him his skin was hot enough! An hour or two after, I recrossed the street on the way to my night"s rest, leaving his wife to nurse him, and Senda to attend on her and keep house.
I paused in the garden and gazed up among the benignant stars. And then I looked onward, through and beyond their ranks, seemingly so confused, yet where such amazing hidden order is, and said, for our good Fontenette, and for his watching wife, and for all of us--even for my wife and me in our unutterable loss--"Sank Kott! sank Kott! it iss only se yellow fevah!"
XVI
Three days more. In the third evening I found the doctor saying to Mrs.
Fontenette:
"Nine o"clock. It"s now seven-thirty. Well, you"d better begin pretty soon to watch for the change.
"O, you"ll know it when you see it, it will be as plain as something sinking in water right before your eyes. Then give him the beef-tea, just a teaspoonful; then, by and by, another, and another, as I told you, always keeping his head on the pillow--mind that."
Out beside his carriage he continued to me: "O yes, a nurse or patient may break that rule, or almost any rule, and the patient may live. I had a patient, left alone for a moment on the climacteric day, who was found standing at her mirror combing her hair, and to-day she"s as well as you or I. I had another who got out of bed, walked down a corridor, fell face downward and lay insensible at the crack of a doorsill with the rain blowing in on him under the door--and he got well. As to Fontenette, all his symptoms so far are good. Well--I"ll be back in the morning."
So ran the time. There were no more new cases in our house; Mrs. Smith and I had had the scourge years before, as also had Senda, who remained over the way. Fontenette pa.s.sed from one typical phase of the disorder to another "charmingly" as the doctor said, yet he specially needed just such exceptionally delicate care as his wife was giving him. In the city at large the deaths per day were more and more, and one night when it showered and there was a heavenly cooling of the air, the increase in the mortality was horrible. But the weather, as a rule, was steady and tropically splendid; the sun blazed; the moonlight was marvellous; the dews were like rains; the gardens were gay with b.u.t.terflies. Our convalescent little ones hourly forgot how gravely far they were from being well, and it became one of our heavy cares to keep the entomologist from entomologizing--and from overeating.