"Tell me," he said, bending towards her.
"I know you cannot overlook it! My faith--it is all confusion," she said in a low awe-struck voice. "I do believe--I do wish to believe; but my grasp seems gone. I cannot rest or trust for thinking of the questions that have been raised! There," she added in a strange interrogative tone.
"It is a cruel thing to represent doubt as the sign of intellect," Alick said sadly; "but you will shake off the tormentors when the power of thinking and reasoning is come back."
"Oh, if I could think so! The misery of darkness here--there-- everywhere--the old implicit reliance gone, and all observance seeming like hypocrisy and unreality. There is no thinking, no enduring the intolerable maze."
"Do not try to think now. You cannot bear it. We will try to face what difficulties remain when you are stronger."
She turned her eyes full on him. "You do not turn away! You know you are free."
"Turn from the sincerity that I prize?"
"You don't? I thought your views were exactly what would make you hate and loathe such bewilderment, and call it wilful;" there was something piteous in the way her eye sought his face.
"It was not wilful," he said; "it came of honest truth-seeking. And, Rachel, I think the one thing is now gone that kept that honesty from finding its way."
"Self-sufficiency!" she said with a groan; but with a sudden turn she exclaimed, "You don't trust to my surrendering my judgment. I don't think I am that kind of woman."
"Nor I that kind of man," he answered in his natural tone; then affectionately, "No, indeed I want you to aid mine."
She lay back, wearied with the effort, and disinclined to break the stillness. There was a move at the door; Mrs. Curtis, in an agony of restless anxiety, could not help coming to see that the interview was doing no harm.
"Don't go!" exclaimed Rachel, holding out her hand as he turned at the opening of the door. "Oh, mother!" and there was an evident sound of disappointment.
Mrs. Curtis was infinitely rejoiced to find her entrance thus inopportune. "I only wished just to be sure it was not too much," she said.
"Oh, mother, it is the first peace I have known for weeks! Can't you stay?" looking up to him, as her mother retreated to tell Grace that it was indeed all right.
This brought him to a footstool close beside her. "Thank you," he murmured. "I was wondering just then if it would hurt you or agitate you to give me some little satisfaction in going on with this. I know you are too true not to have told me at once if your objections were more personal than those you have made; but, Rachel, it is true, as you say, that you have never consented!"
The tone of these words made Rachel raise herself, turn towards him, and hold out both her hands. "Oh," she said, as he took them into his own, "it was--it could be only that I cannot bear so much more than I deserve."
"What! such an infliction?" in his own dry way.
"Such rest, such kindness, such generosity!"
"No, Rachel, there is something that makes it neither kindness nor generosity. You know what I mean."
"And that is what overpowers me more than all," she sighed, in the full surrender of herself. "I ought not to be so very happy."
"That is all I want to hear," he said, as he replaced her on her cushions, and sat by her, holding her hand, but not speaking till the next interruption, by one of the numerous convalescent meals, brought in by Grace, who looked doubtful whether she would be allowed to come in, and then was edified by the little arrangements he made, quietly taking all into his own hands, and wonderfully lessening a sort of fidget that Mrs. Curtis's anxiety had attached to all that was done for Rachel. It was not for nothing that he had spent a year upon the sofa in the irritably sensitive state of nerves that Bessie had described; and when he could speak to Grace alone, he gave her a lecture on those little refinements of unobtrusive care, that more demonstrative ailments had not availed to inculcate, and which Mrs. Curtis's present restless anxiety rendered almost impossible. To hinder her from constantly aggravating the fever on the nerves by her fidgeting solicitude was beyond all power save his own, and that when he was actually in the house.
Morning after morning he rode to the Homestead to hear that Rachel had had a very bad night, and was very low, then was admitted to find Mrs. Curtis's fluttering, flurried attentions exasperating every wearied fibre with the very effort to force down fretfulness and impatience, till, when she was left to him, a long space of the lull impressed on her by his presence was needful before he could attempt any of the quiet talk, or brief readings of poetry, by which he tried further to soothe and rest her spirits. He would leave her so calm and full of repose as to make him augur well for the next day; but the moment his back was turned, something would always happen that set all the pulses in agitation again, and consigned her to a fresh night of feverish phantoms of the past. He even grew distracted enough to scold Grace fraternally as the only person he could scold.
"You seem to nurse her on the principle of old Morris, the biggest officer among us, who kindly insisted on sitting up with me, and began by taking his seat upon my hand as it was lying spread out upon a pillow."
"Indeed, Alick," said Grace, with tears in her eyes, "I hardly know what to do. When you are not in the house the mother is almost as much in a nervous fever as Rachel, and it is hardly in her power to keep from fretting her. It is all well when you are here."
"Then, Grace, there is only one thing to be done. The sooner I take Rachel away the better for both her and the mother."
"Oh, Alick, you will drive them both wild if you hurry it on."
"Look here. I believe I can get leave from Saturday till Tuesday. If I can get a hearing in those two days, I shall try; and depend upon it, Grace, this place is the worst that Rachel can be in."
"Can you come out here for three whole days? Oh, what a comfort!"
And 'what a comfort' was re-echoed by Mrs. Curtis, who had erected dear Alexander to a pedestal of infallibility, and was always treated by him with a considerate kindness that made her pity Fanny for the number of years that must pass before Stephana could give her the supreme blessing of a son-in-law. Fanny, on her side, had sufficient present blessing in collecting her brood around her, after the long famine she had suffered, and regretted only that this month had rendered Stephana's babyhood more perceptibly a matter of the past; and that, in the distance, school days were advancing towards Conrade, though it was at least a comfort that his diphtheria had secured him at home for another half year, and the Colonel had so much to think about that he had not begun his promised researches into schools.
The long-looked-for letters came after a weary interval of expectation, the more trying to Ermine because the weather had been so bitter that Colin could not shake off his cold, nor venture beyond his own fireside, where Rose daily visited him, and brought home accounts that did not cheer her aunt.
Edward wrote shortly to his sister, as if almost annoyed at the shower of letters that had by every post begun to recall his attention from some new invention on the means of assaying metals:--
"I am sorry you have stirred up Keith to the renewal of this painful subject. You know I considered that page in my life as closed for ever, and I see nothing that would compensate for what it costs me even to think of it. To redeem my name before the world would be of no avail to me now, for all my English habits are broken, and all that made life valuable to me is gone. If Long and Beauchamp could reject my solemn affirmation three years ago, what would a retractation slowly wrung from them be worth to me now? It might once have been, but that is all over now. Even the desire to take care of you would no longer actuate me since you have Keith again; and in a few years I hope to make my child independent in money matters--independent of your love and care you would not wish her to be. Forget the troubles of your life, Ermine, and be happy with your faithful Keith, without further efforts on behalf of one whom they only harass and grieve."