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THE MISTS ALL CLEARED AWAY
On toward midnight I was awakened by Dickenson clamoring at my door, telling me that Nancy lay delirious, with a high fever, calling for me. Making what haste I could, I reached the poor child, to find her tossing from one side of the bed to the other, uttering hoarse cries, with neither intelligence in her glance nor recognition of either my presence or my voice. McMurtrie's attitude, after his examination, drove me wild with fear. "It's like to be a long case," he said. "I want ye to get Dr. Cameron from Glasgow. I'll stay by ye," he added; "I'll just move into the house, for, under God, it's not my intention to let Nancy Stair leave us yet."
Weeks and weeks went by, during which it seemed as though I neither slept nor ate, listening to the moaning, or, what was far worse, broken talk of her work, of her cares, scraps of forgotten rhymes, bits of Latin verse, law references cited letter for letter, until I needed the doctor myself, who threatened to put me from the house unless I showed a more reasonable behavior.
On in the third week of Nancy's fever I heard that Danvers's wife was ill, but this was nature, and I gave no more thought to the matter. On the afternoon of the day on which the news was brought me the Arran folks sent again to know if Dr. McMurtrie could be spared them, and we sent him over immediately. On his return I asked him, in a perfunctory way, how he had found things, and he returned an evasive answer; but upon my insisting for the truth, he told me that Isabel had given birth to a child the night before, but that it had died before morning, and that she herself was in a most desperate state.
My heart went out to all this suffering, but death so near increased my anxiety for my own child, and when the news was brought me on the following morning that Isabel had passed away during the night, the fear for Nancy rose high in me, and I became like a crazed creature, wandering from one room to another, with half-begun prayers to God upon my lips and a feeling of utter helplessness heavy on my soul.
Nine weeks of this I endured, nine weeks of such dread that I should choose death in preference to living the time again, when one morning in early spring Dr. Cameron, who had been watching by the bedside all night, came to me. "I think, my lord," he said, "that the worst is by with. Ye need worry no more," and at the words I buried my face in my hands, as I sat at the table, and wept like a child.
On the day following this announcement, Sandy, who had refused to leave me in my great anxiety, took his boy off to visit the New Republic founded across seas, and Dr. McMurtrie, who kept his residence at Stair, for I would listen to no word of his leaving us yet, watched the dear one on her journey back from the valley of the shadow. It was late summer before she was able to be about at all, and Hallowe'en was celebrated by her first riding out.
As she grew stronger there were two changes I noted in her conduct, the first of these being her unwillingness to see Hugh Pitcairn, whose solicitude for her during her illness had knit us together by cords never to be broken. If she knew he was in the house she would retire to her own room, or if advised of his coming would go abroad to visit or drive, in every way showing a clear avoidance of his society. And the second matter was in connection with the Burn School. This work had been the chief thought of her life before her illness, but upon her recovery she refused to visit the place, would walk or ride far around by the Dead Man's Holm to avoid meeting in with either teachers or pupils; and when Father Michel brought work to her to have it examined she would overlook it listlessly, and put it by immediately on his departure, to be referred to no more. I knew more of the reasons for this conduct than she suspected, her talk in the fever being all of one thing, and the intuition of my love helping me far in discovering the truth. I believed that McMurtrie had learned some matters as well as myself, for twice, when he was telling me something concerning her, he broke off with entire irrelevancy to say: "The little deevil; the plucky little deevil!" with tears in his eyes, and ending with, "God! I'd like to tell Pitcairn," and a roar of laughter.
More than a year had gone by before her color and brightness came back to her, and one gay spring morning, when the "Nanciness" of her had shown itself by some audacious rejoinder, I ventured on a remark, which I hoped would lead to an open talk with me, concerning the affair of the trial.
"Nancy," said I, with nothing but the impulse of the moment to guide me, "would a child of mine commit a forgery?"
She looked up at me quickly, as though to judge my intention, before she answered, "A child of yours did."
"But you were too little to know the force of your conduct then," I continued. "Would a child of mine do such a thing now?"
A curious gleam passed over her face before she answered, looking straight into my eyes as she did so, "Don't worry about that, Jock," she said; "she didn't have to!"
"We will suppose," she went on, with an exact imitation of Pitcairn, "only suppose, you understand, that a bit of evidence was needed in a certain trial to clear one who was very dear; and we will suppose, only suppose, you remember, that there was a girl who had skill enough to seem to obtain it. We will suppose, still, that the girl said to herself, 'If I am on the other side from the great Pitcairn, I shall have no chance against his cross-examination, but if I seem to be on his own side he may be thrown from his guard, and I may suggest the questioning I want followed.' Take the testimony!" she cried, in her natural voice, rising and standing by the chimney-place. "Take the testimony which I gave and go through it word by word, and you can find neither forgery nor perjury. I had been well taught in the letter of the law. I was Pitcairn's own pupil, Jock!"
It was less than a week from this time that I came in from a ride, happier than I had thought to be again in this life, when a sight met my eyes which threw me clear from my reckoning. Going past the door of Nancy's sitting-room, I looked in, and at first sight thought my eyes had deceived me, for standing in the middle of the room was Hugh Pitcairn, and Nancy's head was on his shoulder. I saw that she was crying, and that the great lawyer himself, who was far from unmoved, patted her shoulder every once in a while, saying, "There, there!" staring out of the window and blinking hard to keep the tears back.
I went on to my own chamber and sat down in a heap on the side of the bed, as I used to do at college, repeating, "Good Heavens!" over and over to myself, until interrupted in the performance by Huey, who came in to gather the fire. "Where is Mr. Pitcairn, Huey?" said I. "He's went," he replied, and on the words a fear seized me lest Nancy should retire into one of her silences, and I should be left in a state of raging curiosity through the night. Upon inquiry I found that she was sleeping, and went down to the library, where I had but just settled myself when Hugh Pitcairn appeared before me, a legal document in his hand, having been for a walk to recover himself, I supposed. He looked more wooden than I had ever seen him, and, in the language of the country, I knew he would make me pay for the emotion he had shown before Nancy.
"I've news for you," he said.
"Hugh," I answered, "if they're pleasant, ye're welcome; but if they are not, I tell ye frankly, I've been stretched to breaking in the past year, and can not stand much more."
"It's not ill," he answered. "It concerns the death of the Duke of Borthwicke."
Here was dangerous walking for me, and I waited.
"Do you recall," he inquired, "the French woman at the Burnside who taught the Marseilles work?"
"A poor distraught body who ran from her own shadow?" said I.
He nodded.
"Although she spoke the French tongue, it seems she was Irish by birth. Her name" — he coughed a little behind his hand as though to give me time — "her name was Barnet."
I had heard the name before, but where? I saw that Hugh was waiting for me to place it, but any significant connection it might have I found myself unable to recall.
"It was heard of, ten or twelve years past, in connection with that of the late Duke of Borthwicke," he threw in for my assistance, and the tale of an old-time scandal came back to me at his words.
"She left her husband for him. They went to France together, did they not?" I asked.
"It was so stated at the time," Pitcairn answered.
"And she knows something of the duke's death?"
"Knew," Pitcairn corrected. "She died at noon to-day. It is her confession that I have in this paper, John. It was she herself who shot the duke, and the interwovenness of affairs is marked in this. She was an early love of Father Michel's, before he entered the priesthood, and came to him for work after her children died."
"Poor woman," said I, "she was half crazed, and, God forgive me for saying so, had many excuses for her act."
"Father Michel sent for me at ten. McMurtrie was there, and she told us the tale, after signing the paper, which I bring to you to use as you think best. You will be glad to have Carmichael see it, perhaps."
"Hugh," said I, for a shadow had lain between us ever since the trial, despite his devotion to Nancy, "I didn't think ye acted well by me at the time of the trial."
I got no further in this speech, for upon the instant he flew into a sudden heat, which made any temper, Sandy's or mine, or both of them put together, seem but a child's displeasure beside it.
"Acted well to ye!" he cried. "Acted well to ye! Do you know what I did for you at that time, Jock Stair, or rather for that bit lassie of yours, who has so wound herself about my heart that her illness has made me a broken man? I didn't give over the case when ye asked me, for I believed Danvers Carmichael a guilty man; but I meant to be as lenient to him as consistent with exact duty. Ye'll learn perhaps that in law, a friend prosecuting is better than a friend defending! Do you think I did not know what was done at that trial? Oh! not at the first, for she tricked and befooled me to the clear end of the prosecution; but when the letter was read I knew it had been changed, and did for that bit of a girl what the rest of the world might have tried to get me to do in vain. I was afraid for her — for her! do you understand? — for, on my soul, I thought him guilty in the way she did, a sudden duel perhaps, for the young man has a look of honesty not compatible with murder. But when I thought of what might come to her as accessory after the fact — accessory — after — the — fact — do you understand? — I shivered before a Scotch justice for the first time in my life.
"But the thing that galls me," he went on, and his pride spoke, "is that yon London-man, Magendie, may never know I had the truth concerning the affair. With Ferrars vs. Lorrimer, Annesly vs. Ingraham, and Cobham, Greenly, and Spencer vs. the Crown 10 at my tongue's end, did he think I'd let a case of resting on letter-evidence like his pass as I did without some weighty reason for my silence?
"But the queer thing of it is that I feel a better man somehow for having done my duty loosely; for, John, I had at home, when that letter was produced in court, one sent by messenger, dated a half-hour later by the duke himself, asking me to meet him the following morning to overlook some papers before he signed them, which, had I produced, would have ended the whole defense.
"She's just upset all my creeds and conduct. I could no more have hurt her as she sat looking at me with those big soft eyes of hers than I could have murdered a baby. What did I tell you years agone?" he cried, turning upon me with some fierceness — "That ye can't do anything with women folks. Inherited mother instincts make them protect anything, and when it comes to one they love, they'll falsify, not knowing that they're doing it, and justify the lies by Scripture, if need be.
"But when a man comes to die it's his mother he calls for; 'tis the touch of her hand he wants, and her breast to lean against as when he was a wee bit bairn, for he knows the worth of a heart that is all for him, right or wrong, through sickness, disgrace, and death. And in the long nights I watched by the child's bedside I learned more, Jock Stair, than any intellectual work could ever bring me, for the love I had for her, and the thought of woman's love as mother, wife, and daughter, raised me more, made me a finer man, a more uplifted one than I have ever been, even when it made me soft about my duty. It seems a bit muddled, but it's a solemn truth."
"I knew you'd find it out, Hugh Pitcairn, and you'd have known what ye've been trying to tell me years ago if you'd had a wife and children of your own. You're such a splendid fellow," I cried, "it's a pity you haven't."
"I've been wishing I had," he said simply.
"And why not?" I cried; "you're a young man yet."
He shook his head at this, but made no answer in words, and left me with some abruptness and no further speech.
Now that the confession was in my hands I knew not what course to pursue, and fell to wondering how much reviewing it might cause of the testimony which had cleared Danvers Carmichael, and what possible trouble from that might come home to Nancy's door. It was but nine o'clock; a thought seized me before I reached the house, and I sent MacColl to Arran Towers with a request that Mr. Danvers come to me immediately. It had been over a year since he had crossed my threshold, and although he was back in the country above three months, with Nancy's conduct still unexplained, friendly intercourse between the houses was impossible.
"There's a welcome been waiting for you o'er long," I said to him as he entered the room, and here the fine directness of him answered me:
"I've never had for you a thought not of the kindest; but your daughter's conduct to me; Lord Stair, has rendered —— " and before he finished I put out my hand to stay him.
"I wouldn't go on if I were you, Danvers! I wouldn't say that which I might come to regret. Ye haven't known all, and ye may have misjudged," and here I began at the other end.
"The one who killed the Duke of Borthwicke has confessed the deed. I have the confession here!" I said, touching the paper I had from Hugh Pitcairn as it lay on the table.
"The one who killed the duke!" Danvers cried, in amazement. "The man confessed himself a suicide."
"Danvers," I went on, "I am afraid that letter was not written by the duke, not all written by the duke. It was on separate sheets, if you remember, the first one naturally without signature. It is this part which I believe to have been partly written by another."
If ever there was a mystified face it was Danvers's as he stood trying to make something of my words.
"Let me tell you the whole story," I went on, "a bit at a time, and when I bungle it in the telling stop me till ye get it clear, for the future between us is just hanging on the tale I tell.
"The night of the murder I saw ye, Danvers, going back to Stair, bareheaded, in the snow, upon what errand I knew not; and when Nancy and I went down the steps of the little porch, she picked up something and hid it in the lace of her cloak; but in her room that night, when she fainted, I saw it was your cap, all of which she held silence concerning. And the next morning I was sent off to Pitcairn to worm it from him if he had heard you threatening the duke the day before, and discovered that not only did he hear that, but knew as well, from the fool chemist, that you were seen running away from Stair on the very heels of the murder, and if a blacker case was ever set for a woman to clear away I have yet to hear of it."
"I came up from Father Michel's through your grounds, hoping to catch a sight of her by the light in the writing-room. When I was far toward home I discovered that I had lost the cap she gave me, and turned back for it, but the snow was so deep I thought it useless," Danvers explained.
Upon this I told the story, a piece at a time, going backward and forward over all that has been set down, and the effect of it upon the lad is impossible to describe. When I told of Nancy's finding his cap he put his hands over his eyes, and sat with his face covered until the clear end of the telling, when he looked up at me with a great sadness, which had joy in it as well.
"Where is she, Lord Stair; may I see her?" he asked.
"I'll go up with you and see," I answered, as I held him by the arm for a minute. "Will you be good to her?" I asked.
"Good to her!" he cried. "If she'll have me! — if the rest of my life's service can atone in any way for all the misery I've caused her — it's hers for the taking."
"God bless you," I said; "God bless and keep you both."
The door of the sitting-room stood a bit open, and I entered to find Nancy in a loose white wrapper in a great-chair by the fire.
"I've some company for you, Little Flower!" I began, and my voice choked me so that she looked at me in surprise.
"Who is it?" she asked.
"It's one who has been too long gone," I answered her, but by this time reason and convention were blown to the four winds of heaven, for at sound of that beloved voice the door was thrown open and Danvers was on his knees before her, his face buried in her hands.
"My girl!" he cried, "my girl! Can ye forgive me for all the misjudgments I made of you? Can you forget all the sorrow and misery I have brought into your life? Can you just let the past be by with and take me to your heart, for 'tis the only place I've ever known happiness or peace in all my life? I'm not worthy of you," he went on, "no man ever born was that; but say you care enough — that you think you —— "
And here the woman spoke:
"Good or bad — and I think you the finest man I ever knew — worthy of me or not, I'd rather be your wife than anything this world could bring. Oh, ye've been so long away, Danvers," she said, with a sob, "so long away —— "
"God!" he cried, the word sounding like a prayer, as he gathered her in his arms, kissing her lips, her eyes, her hair; and, the time being made for them, I went quietly from the room.
An hour passed, two; and when midnight was tolled, I knew that Nancy's health must be thought of, and crossed the hall to pack Danvers off home. I found him, glorified, at one side of the chimney-shelf, and Nancy, like a beautiful crumpled rose, at the other; Nancy, with eyes showing the memory of Danvers's kisses; conscious to the finger-tips, all woman, who had been learning for the past two hours from her lover's passionate caresses the Meaning of Life.
"Be off home with you, Danvers Carmichael," I cried. "Ye'll have this child of mine ill again!"
"I am not going home," he said determinedly. "She is not well, and she needs some one to sit up with her."
I laughed in his face. "With Dickenson in the next room, Joan Landy sleeping at the foot of the bed, and McMurtrie and myself across the hall, she scarce suffers from lack of attention," I answered, and here he took another course.
"Oh," he cried, "think of what I have been through — think of all the bitter days and nights of separation from her! Think how near I came to losing her altogether. Think of the hell of the last two years, and let me stay," he cried, pleadingly; and here the young rascal put his hand on my shoulder.
"Father," he cried.
The word made me wax in his hand, and I compromised. "Ye can have the rooms next to mine and stay with us to-night," I gave in.
"I shall stay till the wedding. I'm going to live here," he returned with a laugh, at which I carried him off to my own rooms, though he went back twice to Nancy's door to say something he'd forgotten.
I knew that "forgotten thing." I had gone back often to say it myself. What lover has not? But at the third announcement of his forgettings I lost patience with him.
"Danvers Carmichael! Many's the time in our college days that I have thrown your father down and sat on him to keep him from some piece of deviltry, and despite my years, I fear I'll have to treat ye the same way," I cried, upon which we ordered the pipes and some brandy, and sat till the clear day was come, talking the past over, going back and forth over our many mistakes, and making happy plans for the future, with Nancy the centre of every plan.
A month later the marriage took place in the little chapel on the Burnside, on a morning so fair and bright and joyous that it seemed made for such a happening. All the old friends were there — Janet and Hugh, Dame Dickenson and Uncle Ben, the girls from the lace-school, Jeanie Henderlin with the Lapraiks, and Huey MacGrath, who cried without intermission from the time he arose in the morning until late in the day, when, overcome by the punch, he was found asleep with his head on the Hall Bible.
Jamie played the violin, and as Nancy and I entered the church, Danvers and Billy Deuceace were waiting for us at the railing. It was such a misty, glorified, radiant Nancy I had upon my arm, that Danvers waited no longer after the first look, his impatience being such that he left Billy Deuceace, and, coming down the aisle, took her from me before we were half-way to the altar. Somewhat set back by the suddenness of this, I turned to Sandy, who was near — Sandy, with a face as glad, as overjoyed as my own — who, seeing the position I was left in, joined me, and we walked together to the altar-rail and stood shoulder to shoulder as our two children were united until God do them part.
Looking down the years to come we saw other Sandy Carmichaels and other Jock Stairs together in the bare old playground we had known; saw splendid men and women, born of our son and daughter, making the world better and stronger for our having lived, and the joy within me was so strong that the tears stood in my eyes and trembled down my face. Turning suddenly, I found Sandy as moist-eyed as myself, and while the service was being read I reached toward him, and we stood, hands gripped, until the end, in memory of our dead youth and of our friendship that could never die.
And like an old man who tells a tale limpingly, and covers the ground again to make its points clear to the listener, I set down a scene some five years later in the grounds of Stair. We were all there, Nancy and Danvers, Sandy, Pitcairn, and myself — and two Newcomers, the most spoiled and petted children, it is my belief, upon the entire earth.
"I had a letter from Pailey to-day, Nancy," said I, "proposing a third edition of your poems." 11
She shook her head.
"That's by with forever, Jock; I shall never write again," she answered.
"No more verse-making?" I inquired.
"Never any more — unless it be to say to women this."
She stood, with her hands folded before her, a beautiful fulfilled Nancy, looking down at us with sweetest earnestness, her children leaning against her as she spoke.
"I should write: I, Nancy Stair-Carmichael, have learned that verse-making and verse-singing and the publicity that goes with them do not make me a finer woman; I have learned that my woman's body is not strong enough for the mental excitement of that existence, and to be a daughter, a wife and a mother, as well, and that God in his goodness sent a certain great poet into my life to show me that gift is nothing beside womanhood.
"And I would reason with all these dear other women like this:
"Suppose I write certain verses! Where will my lines be two hundred years from now? Forgotten words of unimmediate things. But suppose my heart spoke to me, and knowing I could do but one work well, I put all childish ambition aside to become the mother of men, that centuries from now thousands of my children may be fighting for the right of present issues and hastening that Divine Outcome for which God made us all.
"And I would say to them: the night I knew another woman was to be the mother —— " she paused abruptly, for she had been so carried away by her own thought as to forget where this might lead. She was a great woman, but to the end of her life could never bring herself to name the fact that Danvers had had another wife.
"That night," she continued, slurring the statement over, "I learned more about life than the classics ever taught me.
"And I would write, as well, something about the trial, to say to them that when Danvers's life was at stake I had no thought but to save him. Right or wrong, innocent or guilty, the only thing I wanted was that he might be free.
"And by this thing I found the unfitness of women to handle public affairs, for the tender hearts, which make good wives and mothers and daughters, unfit us for the judicial conduct needed in public matters — and I'm glad they do," she finished, with a smile.
"It's not," Danvers amended, as he stood with his arm about her, "that women have not the ability to do anything they want," for he was ever chivalrous, "but that God in his wisdom gave them a great and special work, and they should be kept strong and safe and holy for its fulfilment."
"But it is not given to all women to choose what they shall do," said Sandy.
"And few of them are gifted creatures, anyhow," said Hugh.
"And one life can never be as another," said I; but the older baby, who looked up just then, said, "Mother."
"And that one word tells the whole story," cried Nancy, with a passion of tenderness in her voice, laying the child's head against her bosom.
10 "Famous Forgeries," Benson.
11 The last published poems written by Nancy Stair Carmichael (afterward Countess of Glenmore) were:
"And will ye go Love's Way with me" — written directly after the visit to Allan-Lough — and
"Here awa! There awa! Daffy-Down-Dilly O!" one of the quaintest bits of loving child rhyme in all the Scots tongue, composed soon after the birth of her first child, Danvers Carmichael, Jr.
THE END