The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864

"Wal, 'twas."

And when the reluctant tinman went on his way again, she returned to spread the fabulous result before her mother. There were sugars and spices and whatnot. And though—woe worth the day!—she found that the sum yielded only half what once it would, still, by drinking her own tea in its acritude, they would do admirably; for tea even little Jane required as her tonic, and without it felt like nothing but a mollusk.

All this was very well, so far as it went; but the thrifty housekeeper soon found that it went no way at all. Those for whom she made her efforts wanted none of their results. She would have given all she had in the world to help these suffering beings; but her little cooking and concocting were all that she could do, and those they disregarded utterly. When in the dull forenoon she would have enlivened Vivia with her precious elderberry-wine, that a connoisseur must taste twice before telling from purplest Port, and Vivia only wet her lips at it, or when she carried Ray a roasted apple, its burnished sides bursting with juice and clotted with cream, and the boy glanced at it and never saw it, little Jane felt ready to cry; and she set to bethinking herself seriously if there were nothing else to be done.

One day, it was the day before Christmas, Jane took up to Ray's room one of her trifles, a whip, whose suave and frothy nothingness was piled over the sweet plum-pulp at bottom. Ray lay on the outside of the bed, with his thick poncho over him; he looked at her and at her tray, played with the teaspoon a moment, then rolled upon his side and shut his eyes. Little Jane took a half-dozen steps about the room, reached the door, hesitated, and came back.

"Ray," said she, under her breath and with tears in her voice, "I wish you wouldn't do so. You don't know how it makes me feel. I can't do anything for you but bring whips and custards; and you won't touch those."

Ray turned and looked up at her.

"Do you care, Janet?" said he; and, rising on one arm, he lifted the glass, and finished its delicate sweetmeat with a gust.

But as he threw himself back, little Jane took heart of grace once more.

"Ray, dear," said she, "I don't think it's right for you to stay here alone in the cold. Won't you come down where it's warm? It's so much more cheerful by the fire."

"I don't want to be cheerful," said Ray.

Janet looked at the door, then summoned her forces, and, holding the high bedpost with both hands, said,—

"Ray, if God sent you any trouble, He never meant for you to take it so. You are repulsing Him every day. You are straightening yourself against Him. You are like a log on His hands. Can't you bend beneath it? Dear Ray, you need comfort, but you never will find it till you take up your life and your duties again, and come down among us."

"What duties have I?" said Ray, hoarsely, looking along his footless limb. "The sooner my life ends, oh, the better! I want no comfort!"

But little Jane had gone.

Christmas day dawned clear and keen; the sky was full of its bluest sparkle, and, wheresoever it mounted and stretched over snowy fields, seemed to hold nothing but gladness. Vivia had wrapped herself in her cloak, and walked two miles to an early church-service, so if by any accord of worship she might put her heart in tune with the universe. She had been at home a half-hour already, and sat in her old nook with some idle work between her fingers. A broad blaze rolled its rosy volumes up the chimney, and threw its reflections on the shining shelves and into the great tin-kitchen, that, planted firmly, held up to the heat the very bird that had moved so majestically over the spring meadow, and which Mrs. Vennard was at present basting with such assiduity, that, if ever the knife should penetrate the crisp depth of envelope, it would certainly find the inclosure unscathed by fire. Little Jane was stirring enormous raisins into some wonderful batter of a pudding,—for she remembered the time when somebody used to pick out all his plums and leave the rest, and she meant, that, so far as her skill and her resources would go, there should be no abatement of Christmas cheer to-day. And if, after all, everybody disdained the bounteous affair, why it could go to Tommy Low's mother, who would not by any means disdain it. Every now and then she turned an anxious ear for any movement in the cold distance,—but there was only silence.

Suddenly Vivia started. A door had swung to, a strange sharp sound echoed on the staircase, the kitchen-door opened and closed, and Ray set his back against it. He did not attempt to move, but stood there darkly surveying them. Vivia looked at him a second, then rose quickly, crossed the room, and kissed him. Immediately Mrs. Vennard made a commotion, while the other led him forward and placed him in her chair. Little Jane pushed aside the pudding hastily, and proceeded to mull some of her mock Sherry, that his heart might be warmed within him; and the cat came rubbing against his crutch, as if she would make friends with it and take it into the family. Mrs. Vennard resumed her basting; Vivia began talking to him about her work and about her walk, murmuring pleasantly in her clear, low tone,—Janet now and then putting in a word. Ray sat there, sipping his spicy draught, and looking out with an unacquainted air at the stir to which his coming had lent some gladness. But his face was yet overcast with the shadows of the grave. In vain Mrs. Vennard fussed and fidgeted, in vain little Jane uttered any of her brisk, but sorry jesting, in vain Vivia's gentle voice;—it all touched Ray's heart no other way than as the rain slips along a tombstone. Vivia folded her work and disappeared; she was going to light a fire in her parlor, where there had been none yet, and where by-and-by in the evening shadows she might play to Ray, and charm him, perhaps, to rest. Mrs. Vennard divined her purpose, and hurried after her to join in the task. Ray found himself alone in his corner; he shivered. In spite of all the weeks of solitude, a sudden chill seized him; he gathered up his crutches, and stalked on them to the table where little Jane was yet finding something to do. She brought him a chair, and for a minute or two he watched her; then he was only staring vacantly at his hands, as they lay before him on the table.

If Janet was a busy soul, she was just as certainly a busybody. She had the loving and innocent habit of making herself a member of every one's equation. Just now she ached inwardly, when looking at Ray, and it was impossible for her not to try and help him.

"Ray, dear," said she, leaving her work and standing before him, "I think you ought to smile now. Vivia has forgiven you. Take it as an earnest that God forgives you, too."

"I haven't sinned against God," said Ray. "I don't know who I sinned against. I killed my brother."

And his face fell forward on his hands and wet them with jets of scalding tears. Full of awe and misery, little Jane dropped upon her knees beside him, and, clasping his hands in hers, said to herself some silent prayer.

After that placid-ending Christmas, after that first prayer, those first tears, after Vivia's music at nightfall, Ray was another creature. He no longer shut himself up in his room, but was down and about with little Jane at peep of day. Indeed, he had now a horror of being alone, following Janet from morn till eve, like a shadow, and stooping forward, when the dark began to gather, with great, silent tears rolling over his face, unless she came and took the cricket at his foot, slipping her warm hand into his, and helping him to himself with the unspoken sympathy. But it was a horror which nothing wholly lulled to sleep at last but Vivia's singing. Every night, for an hour or more, Vivia wrought the music's spell about him, while he lay back in his chair, and little Jane retreated across the hearth, not daring to intrude on such a season. They were seldom purely sad things that she played: sometimes the melody murmured its cantabile like a summer brook into which moonbeams bent, flowing along the lowland, breaking only in sprays of tune, and seeming to paint in its bosom the sleeping shadows of the fair field-flowers; and if ever the gentle strain lost its way, and found itself wandering among the massive chords, the profound melancholy, the blind groping of any Fifth Symphony or piercing Stabat Mater, she answered it, singing Elijah's hymn of rest; and as she sang, there grew in her voice a strength, a sweetness, that satisfied the very soul. When the nine-o'clock bell rang in from the village through the winter night's crystal clearness, little Jane would lightly nudge her mother and steal away to bed; and in the ruddy twilight of the felling fire the two talked softly, talked,—but never of that dark thing lying most deeply in the heart of either. Perhaps, by-and-by, when the thrilling wound should be only a scar, if ever that time should come, the one would be able to speak, the other to hear.

Week after week, now, Ray began to occupy himself about the house more and more, resuming in succession odd little jobs that during all this time had remained unfinished as on the day he went. He seemed desirous of taking up the days exactly as he had left them, of bridging over this gap and chasm, of ignoring the fatal summer. Something so dreadful had fallen into his life that it could not assimilate itself with the tissues of daily existence. The work must be slow that would volatilize such a black body of horror till it leavened all the being into power and grace undreamed of before.

But little Jane did not philosophize upon what she was so glad to see; she hailed every sign of outside interest as a symptom of returning health, and gave him a thousand occasions. Yesterday there were baskets to braid, and to-day he must initiate her in the complications of a dozen difficult sailor's-knots that he knew, and to-morrow there would be woodchuck-traps to make and show her how to set. For Janet's chief vexation had overtaken her in the absence of fresh eggs for breakfast, an absence that would be enduring, unless the small game of the forest could be lured into her snares and parcelled among the apathetic hens. Many were the recipes and the consultations on the subject, till at last Ray wrote out for her, in black-letter, a notice to be pinned up in the sight of every delinquent: "Twelve eggs, or death!" Whether it were the frozen rabbit-meat flung among them the day before, or whether it were the timely warning, there is no one to tell; but the next morning twelve eggs lay in the various hiding-places, which Mrs. Vennard declared to be as good eggs as ever were laid, and custards and cookies renewed their reign. Here, suddenly, Ray remembered the purse in his haversack, containing all his uncounted pay. It was a weary while that he stayed alone in the cold, leaning over it as if he stared at the thirty pieces of silver, a faint sickness seized him, then hurriedly sweeping it up, with a red spot burning cruelly into either cheek, he brought it down, and emptied it in little Jane's lap, though he would rather have seen it ground to impalpable dust. But, after a moment's thought, the astonished recipient kept it for a use of her own. Finally, one night, Ray proposed to instruct Janet in some particular branch of his general ignorance; and after those firelight-recitations, little Jane forgot to move her seat away, and her hand was kept in his through all the hour of Vivia's slow enchantment.

So the cold weather wore away, and spring stole into the scene like a surprise, finding Vivia as the winter found her,—but Ray still undergoing volcanic changes, now passionless lulls and now rages and spasms of grief: gradually out of them all he gathered his strength about him.

It was once more a morning of early June, sunrise was blushing over the meadows, and the gossamers of hoar dew lay in spidery veils of woven light and melted under the rosy beams. From her window one heard Vivia singing, and the strain stole down like the breath of the heavy honeysuckles that trellised her pane:—

"No more for me the eager day
Breaks its bright prison-bars;
The sunshine Thou hast stripped away,
But bared the eternal stars.

"Though in the cloud the wild bird sings,
His song falls not for me,
Alone while rosy heaven rings,—
But, Lord, alone with Thee!"

One well could know, in listening to the liquid melody of those clear tones, that love and sorrow had transfused her life at last to woof and warp of innermost joy that death itself could neither tarnish nor obscure. In a few moments she came down and joined Ray, where he stood upon the door-stone, with one arm resting over the shoulder of little Jane, and watched with him the antics of a youth who postured before them. It was some old acquaintance of Ray's, returned from the war; and as if he would demonstrate how wonderfully martial exercise supples joint and sinew, he was leaping in the air, turning his heel where his toe should be, hanging his foot on his arm and throwing it over his shoulder in a necklace, skipping and prancing on the grass like a veritable saltinbanco. Ray looked grimly on and inspected the evolutions; then there was long process of question and answer and asseveration, and, when the youth departed, little Jane had announced with authority that Ray should throw away his crutch and stand on two feet of his own again.

"What a gay fellow he is!" said Ray, drawing a breath of relief. "They're all alike, dancing on graves. To be an old Téméraire decked out in signal-flags after thunderous work well done, and settling down, is one thing. But we,—to-day, when one would think every woman in the land should wear the sackcloth and ashes of mourning, we break into a splendor of apparel that defies the butterflies and boughs of the dying year."

"Two striking examples before you," said little Jane, with a laugh, as she looked at her old print and at Vivia's gray gown.

"I wasn't thinking of you. I saw the ladies in the village yesterday,—they were pied and parded."

"Children," said Mrs. Vennard from within, "I've taken up the coffee now. I sha'n't wait a minute longer. Vivia, I'll beat an egg into yours."

But the children had wandered down to the lake-shore, oblivious of her cry, and were standing on the rock watching their images glassed below and ever freshly shattered with rippling undulations. A wherry chained beside them Vivia rocked lightly with her foot.

"You and little Jane will set me down by-and-by?" she asked. "'T will be so much pleasanter than the coach."

"And, Vivia dear, you will go, then?" exclaimed little Jane, with tearful eyes. "You will certainly go?"

"Yes," said Vivia, looking out and far away, "I shall go to do that"—

"Which no one can ever do for you," said Ray, with a shudder.

"Which some woman will praise Heaven for."

"God bless you, Vivia!" cried little Jane.

"He has already blessed me," said Vivia, softly.

Janet nestled nearer to Ray's side, as they stood. There was a tremor of gladness through all the dew of her glance. Ray looked down at her for a moment, and his hard brow softened, in his eyes hung a light like the reflection of a star in a breaking wave.

"He has blessed me, too," said he. "Some day I shall be a man again. I have thrown away my crutch, Vivia,—for all my life I am going to have this little shoulder to lean upon."

And over his sombre face a smile crept and deepened, like the yellow ray, that, after a long, dark day of driving rain, suddenly gilds the tree-tops and brims the sky; and though, when it went, the gloom shut drearily down again, still it bore the promise of fair day to-morrow.

HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS

BY CHRISTOPHER CROWFIELD

I

THE RAVAGES OF A CARPET