Part 30 (2/2)
”Don't!” protested Gerald, softly. ”Don't regard as wrong what was so natural. All who have the benefit of knowing you must thank the stars which permitted your beautiful love of life to survive the dreadfulness of which you have given me a glimpse.”
”The dreadfulness, Geraldino! I haven't told you anything yet of the dreadfulness. I haven't come to it. I haven't come to what makes her”--she nodded toward the portrait,--”look like that.”
”Then tell me!” he encouraged her.
”It isn't Jim. When I think of Jim, it only makes me mad. My heart is hard as stone toward him.” She clenched her jaws and looked, in fact, rather grim. ”That he's dead doesn't change it. I hope I forgive him as a Christian ought to who asks forgiveness for her own trespa.s.ses. I know I don't feel revengeful. There wasn't enough _to_ Jim for me to wish him punished in h.e.l.l. But if you think I have any sentiment because I used to love him, or that I was sorry I woke up from my fool dream when I once had seen it was a dream--Not a bit of it. There was a time, though, when I first began to suspect and understand, that makes me rather sick to think of even now. I was so far from home, you see. I hadn't a friend, and I wouldn't for worlds have written back to my old friends that I'd made a bad bargain--not while I wasn't dead sure. And I kept on hoping.
”At first we had a real good time. We lived in a miner's cottage, but that seemed sort of jolly. I'd been used to hard work all my life, so I didn't mind that, and I wanted him to have as nice a home as any man could on the same money. So I cleaned and contrived and baked and brewed and fixed up. I wanted him to be pleased with me and proud among the other men. But pretty soon I found I didn't care to make acquaintances, because I was ashamed of the way Jim did. He kept putting all his money into the mine, sending good money after bad, and let me keep house on nothing, and then was in a worse and worse temper because the mine didn't pan out and things weren't more comfortable at home. I began to wake up in the night and lie there in a cold sweat, clean scairt. I haven't told you that we were looking for an addition to the family.
That's one reason I was so scairt. But I shut my teeth, and said I to myself, 'This baby's going to have a chance if his mother can give it to him by not getting excited or letting things prey on her mind.' So I kept a hold on myself and didn't let anything count except guarding that baby. I seemed to care more about it than all the rest of the world put together. Oh, I can't begin to tell you how much more than for all the rest of the world put together. I don't know that a man would understand.”
”Yes, he would; of course he would,” spoke Gerald, gently reverent, yet a little impatient; then he qualified his a.s.sertion: ”He could imagine, I mean to say, how you would have felt that way.”
”Well, that matter was going to be put safely through, no matter what.
The first mistake I made was not making friends with my women neighbors, so that everybody in Elsinore supposed that Jim's wife was the same stripe as he,--or that's what I thought they supposed,--and when I needed friends I couldn't think of any to turn to except those at home.
The other mistake I made was not to write them at home and tell them the truth and then wait for them to send me money to come. But I guess my mind stopped working when the shock came.”
Aurora appeared to brace herself, while decently considering how to minimize to her audience the brutality of her next revelation.
”Jim cleared out one night while I was asleep, taking every cent we'd got and every last thing he could hope to turn into a cent,” she said, hardening her voice and lips. Gerald was given a moment in which to visualize the situation, before she went on: ”I guess, as I said before, that I wasn't in my right mind for a spell; all I could think of was getting home to my own folks, and I was going to do it somehow, though I hadn't a cent. I hadn't even my wedding-ring. I'd put it off because my finger had grown fatter, and he'd taken even that to go and try his luck somewhere else.--What do you think of it?” she mechanically added.
She was pale, remembering these things. Gerald drew in a long, unsteady breath, oppressed.
”I was going to get home somehow,” Aurora repeated, ”and I wasn't going to waste time waiting for anything. And how was I going to do it? I don't suppose I really thought; I followed instinct like an animal. I hid in a freight-car going East--”
A definite difficulty here stopped Aurora. While she felt for words in which to clothe what followed, the images in her mind made her eyes, which were not seeing the things actually before them, more descriptive of the anguish of remembered scenes than her words were likely to be.
”I'm going to skip all that, Gerald.” With a gesture, she suddenly rolled up a part of her story and threw it aside. ”But when I came to see and understand rightly again, weeks after, in a hospital at Denver, I cried, oh! how I cried, and didn't care what became of me. Because I'd lost him; they hadn't succeeded in saving him. He had lived, mind you,”
she emphasized with pride--”he had lived a little while, he was all right, perfect in every way--a son.”
His due of tears was not withheld from the wee frustrated G.o.d. Aurora gave up talking, so as to have her cry in quietness.
Gerald, holding back a sound of distress, twisted on his chair, not daring to recall himself to Aurora's notice either by speaking or touching her.
”I'm plain sorry for myself,” she explained her tears while trying to stop them. ”You can't be sorry, for their own sakes, for the little children who go back to G.o.d without knowing anything of this life's troubles. It's for myself I'm sorry. I never can bring up those times without the _feeling_ of them coming over me again, and then, as I tell you, I'm sorry for that poor fool in her empty house, and then in the thundering freight-car, and then in the hospital. I see her outside of me just as plain as I would another person. Then, too”--she dried her eyes as if this time for good--”I feel a burning here”--she touched her breast--”like anger. Angry. I feel angry at being robbed, in a way I never seem to get over. To think I might have had him all my life, like millions of other women, and I never even saw him! And he was as real to me all those months before!... I don't see how I could have loved him more than I did. I'm hungry for him sometimes, just as I might be for food. And then I'm angry and rebellious. But I couldn't tell you against who. It isn't G.o.d, certainly. He's our best friend, all we've got to rely on. And He's been mighty good to me. There in Denver, when I hadn't a friend or a penny, He raised up friends for me and gave me the most wonderful luck.
”I stayed right there in Denver till less than a year ago. I guess you've heard me speak of the Judge. The doctor in the hospital where they carried me was his son; that's how it all came about--friends, good luck, money, everything. When I say I found friends, let me mention that I found enemies, too, the meanest, the bitterest! I--but there”--she interrupted herself as, on the very verge of further confidences, a change of mind was effected in her by sudden weariness or by a deterrent thought, or both--”I guess I've talked enough about myself for one evening. I didn't have a soft time of it there in Denver,” she summed up the remainder of her story, ”but I'd got back to being my old self.
You'd never have known what I'd been through. I was just about as you've known me here. Funny, isn't it,”--Aurora seemed almost ashamed, apologetic,--”how the disposition you're born with hangs on?”
”Golden disposition,” Gerald commented soothingly. Timid about looking directly at her just yet, he looked instead at the portrait, whereon lay the shadow of the events just related.
After a little period of thought in silence Aurora said, with the shamefaced air she took when venturing to talk of high things:
”I heard a sermon once on the text, 'Mary kept all these things in her heart.' The minister said that it wasn't only Mary who did this, but ordinary women, so often. And I know from myself how true it is. You see a woman all dressed up at a party, laughing with the others, dancing perhaps, and she'll be saying inside of herself, 'If baby had lived, he'd have been three years old.' Or thirteen, or thirty. I've no doubt it goes on as long as she lives. And she can see him before her just as plain, as he would have been.... My baby would have been five last October.”
Gerald remembered how sweet he had always thought it of her to wish to stop and fondle little children, often wee beggars, stuffing little grimy fists with pennies, not avoiding to touch soiled little cheeks with her clean gloves. He had attributed this propensity to a simple womanly talent for motherliness.
”I've got this to be thankful for,” she came out again from silence, farther down along the line of her meditations, ”that he did live for a few hours. I've got a son, just as much as if he'd grown to be a man.”
<script>