Elsie Venner

O >> Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. >> Elsie Venner


So they walked over the crackling leaves in the garden, between the lines
of box breathing its fragrance of eternity;--for this is one of the odors
which carry us out of time into the abysses of the unbeginning past; if
we ever lived on another ball of stone than this, it must be that there
was box growing on it. So they walked, finding their way softly to each
other's sorrows and sympathies, each matching some counterpart to the
other's experience of life, and startled to see how the different, yet
parallel, lessons they had been taught by suffering had led them step by
step to the same serene acquiescence in the orderings of that Supreme
Wisdom which they both devoutly recognized.

Old Sophy was at the window and saw them walking up and down the
garden-alleys. She watched them as her grandfather the savage watched
the figures that moved among the trees when a hostile tribe was lurking
about his mountain.

"There'll be a weddin' in the ol house," she said, "before there's roses
on them bushes ag'in. But it won' be my poor Elsie's weddin', 'n' ol'
Sophy won' be there."

When Helen prayed in the silence of her soul that evening, it was not
that Elsie's life might be spared. She dared not ask that as a favor of
Heaven. What could life be to her but a perpetual anguish, and to those
about her but an ever-present terror? Might she but be so influenced by
divine grace, that what in her was most truly human, most purely
woman-like, should overcome the dark, cold, unmentionable instinct which
had pervaded her being like a subtile poison that was all she could ask,
and the rest she left to a higher wisdom and tenderer love than her own.




CHAPTER XXIX.

THE WHITE ASH.

When Helen returned to Elsie's bedside, it was with a new and still
deeper feeling of sympathy, such as the story told by Old Sophy might
well awaken. She understood, as never before, the singular fascination
and as singular repulsion which she had long felt in Elsie's presence.
It had not been without a great effort that she had forced herself to
become the almost constant attendant of the sick girl; and now she was
learning, but not for the first time, the blessed truth which so many
good women have found out for themselves, that the hardest duty bravely
performed soon becomes a habit, and tends in due time to transform itself
into a pleasure.

The old Doctor was beginning to look graver, in spite of himself. The
fever, if such it was, went gently forward, wasting the young girl's
powers of resistance from day to day; yet she showed no disposition to
take nourishment, and seemed literally to be living on air. It was
remarkable that with all this her look was almost natural, and her
features were hardly sharpened so as to suggest that her life was burning
away. He did not like this, nor various other unobtrusive signs of
danger which his practised eye detected. A very small matter might turn
the balance which held life and death poised against each other. He
surrounded her with precautions, that Nature might have every opportunity
of cunningly shifting the weights from the scale of death to the scale of
life, as she will often do if not rudely disturbed or interfered with.

Little tokens of good-will and kind remembrance were constantly coming to
her from the girls in the school and the good people in the village. Some
of the mansion-house people obtained rare flowers which they sent her,
and her table was covered with fruits which tempted her in vain. Several
of the school-girls wished to make her a basket of their own handiwork,
and, filling it with autumnal flowers, to send it as a joint offering.
Mr. Bernard found out their project accidentally, and, wishing to have
his share in it, brought home from one of his long walks some boughs full
of variously tinted leaves, such as were still clinging to the stricken
trees. With these he brought also some of the already fallen leaflets of
the white ash, remarkable for their rich olive-purple color, forming a
beautiful contrast with some of the lighter-hued leaves. It so happened
that this particular tree, the white ash, did not grow upon The Mountain,
and the leaflets were more welcome for their comparative rarity. So the
girls made their basket, and the floor of it they covered with the rich
olive-purple leaflets. Such late flowers as they could lay their hands
upon served to fill it, and with many kindly messages they sent it to
Miss Elsie Venner at the Dudley mansion-house.

Elsie was sitting up in her bed when it came, languid, but tranquil, and
Helen was by her, as usual, holding her hand, which was strangely cold,
Helen thought, for one who was said to have some kind of fever. The
school-girls' basket was brought in with its messages of love and hopes
for speedy recovery. Old Sophy was delighted to see that it pleased
Elsie, and laid it on the bed before her. Elsie began looking at the
flowers, and taking them from the basket, that she might see the leaves.
All at once she appeared to be agitated; she looked at the basket, then
around, as if there were some fearful presence about her which she was
searching for with her eager glances. She took out the flowers, one by
one, her breathing growing hurried, her eyes staring, her hands
trembling,--till, as she came near the bottom of the basket, she flung
out all the rest with a hasty movement, looked upon the olive-purple
leaflets as if paralyzed for a moment, shrunk up, as it were, into
herself in a curdling terror, dashed the basket from her, and fell back
senseless, with a faint cry which chilled the blood of the startled
listeners at her bedside.

"Take it away!--take it away!--quick!" said Old Sophy, as she hastened
to her mistress's pillow. "It 's the leaves of the tree that was always
death to her,--take it away! She can't live wi' it in the room!"

The poor old woman began chafing Elsie's hands, and Helen to try to rouse
her with hartshorn, while a third frightened attendant gathered up the
flowers and the basket and carried them out of the apartment, She came to
herself after a time, but exhausted and then wandering. In her delirium
she talked constantly as if she were in a cave, with such exactness of
circumstance that Helen could not doubt at all that she had some such
retreat among the rocks of The Mountain, probably fitted up in her own
fantastic way, where she sometimes hid herself from all human eyes, and
of the entrance to which she alone possessed the secret.

All this passed away, and left her, of course, weaker than before. But
this was not the only influence the unexplained paroxysm had left behind
it. From this time forward there was a change in her whole expression
and her manner. The shadows ceased flitting over her features, and the
old woman, who watched her from day to day and from hour to hour as a
mother watches her child, saw the likeness she bore to her mother coming
forth more and more, as the cold glitter died out of the diamond eyes,
and the stormy scowl disappeared from the dark brows and low forehead.

With all the kindness and indulgence her father had bestowed upon her,
Elsie had never felt that he loved her. The reader knows well enough
what fatal recollections and associations had frozen up the springs of
natural affection in his breast. There was nothing in the world he would
not do for Elsie. He had sacrificed his whole life to her. His very
seeming carelessness about restraining her was all calculated; he knew
that restraint would produce nothing but utter alienation. Just so far
as she allowed him, he shared her studies, her few pleasures, her
thoughts; but she was essentially solitary and uncommunicative. No
person, as was said long ago, could judge him, because his task was not
merely difficult, but simply impracticable to human powers. A nature
like Elsie's had necessarily to be studied by itself, and to be followed
in its laws where it could not be led.

Every day, at different hours, during the whole of his daughter's
illness, Dudley Venner had sat by her, doing all he could to soothe and
please her. Always the same thin film of some emotional non-conductor
between them; always that kind of habitual regard and family-interest,
mingled with the deepest pity on one side and a sort of respect on the
other, which never warmed into outward evidences of affection.

It was after this occasion, when she had been so profoundly agitated by a
seemingly insignificant cause, that her father and Old Sophy were
sitting, one at one side of her bed and one at the other. She had fallen
into a light slumber. As they were looking at her, the same thought came
into both their minds at the same moment. Old Sophy spoke for both, as
she said, in a low voice,

"It 's her mother's look,--it 's her mother's own face right over
again,--she never look' so before, the Lord's hand is on her! His will
be done!"

When Elsie woke and lifted her languid eyes upon her father's face, she
saw in it a tenderness, a depth of affection, such as she remembered at
rare moments of her childhood, when she had won him to her by some
unusual gleam of sunshine in her fitful temper.

"Elsie, dear," he said, "we were thinking how much your expression was
sometimes like that of your sweet mother. If you could but have seen
her, so as to remember her!"

The tender look and tone, the yearning of the daughter's heart for the
mother she had never seen, save only with the unfixed, undistinguishing
eyes of earliest infancy, perhaps the under-thought that she might soon
rejoin her in another state of being,--all came upon her with a sudden
overflow of feeling which broke through all the barriers between her
heart and her eyes, and Elsie wept. It seemed to her father as if the
malign influence--evil spirit it might almost be called--which had
pervaded her being, had at last been driven forth or exorcised, and that
these tears were at once the sign and the pledge of her redeemed nature.
But now she was to be soothed, and not excited. After her tears she
slept again, and the look her face wore was peaceful as never before.

Old Sophy met the Doctor at the door and told him all the circumstances
connected with the extraordinary attack from which Elsie had suffered.
It was the purple leaves, she said. She remembered that Dick once
brought home a branch of a tree with some of the same leaves on it, and
Elsie screamed and almost fainted then. She, Sophy, had asked her, after
she had got quiet, what it was in the leaves that made her feel so bad.
Elsie could n't tell her,--did n't like to speak about it,--shuddered
whenever Sophy mentioned it.

This did not sound so strangely to the old Doctor as it does to some who
listen to his narrative. He had known some curious examples of
antipathies, and remembered reading of others still more singular. He had
known those who could not bear the presence of a cat, and recollected the
story, often told, of a person's hiding one in a chest when one of these
sensitive individuals came into the room, so as not to disturb him; but
he presently began to sweat and turn pale, and cried out that there must
be a cat hid somewhere. He knew people who were poisoned by
strawberries, by honey, by different meats, many who could not endure
cheese,--some who could not bear the smell of roses. If he had known all
the stories in the old books, he would have found that some have swooned
and become as dead men at the smell of a rose,--that a stout soldier has
been known to turn and run at the sight or smell of rue,--that cassia and
even olive-oil have produced deadly faintings in certain.
individuals,--in short, that almost everything has seemed to be a poison
to somebody.

"Bring me that basket, Sophy," said the old Doctor, "if you can find it."

Sophy brought it to him,--for he had not yet entered Elsie's apartment.

"These purple leaves are from the white ash," he said. "You don't know
the notion that people commonly have about that tree, Sophy?"

"I know they say the Ugly Things never go where the white ash grows,"
Sophy answered. "Oh, Doctor dear, what I'm thinkin' of a'n't true, is
it?"

The Doctor smiled sadly, but did not answer. He went directly to Elsie's
room. Nobody would have known by his manner that he saw any special
change in his patient. He spoke with her as usual, made some slight
alteration in his prescriptions, and left the room with a kind, cheerful
look. He met her father on the stairs.

"Is it as I thought?" said Dudley Veneer.

"There is everything to fear," the Doctor said, "and not much, I am
afraid, to hope. Does not her face recall to you one that you remember,
as never before?"

"Yes," her father answered,--"oh, yes! What is the meaning of this
change which has come over her features, and her voice, her temper, her
whole being? Tell me, oh, tell me, what is it? Can it be that the curse
is passing away, and my daughter is to be restored to me,--such as her
mother would have had her,--such as her mother was?"

"Walk out with me into the garden," the Doctor said, "and I will tell you
all I know and all I think about this great mystery of Elsie's life."

They walked out together, and the Doctor began: "She has lived a double
being, as it were,--the consequence of the blight which fell upon her in
the dim period before consciousness. You can see what she might have
been but for this. You know that for these eighteen years her whole
existence has taken its character from that influence which we need not
name. But you will remember that few of the lower forms of life last as
human beings do; and thus it might have been hoped and trusted with some
show of reason, as I have always suspected you hoped and trusted, perhaps
more confidently than myself, that the lower nature which had become
engrafted on the higher would die out and leave the real woman's life she
inherited to outlive this accidental principle which had so poisoned her
childhood and youth. I believe it is so dying out; but I am
afraid,--yes, I must say it, I fear it has involved the centres of life
in its own decay. There is hardly any pulse at Elsie's wrist; no
stimulants seem to rouse her; and it looks as if life were slowly
retreating inwards, so that by-and-by she will sleep as those who lie
down in the cold and never wake."

Strange as it may seem, her father heard all this not without deep
sorrow, and such marks of it as his thoughtful and tranquil nature, long
schooled by suffering, claimed or permitted, but with a resignation
itself the measure of his past trials. Dear as his daughter might become
to him, all he dared to ask of Heaven was that she might be restored to
that truer self which lay beneath her false and adventitious being. If
he could once see that the icy lustre in her eyes had become a soft, calm
light,--that her soul was at peace with all about her and with Him;
above,--this crumb from the children's table was enough for him, as it
was for the Syro-Phoenician woman who asked that the dark spirit might go
out from her daughter.

There was little change the next day, until all at once she said in a
clear voice that she should like to see her master at the school, Mr.
Langdon. He came accordingly, and took the place of Helen at her
bedside. It seemed as if Elsie had forgotten the last scene with him.
Might it be that pride had come in, and she had sent for him only to show
how superior she had grown to the weakness which had betrayed her into
that extraordinary request, so contrary to the instincts and usages of
her sex? Or was it that the singular change which had come over her had
involved her passionate fancy for him and swept it away with her other
habits of thought and feeling? Or could it be that she felt that all
earthly interests were becoming of little account to her, and wished to
place herself right with one to whom she had displayed a wayward movement
of her unbalanced imagination? She welcomed Mr. Bernard as quietly as
she had received Helen Darley. He colored at the recollection of that
last scene, when he came into her presence; but she smiled with perfect
tranquillity. She did not speak to him of any apprehension; but he saw
that she looked upon herself as doomed. So friendly, yet so calm did she
seem through all their interview, that Mr. Bernard could only look back
upon her manifestation of feeling towards him on their walk from the
school as a vagary of a mind laboring under some unnatural excitement,
and wholly at variance with the true character of Elsie Venner as he saw
her before him in her subdued, yet singular beauty. He looked with almost
scientific closeness of observation into the diamond eyes; but that
peculiar light which he knew so well was not there. She was the same in
one sense as on that first day when he had seen her coiling and uncoiling
her golden chain; yet how different in every aspect which revealed her
state of mind and emotion! Something of tenderness there was, perhaps,
in her tone towards him; she would not have sent for him, had she not
felt more than an ordinary interest in him. But through the whole of his
visit she never lost her gracious self-possession. The Dudley race might
well be proud of the last of its daughters, as she lay dying, but
unconquered by the feeling of the present or the fear of the future.

As for Mr. Bernard, he found it very hard to look upon her, and listen to
her unmoved. There was nothing that reminded him of the stormy--browed,
almost savage girl he remembered in her fierce loveliness,--nothing of
all her singularities of air and of costume. Nothing? Yes, one thing.
Weak and suffering as she was, she had never parted with one particular
ornament, such as a sick person would naturally, as it might be supposed,
get rid of at once. The golden cord which she wore round her neck at the
great party was still there. A bracelet was lying by her pillow; she had
unclasped it from her wrist.

Before Mr. Bernard left her, she said,

"I shall never see you again. Some time or other, perhaps, you will
mention my name to one whom you love. Give her this from your scholar
and friend Elsie."

He took the bracelet, raised her hand to his lips, then turned his face
away; in that moment he was the weaker of the two.

"Good-bye," she said; "thank you for coming."

His voice died away in his throat, as he tried to answer her. She
followed him with her eyes as he passed from her sight through the door,
and when it closed after him sobbed tremulously once or twice, but
stilled herself, and met Helen, as she entered, with a composed
countenance.

"I have had a very pleasant visit from Mr. Langdon," Elsie said. "Sit by
me, Helen, awhile without speaking; I should like to sleep, if I
can,--and to dream."




CHAPTER XXX.

THE GOLDEN CORD IS LOOSED.

The Reverend Chauncy Fairweather, hearing that his parishioner's
daughter, Elsie, was very ill, could do nothing less than come to the
mansion-house and tender such consolations as he was master of. It was
rather remarkable that the old Doctor did not exactly approve of his
visit. He thought that company of every sort might be injurious in her
weak state. He was of opinion that Mr. Fairweather, though greatly
interested in religious matters, was not the most sympathetic person that
could be found; in fact, the old Doctor thought he was too much taken up
with his own interests for eternity to give himself quite 'so heartily to
the need of other people as some persons got up on a rather more generous
scale (our good neighbor Dr. Honeywood, for instance) could do. However,
all these things had better be arranged to suit her wants; if she would
like to talk with a clergyman, she had a great deal better see one as
often as she liked, and run the risk of the excitement, than have a
hidden wish for such a visit and perhaps find herself too weak to see him
by-and-by.

The old Doctor knew by sad experience that dreadful mistake against which
all medical practitioners should be warned. His experience may well be a
guide for others. Do not overlook the desire for spiritual advice and
consolation which patients sometimes feel, and, with the frightful
mauvaise honte peculiar to Protestantism, alone among all human beliefs,
are ashamed to tell. As a part of medical treatment, it is the
physician's business to detect the hidden longing for the food of the
soul, as much as for any form of bodily nourishment. Especially in the
higher walks of society, where this unutterably miserable false shame of
Protestantism acts in proportion to the general acuteness of the
cultivated sensibilities, let no unwillingness to suggest the sick
person's real need suffer him to languish between his want and his morbid
sensitiveness. What an infinite advantage the Mussulmans and the
Catholics have over many of our more exclusively spiritual sects in the
way they keep their religion always by them and never blush for it! And
besides this spiritual longing, we should never forget that

"On some fond breast the parting soul relies,"

and the minister of religion, in addition to the sympathetic nature which
we have a right to demand in him, has trained himself to the art of
entering into the feelings of others.

The reader must pardon this digression, which introduces the visit of the
Reverend Chauncy Fairweather to Elsie Veneer. It was mentioned to her
that he would like to call and see how she was, and she consented,--not
with much apparent interest, for she had reasons of her own for not
feeling any very deep conviction of his sympathy for persons in sorrow.
But he came, and worked the conversation round to religion, and confused
her with his hybrid notions, half made up of what he had been believing
and teaching all his life, and half of the new doctrines which he had
veneered upon the surface of his old belief. He got so far as to make a
prayer with her,--a cool, well-guarded prayer, which compromised his
faith as little as possible, and which, if devotion were a game played
against Providence, might have been considered a cautious and sagacious
move.

When he had gone, Elsie called Old Sophy to her.

"Sophy," she said, "don't let them send that cold hearted man to me any
more. If your old minister comes--to see you, I should like to hear him
talk. He looks as if he cared for everybody, and would care for me.
And, Sophy, if I should die one of these days, I should like to have that
old minister come and say whatever is to be said over me. It would
comfort Dudley more, I know, than to have that hard man here, when you're
in trouble, for some of you will be sorry when I'm gone,--won't you,
Sophy?"

The poor old black woman could not stand this question. The cold
minister had frozen Elsie until she felt as if nobody cared for her or
would regret her,--and her question had betrayed this momentary feeling.

"Don' talk so! don' talk so, darlin'!" she cried, passionately. "When you
go, Ol' Sophy'll go; 'n' where you go, Ol' Sophy'll go: 'n' we'll both go
t' th' place where th' Lord takes care of all his children, whether their
faces are white or black. Oh, darlin', darlin'! if th' Lord should let
me die firs', you shall fin' all ready for you when you come after me.
On'y don' go 'n' leave poor Ol' Sophy all 'lone in th' world!"

Helen came in at this moment and quieted the old woman with a look. Such
scenes were just what were most dangerous, in the state in which Elsie
was lying: but that is one of the ways in which an affectionate friend
sometimes unconsciously wears out the life which a hired nurse, thinking
of nothing but her regular duties and her wages, would have spared from
all emotional fatigue.

The change which had come over Elsie's disposition was itself the cause
of new excitements. How was it possible that her father could keep away
from her, now that she was coming back to the nature and the very look of
her mother, the bride of his youth? How was it possible to refuse her,
when she said to Old Sophy, that she should like to have her minister
come in and sit by her, even though his presence might perhaps prove a
new source of excitement?

But the Reverend Doctor did come and sit by her, and spoke such soothing
words to her, words of such peace and consolation, that from that hour
she was tranquil as never before. All true hearts are alike in the hour
of need; the Catholic has a reserved fund of faith for his
fellow-creature's trying moment, and the Calvinist reveals those springs
of human brotherhood and charity in his soul which are only covered over
by the iron tables inscribed with the harder dogmas of his creed. It was
enough that the Reverend Doctor knew all Elsie's history. He could not
judge her by any formula, like those which have been moulded by past ages
out of their ignorance. He did not talk with her as if she were an
outside sinner worse than himself. He found a bruised and languishing
soul, and bound up its wounds. A blessed office,--one which is confined
to no sect or creed, but which good men in all times, under various names
and with varying ministries, to suit the need of each age, of each race,
of each individual soul, have come forward to discharge for their
suffering fellow-creatures.