Fidelia/Chapter 26
NOT even the Scriptures can claim that goodness and purity have power to alter human fate; indeed, the Bible says in plain words:
"All things come alike to all; there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not."
Yet people persuade themselves that, for the doing of good, a man or a woman may obtain special dispensation of super-human endurance and strength.
When David arrived at Itanaca, he realized with a shock, which was the more severe because of the time which had passed since his last visit; that he had been living in the delusion of a special dispensation in regard to his mother.
To his father's perceptions, to those of David's sisters and brothers and to the neighbors, nothing markedly unusual was apparent; and David found his mother going about her usual duties but he saw alterations in her which alarmed him.
His father admitted, "Your mother is not as well as I would like. I have had her see Dr. Brailford and he is giving her a good tonic." Brailford was the local physician.
Deborah said to David: "Mother is thinner; and she tires so easily now. I try to make her leave more to me; but she simply won't, David. You know mother." And Deborah, for all her habit of self-restraint, had to cry a little. She was very glad to have David in the house again; for David was the only brother near her age. The other brothers, Paul and John, were much younger. They belonged with Esther and Ruth as "the children."
David felt no inclination to tears, but was aroused by an insurgent emotion almost like anger. It was not against Deborah, and certainly it was not against his mother; it was not against his father, directly, but was against the manner of thinking and living which David once had described to Alice as his father's "game of forever pleasing God."
This game had been going on as long as David could remember and chiefly at the cost of his mother. As he had told Alice, David had never known his father to strive for things to indulge his mother and she had never striven for them herself; she always had been his father's faithful partner in his game of pleasing God, during the progress of which she had borne six children, nursed them, bathed them, made their clothes, taught them their first lessons, meanwhile cooking, washing dishes—and clothes—scrubbing, making beds, being wife and mother and maid-of-all work and, also, leader of the church auxiliaries and charitable societies and in the Sunday school.
Invariably in the little white parsonage beside the spired wooden church, she was the first up in the morning; rarely indeed was any one later to bed than she. David thought of her as sleeping intermittently for she had formed the habit, when she had many babies, of rousing at small stirrings. She had the knack of leaving the big, double bed, where she slept with her husband, without awakening him when she went her rounds to see that every child was covered and was safe and warm.
David telegraphed to Fidelia: "I have come to Itanaca and will stay here till to-morrow. Will wire later."
He determined to take into his own hands the matter of his mother's health so he called on Dr. Brailford with very unsatisfactory results, as the doctor seemed to observe nothing more definite than that Mrs. Herrick was "run down" and he hoped she would pick up soon.
David asked, "Rest would certainly help her, wouldn't it?"
The doctor shook his head. "Not if you mean a trip to California and nothing to do, son. Not for the type of woman your mother is. I know her; she'd just fret herself to death."
That night David lay awake in the room he used to share with his brother Paul; Paul had been put elsewhere to-night. It was not easy for his mother to arrange that David have a room to himself but she had done it and when his door opened, very quietly, and his mother came in, David understood that she had done it for a particular purpose.
He whispered to her, in order to make sure of rousing no one, and she came quietly to the bed. "I wanted you to be awake, David," she said.
He clasped his arm about her and felt with new alarm how thin she was under her nightdress and robe.
David said, "I've seen Brailford to-day, mother, and he's an old dodderer. You've got to come to Chicago with me to-morrow and see a specialist."
Then she told him, "David, I have. I went down to Peoria and I saw Dr. Winstrom there. He's as good a doctor as there is in the state, they say. He was very thorough with me, David; he saw me several times."
When David whispered, "What did he say?" she evaded and replied, "Your father doesn't know I went. I could go back and forth from Peoria in little more than an hour. He must not know I went, David. You see, my son, my son," she whispered to him steadily although she repeated some words, "Dr. Winstrom made some definite tests; he knows. He is sure and he has told me the truth. You see, there's nothing to be done for me."
"What? What?"
"No; there is nothing which any one can do."
David was on his knees beside her. She smoothed his hair. "My son, my strong son, I have told no one else, not even Deborah, who had to know when I went to Peoria. It has been my secret, David, with God."
With God! David rebelled. Where was God in this? He asked his mother, "What—what does the doctor call it?"
Her hand became quiet upon his head. "You'll go to the doctor, David?"
"The first thing in the morning."
"Let him tell you, then. I've another year, my son; perhaps not quite so long. They don't know exactly about that."
David choked and clung to her and his mother sank to her knees beside him. "Pray with me, David."
"What shall I pray?"
She said: "How do you pray now, my son?"
"Mother, I haven't prayed for years."
"Yes," she said, not rebuking him at all. "Yes, I supposed so. I've come to pray differently, David; I say our Lord's prayer and now four words, mostly, and they are from our Lord's prayer. 'Thy will be done,' I say. 'Thy will be done.'"
She whispered the prayer and he tried to repeat it with her but a mighty guilt filled him. He thought of his father and mother praying beside him when he was a baby and consecrating him to God, if God spared his life; and after God had spared him, he had cheated God. And who could cheat God, the Lord God to whom vengeance belongeth? For God, if he was God, must have done this thing to his mother and for no fault of hers but for David's.
What did God say of himself in his own commandment? "I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children."
But suppose there were no children; suppose your sin saw to that? Suppose, defying God, you lived after your desire but denying children. Then God struck your mother.
David heard his mother's voice repeating the beautiful words of the twenty-third psalm:
The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want;
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. . .
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me. . . .
A few moments later, she arose quietly and kissed David and left him.
Early in the morning he went to Peoria and saw the doctor who told him the entire truth. Winstrom said, "You are the eldest son, of whom she spoke to me?"
"What did she tell you about me?" David asked.
"If your father discovered that she had consulted me, or if any other of the family came, I was to reassure them as much as possible; but she said to tell you the entire truth."
David fought the truth, when it was told, and he tried to deny it; but the doctor took the time to show that there was no doubt of the condition.
David declared, "I'll send her away." But Winstrom, like Brailford, shook his head and said, "In a case like this, the most merciful course is to allow her to keep at her duties as long as she can and to let others learn only as they must."
At noon, David returned to Itanaca and he telegraphed Fidelia saying again that he would stay away for another night and that he would explain later; for he could put no adequate explanation in a telegram. He stayed, in fact, far into the following day and it was late in the afternoon when he took a train for Chicago.
He had spent most of his hours close to his mother and had occupied himself so completely with home affairs that he had seen few others than the family and had visited Mr. Fuller only for a brief, perfunctory call.
As he sat by the car window, watching the dusk settle over the bare, black October fields, he realized that he had boarded the ordinary day-coach and that thought of the parlor car, in which he had traveled to and from Itanaca with Fidelia, had never entered his mind. In contrast to his feeling when he started from Chicago, he was physically tired; he was without eagerness and appetite. When he thought of Fidelia, he thought of having to tell her the terrible news he bore; it so filled him, it so completely explained what he had done that he never reckoned what she might be believing in her almost complete lack of information about him. He forgot that when he left Fidelia, both of them had been feeling that he was, in a way, returning for a while to Alice; he forgot how Fidelia had urged him to stay longer where Alice was, if he wanted to, and he did not attach the two extra days of his absence to the day he had spent with Alice. Yet, as he reckoned the total time and realized that it was by far his longest separation from Fidelia, since their marriage, he wished he had written her once, at least; but he had not because each day he had expected to return to her that night.
"She'll be hurt," he realized. "But it won't last with her." The train began running into rain. The clear weather of the western edge of the state was changed to a downpour as the train approached the lake; squalls of water washed the window at David's elbow and the lightning crashed in great streaks from the sky.
David had not telegraphed to Fidelia the hour of his return for he did not want to meet her first in the railroad station and when he arrived in the middle of a thunderstorm, he decided not to try to telephone to her. He took a taxi at once for the hotel.
It was nine o'clock in the evening and the city streets of course were alight. Long, even rows of street lamps glowed behind the blur of the rain and the great blocks of office buildings rose with windows patterned here and there with light. Above them the lightning forked and thunder rumbled but the lightning and thunder seemed powerless here in the city, and buildings walled off the gale. Then there was a sudden, tremendous bolt and instantly the streets were dark; the patterns of the windows were gone and amid rumblings of tremendous thunder, the car carrying David skidded to the side and stopped.
Drivers switched on their bright headlights, and resumed their way but the buildings which David passed remained dark except where a ruddy flame burst above a roof; and between the crashes of thunder, there beat an alarm bell.
Gradually lights reappeared; when David reached the hotel, it was alight as usual. His wife was in, he learned, but she was not downstairs and he went at once to their rooms where he found the door closed but not locked and he opened it slowly.
"Fidelia," he called as he entered.
The light was burning in their living-room but she was not there. Their bed-room was dark except for the light through the door from the living room and by this he saw that she was rising from her bed. She was dressed; she merely had been lying upon the bed, without having opened the covers and he saw that she was wearing a white ratinée house dress which she often put on for the morning but never had worn after noon.
He noticed this simultaneously with being aware of the paleness of her face. Rarely, never indeed, had he seen her pale like this. He said, "Something's happened, Fidelia!"
For a second, she stared at him; she moved so as to make him turn more to the light; then she said: "Yes, he's alive, David!"
"What?"
"He's alive, I said, David."
"Who?"
"My husband."
"Who?"
"My husband. Sam—Sam Bolton. He's alive."
"What? Who? What?"
"Sam's alive, David. I told you he was dead. I thought he was dead. I had good reason to think so. But he's alive, David. He's alive and he's my husband."