The Clever Woman of the Family

Rachel, but the more she had of both the more they hurt her. She tossed restlessly all night, and was depressed to the lowest ebb by day; but on the second day, ill as she evidently was, she insisted on seeing Captain Keith, declaring that she should never be better till she had made him understand her. Her nurses saw that she was right; and, besides, Mrs. Curtis’s pity was greatly touched by dear Alexander’s entreaties. So, as a desperate experiment, he was at last allowed to go into the dressing-room, where she was lying on the sofa. He begged to enter alone, only announced by a soft knock, to which she replied with a listless “Come in,” and did not look up till she suddenly became conscious of a footfall firmer though softer than those she was used to. She turned, and saw who it was who stood at a window opposite to her feet, drawing up the Venetian blind, from whose teasing divisions of glare and shade she had been hiding her eyes from the time she had come in, fretted by the low continuous tap of its laths upon the shutters. Her first involuntary exclamation was a sigh of relief.

“Oh, thank you. I did not know what it was that was such a nuisance.”

“This is too much glare. Let me turn your sofa a little way round from it.”

And as he did so, and she raised herself, he shook out her cushions, and substituted a cool chintz covered one for the hot crimson damask on which her head had been resting. “Thank you! How do you know so well?” she said with a long breath of satisfaction.

“By long trial,” he said, very quietly seating himself beside her couch, with a stillness of manner that strangely hushed all her throbbings; and the very pleasure of lying really still was such that she did not at once break it. The lull of these few moments was inexpressibly sweet, but the pang that had crossed her so many times in the last two days and nights could not but return. She moved restlessly, and he leant towards her with a soft-toned inquiry what it was she wanted.

“Don’t,” she said, raising herself. “No, don’t! I have thought more over what you said,” she continued, as if repeating the sentence she had conned over to herself. “You have been most generous, most noble; but⁠—but,” with an effort of memory, “it would be wrong in me to accept such⁠—oh! such a sacrifice; and when I tell you all, you will think it a duty to turn from me,” she added, pressing her hands to her temples. “And mind, you are not committed⁠—you are free.”

“Tell me,” he said, bending towards her.

“I know you cannot overlook it! My faith⁠—it is all confusion,” she said in a low awestruck voice. “I do believe⁠—I do wish to believe; but my grasp seems gone. I cannot rest or trust for thinking of the questions that have been raised! There,” she added in a strange interrogative tone.

“It is a cruel thing to represent doubt as the sign of intellect,” Alick said sadly; “but you will shake off the tormentors when the power of thinking and reasoning is come back.”

“Oh, if I could think so! The misery of darkness here⁠—there⁠—everywhere⁠—the old implicit reliance gone, and all observance seeming like hypocrisy and unreality. There is no thinking, no enduring the intolerable maze.”

“Do not try to think now. You cannot bear it. We will try to face what difficulties remain when you are stronger.”

She turned her eyes full on him. “You do not turn away! You know you are free.”

“Turn from the sincerity that I prize?”

“You don’t? I thought your views were exactly what would make you hate and loathe such bewilderment, and call it wilful;” there was something piteous in the way her eye sought his face.

“It was not wilful,” he said; “it came of honest truth-seeking. And, Rachel, I think the one thing is now gone that kept that honesty from finding its way.”

“Self-sufficiency!” she said with a groan; but with a sudden turn she exclaimed, “You don’t trust to my surrendering my judgment. I don’t think I am that kind of woman.”

“Nor I that kind of man,” he answered in his natural tone; then affectionately, “No, indeed I want you to aid mine.”

She lay back, wearied with the effort, and disinclined to break the stillness. There was a move at the door; Mrs. Curtis, in an agony of restless anxiety, could not help coming to see that the interview was doing no harm.

“Don’t go!” exclaimed Rachel, holding out her hand as he turned at the opening of the door. “Oh, mother!” and there was an evident sound of disappointment.

Mrs. Curtis was infinitely rejoiced to find her entrance thus inopportune. “I only wished just to be sure it was not too much,” she said.

“Oh, mother, it is the first peace I have known for weeks! Can’t you stay?” looking up to him, as her mother retreated to tell Grace that it was indeed all right.

This brought him to a footstool close beside her. “Thank you,” he murmured. “I was wondering just then if it would hurt you or agitate you to give me some little satisfaction in going on with this. I know you are too true not to have told me at once if your objections were more personal than those you have made; but, Rachel, it is true, as you say, that you have never consented!”

The tone of these words made Rachel raise herself, turn towards him, and hold out both her hands. “Oh,” she said, as he took them into his own, “it was⁠—it could be only that I cannot bear so much more than I deserve.”

“What! such an infliction?” in his own dry way.

“Such rest, such kindness, such generosity!”

“No, Rachel, there is something that makes it neither kindness nor generosity. You know what I mean.”

“And that is what overpowers me more than all,” she sighed, in