Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories by Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen (the reading list TXT) 📕

always be seeking in vain."

I gave him my hand silently across the table; he shook it heartily, and we parted.

It was about a month after this occurrence that I happened to be sitting on one of the benches near the entrance to Central Park. That restless spring feeling which always attacks me somewhat prematurely with the early May sunshine, had beguiled me into taking a holiday, and with a book, which had been sent me for review, lying open upon my knees, I was watching the occupants of the baby carriages which were being wheeled up and down on the pavement in front of me. Presently I discovered Storm's nurse seated on a bench near by in eager converse with a male personage of her own nationality. The baby, who was safely strapped in the carriage at the roadside, was pleasantly occupied in venting her destructive instincts upon a linen edition of "Mother Goose." As I arose to get a nearer view of the child, I saw a slender, simply dressed lady, with a beautiful but careworn face, evidently approaching with the same intention. At the sight of me she suddenly paused; a look of recognition seemed to be vaguely struggling in her features,--she turned around, and walked rapidly away. The thought immediately flashed through me that it was the same face I had seen under the gas-lamp on the evening when the child was found. Moreover, the type, although not glaringly Norse, corresponded in its general outline to Storm's description. Fearing to excite her suspicion, I forced my face into the most neutral expression, stooped down to converse with the baby, and then sauntered off with a leisurely air toward "Ward's Indian Hunter." I had no doubt that if the lady were the child's mother, she would soon reappear; and I need not add that my expectations proved correct. After having waited some fifteen minutes, I saw her returning with swift, wary steps and watchful eyes, like some lithe wild thing that scents danger in the air. As she came up to the nurse, she dropped down into the seat with a fine affectation of weariness, and began to chat with an attempt at indifference which was truly pathetic. Her eyes seemed all the while to be devouring the child with a wild, hungry tenderness. Suddenly she pounced upon it, hugged it tightly in her arms, and quite forgetting her _role_, strove no more to smother her sobs. The nurse was greatly alarmed; I heard her expostulating, but could not distinguish the words. The child cried. Suddenly the lady rose, explained briefly, as I afterward heard, that she had herself lately lost a child, and hurried away. At a safe distance I followed her, and succeeded in tracking her nearly a mile down Broadway, where she vanished into what appeared to be a genteel dressmaking establishment. By the aid of a friend of mine, a dealer in furnishing goods, whom I thought it prudent to take into my confidence, I ascertained that she called herself Mrs. Helm (an ineffectual disguise of the Norwegian Hjelm), that she was a widow of quiet demeanor and most exemplary habits, and that she had worked as a seamstress in the establishment during the past four months. My friend elicited these important facts under the pretence of wishing to employ her himself in the shirtmaking department of his own business.

Having through the same agency obtained the street and number of her boarding-place, I visited her landlady, who dispelled my last doubts, and moreover, informed me (perhaps under the impression that I was a possible suitor) that Mrs. Helm was as fine a lady as ever trod God's earth, and a fit wife for any man. The same evening I conveyed to Storm the result of my investigations.

He sat listening to me with a grave intensity of expression, which at first I hardly knew how to interpret. Now and then I saw his lips quivering, and as I described the little scene with the child in the park, he rose abruptly and began to walk up and down on the floor. As I had finished, he again dropped down into the chair, raised his eyes devoutly to the ceiling, and murmured:

"Thank God!"

Thus he sat for a long while, sometimes moving his lips inaudibly, and seemingly unconscious of my presence. Then suddenly he sprang up and seized his hat and cane.

"It was number 532?" he said, laying hold of the door-knob.

"Yes," I answered, "but you surely do not intend to see her to-night."

"Yes, I do."

"But it is after nine o'clock, and she may--"

But he was already half way down the stairs.

Through a dense, drizzling rain which made the gas-lights across the street look like moons set in misty aureoles, Storm hastened on until he reached the unaristocratic locality of Emily's dwelling. He rang the door-bell, and after some slight expostulation with the servant was permitted to enter. Groping his way through a long, dimly-lit hall, he stumbled upon a staircase, which he mounted, and paused at the door which had been pointed out to him. A slender ray of light stole out through the key-hole, piercing the darkness without dispelling it. Storm hesitated long at the door before making up his mind to knock; a strange quivering agitation had come upon him, as if he were about to do something wrong. All sorts of wild imaginings rushed in upon him, and in his effort to rid himself of them he made an unconscious gesture, and seized hold of the door-knob. A hasty fluttering motion was heard from within, and presently the door was opened. A fair and slender lady with a sweet pale face stood before him; in one hand she held a needle, and in the other a bright-colored garment which resembled a baby's jacket. He felt rather than saw that he was in Emily's presence. His head and his heart seemed equally turbulent. A hundred memories from the buried past rose dimly into sight, and he could not chase them away. It was so difficult, too, to identify this grave and worn, though still young face, with that soft, dimpled, kitten-like Emily, who had conquered his youth and made his life hers. Ah! poor little dimpled Emily; yes, he feared she would never return to him. And he sighed at the thought that she had probably lost now all that charming naughtiness which he had once spent so much time in disapproving of. He was suddenly roused from these reflections by a vague, half-whispered cry; Emily had fled to the other end of the room, thrown herself on the bed, and pressed her face hard down among the pillows. It was an act which immediately recalled the Emily of former days, a childish, and still natural motion like that of some shy and foolish animal which believes itself safe when its head is hidden. Storm closed the door, walked up to the bed, and seated himself on a hard, wooden chair.

"Emily," he said at last.

She raised herself abruptly on her arms, and gazed at him over her shoulder with large, tearless, frightened eyes.

"Edmund," she whispered doubtfully. "Edmund."

"Yes, Emily," he answered in a soothing voice, as one speaks to a frightened child. "I have come to see you and to speak with you."

"You have come to see me, Edmund," she repeated mechanically. Then, as if the situation were gradually dawning upon her, "You have come to see _me_."

His _role_ had appeared so easy as he had hastily sketched it on the way,--gratitude on her part, forgiveness on his, and then a speedy reconciliation. But it was the exquisite delicacy of Storm's nature which made him shrink from appearing in any way to condescend, to patronize, to forgive, where perhaps he needed rather to be forgiven. A strange awkwardness had come over him. He felt himself suddenly to be beyond his depth. How unpardonably blunt and masculinely obtuse he had been in dealing with this beautiful and tender thing, which God had once, for a short time, intrusted to his keeping! How cruel and wooden that moral code of his by which he had relentlessly judged her, and often found her wanting! What an effort it must have cost her finer-grained organism to assimilate his crude youthful maxims, what suffering to her tiny feet to be plodding wearily in his footsteps over the thorny moral wastes which he had laid behind him! All this came to him, as by revelation, as he sat gazing into Emily's face, which looked very pathetic just then, with its vague bewilderment and its child-like surrender of any attempt to explain what there was puzzling in the situation. Storm was deeply touched. He would fain have spoken to her out of the fulness of his heart; but here again that awkward morality of his restrained him. There were, unfortunately, some disagreeable questions to be asked first.

Storm stared for a while with a pondering look at the floor; then he carefully knocked a speck of dust from the sleeve of his coat.

"Emily," he said at last, solemnly. "Is your husband still alive?"

It was the bluntest way he could possibly have put it, and he bit his lip angrily at the thought of his awkwardness.

"My husband," answered Emily, suddenly recovering her usual flute-like voice (and it vibrated through him like an electric shock)--"is he alive? No, he is dead--was killed in the Danish war."

"And were you very happy with him, Emily? Was he very good to you?"

It was a brutish question to ask, and his ears burned uncomfortably; but there was no help for it.

"I was not happy," answered she simply, and with an unthinking directness, as if the answer were nothing but his due; "because I was not good to him. I did not love him, and I never would have married him if mother had not died. But then, there was no one left who cared for me."

A blessed sense of rest stole over him; he lifted his grave eyes to hers, took her listless hand and held it close in his. She did not withdraw it, nor did she return his pressure.

"Emily, my darling," he said, while his voice shook with repressed feeling (the old affectionate names rose as of themselves to his lips, and it seemed an inconceivable joy to speak them once more); "you must have suffered much."

"I think I have deserved it, Edmund," she answered with a little pout and a little quiver of her upper lip. "After all, the worst was that I had to lose my baby. But you are very good to her, Edmund, are you not?"

Her eyes now filled with tears, and they began to fall slowly, one by one, down over her cheeks.

"Yes, darling," he broke forth,--the impulse of tenderness now overmastering all other thoughts. "And I will be good to you also, Emily, if you will only let me."

He had risen and drawn her lithe, unresisting form to his bosom. She wept silently, a little convulsive sob now and then breaking the stillness.

"You will not leave me again, Edmund, will you?" she queried, with a sweet, distressed look, as if the very thought of being once more alone made her shudder.

"No, Emily dear, I will never leave you."

"Can you believe me, Edmund?" she began suddenly, after a long pause. "I have always been true to you."

He clasped her face between his palms, drew it back to gaze at it, and then kissed her tenderly.

"God bless you, darling!" he whispered, folding her closely in his arms, as if he feared