XIV.—THE LOST BABY
... Even I already seem to share
In God's love: what does New Year's hymn declare?
••••
If now, as formerly he trod
Paradise, his presence fills
Our earth, each only as God wills
Can work. ...
BUT isn't there,” the younger and sweeter-faced of the two women was arguing, “isn't there something about 'Suffer little children'”
“My dear Clarice,” struck in the older woman, in an inflexible, cheerful voice, “some one has said somewhere that you can find justification in the Bible for almost anything if you look hard enough for it!”
“And, in any case, that is hardly the point,” said the man who was talking to them.
He was a clergyman—a very young, hard-faced clergyman, albeit not an ill-looking one—and he took his own virtues and the world's sins very seriously, indeed. At present, as he sat between the two ladies in front of the roaring logs of the hotel fire, he had the air of a young prophet or oracle, expounding Truths with a capital T.
“My dear Miss Heyward,” he proceeded impressively, “you cannot get away from certain inspired words,” He began to quote sonorously, as if reading from the pulpit:
- “Forasmuch as all men are conceived and born in sin; and our Savior Christ saith, None can enter into the Kingdom of God, except he be regenerate and born anew of Water and of the Holy Ghost”
He paused with a look as triumphant as he considered suitable to his cloth.
“You can't get away from that, Miss Heyward! Nor from the passage following, which asks God to look upon the child to be baptized, 'that he, being delivered from thy wrath, may be received into the ark of Christ's Church,' Mark you, Miss Heyward— 'delivered from thy wrath!' That admits of no misinterpretation!”
Miss Heyward looked vaguely unhappy, but she said no more, for it frightened her to try to argue. She was a gentle soul without convictions of any sort.
“Oh, every one knows, Mr. Arden,” said Mrs. Ray comfortably, “that an unbaptized baby is a lost baby!”
Philippa Carpenter rose in disgust, and moved out of earshot. Stupid, narrow, horrid people! To this scornful thought was added the question: Why, oh, why, had she ever come there?
“Echo answers 'Why?'” she said to herself, half humorously, half grimly.
But she knew why perfectly well.
Pippa, the eternally young, the eternally enthusiastic, had of late lost her interest in life! She had felt suddenly jaded and old, at the very beginning of the New York winter. The passing show had seemed made only of shadows, and the cakes and ale of the good world had been as dust and ashes between her lips. At first the apathy had brought its own palliative; she had not even noticed that she was apathetic. But all at once, with a chill shock, the thing had come home to her.
“I am—old!” Pippa had gasped to her mirror.
The mirror had shaken its head in smiling negative, showing her, indeed, the same exquisite white-rose skin and wine-red hair, the same delicately wistful lips and purple-gray eyes as of other days. But a shadow had come, and stood behind Pippa's chair, and grinned at her in the glass, and she had risen, shuddering.
“I am not old yet,” she had thought, “but I shall be soon, if—if I go on feeling as I do!”
She had sent for the motor, and had gone to see her doctor—not a fashionable physician, but a calm, wise little French savant, who had a knack of treating peoples' hearts and souls as well as their bodies. He had smiled when Mrs. Carpenter, looking particularly lovely in violet velvet and white fox, had explained her case.
“Now, how easy it would be,” he had remarked whimsically, “to exclaim: 'You old, madame? You are the incarnation of youth, of beauty, of' And it would be true!” The motion of his fine silver head had been barely an inclination. “And yet—and yet—I know well what you mean! I, who have been striving to learn the art of healing for forty years, know very well what you mean, madame. La vieillesse de l'ame—the old age of the soul! Ah, yes! It has not come to you yet, madame, but—it might come.”
He had pondered a moment. A bar of December sunlight had struck across his desk, and illumined the lines that the years had drawn upon his handsome, old face. Very kindly lines they were, and now they had suddenly deepened to a smile.
“Up in the north of New England,” he had said, “in what you call the—camping territory?—yes!—up there is a little inn that keeps open all the year round. In midwinter there are but a few people there, but it remains, I believe, quite comfortable. It is in the heart of the pine forests, and there is a lake; that will be all ice by now, I imagine. You can know the winds there, madame, and smell the true scent of the snow. I have sent many there, sick in mind or body, for it is close—as close as is practicable for civilized folk in winter—to the heart of nature. Go there, madame. Leave behind you your—ravishing frocks”—again the gentle, almost imperceptible movement of the head—“and leave, too, your delightful mondaine life and atmosphere, and make a pilgrimage to the pine forests and the frozen lake. Unless,” he had added, more doubtfully, “you object to leaving town just now? It is, to be sure, almost Christmas time.”
Mrs. Carpenter had shivered.
“Christmas time!” she had repeated, with an edge in her voice. “What have I to do with Christmas time? Christmas time is for stockings—and trees—and”
She had caught her breath and stopped.
The old doctor had not looked at her. He had understood altogether too well.
“Bien entendu,” he had said cheerfully, “you will go, then? Talk to the winds, madame, and see if they do not tell you some secrets that are worth while—some secrets, for instance, about”—he had smiled—“eternal youth!”
Philippa had risen, drawing her white furs about her.
“I will go to-morrow,” she had said.
The French doctor had been right. It would be hard to imagine a civilized dwelling for mankind situated closer to primitive nature's heart. It was miles from any railroad. Supplies came up the lake twice a week—by steamboat when the water was “open,” by sledge when the ice had locked it. Here, in the shadow of a dark and lowering mountain wall, gloomed the sighing pine forests. And here, among those most human and wistful of trees, was the Wood Rest, for so the little inn was felicitously named.
Only a few wayfarers “rested” here now, and they were obviously—or so it seemed to Pippa—those whom the world had flung or pushed aside. Even Mrs. Ray, the acidulated churchwoman, was in some obscure way pathetic in her isolation and exile. One wondered if she had children or relatives who were thanking Heaven to be rid of her at Christmas.
Clarice Heyward was a frightened-looking, young old maid, recovering from “excessive school-teaching.” Pippa rather liked her, and was decidedly sorry for her, but Miss Heyward had that curiously cautious flair for things outside her pale which is almost always found in the truly virtuous. She sensed in Mrs. Carpenter something that, if not precisely lawless or improper, was at least unconventional—elastic, convenient, meaningless word—and drew her shabby skirts aside accordingly.
There were perhaps half a dozen other inmates of Wood Rest—a consumptive musician, a well-known actress recuperating, a gouty broker who would not go outdoors at all, but sat all day cursing deeply over the big fire in the oak-raftered hall, and the Reverend Clarence Arden, who was understood to be somewhat broken in health, and, further, to be finishing a work of theological import, for which the quiet and solitude of the pine woods were essential. With none of these did Pippa Carpenter have anything in common—even the recuperating actress looked ill-humored and dyspeptic—and so, mindful of the old doctor's advice, she spent the greater part of her time wandering along the shore of the chill, gray lake, or exploring the sighing woods that pressed so close about the inn.
This afternoon, turning in revolt from that complacent discussion of the Baptism of Infants, she fled, as usual, not to her room, but to the great winter-filled out-of-doors, that the clean air might wash that overheard bigotry from her brain. She thought of the clergyman with a shudder of especial disgust.
“If the Church is founded upon a rock—that's the rock!” she thought, frowning at the memory of the granite-like good looks of the young ecclesiastic.
The next moment, she was outside the inn, buffeted by the December wind, and able to forget her mood of indignation. She went down to the very edge of the lake, and stood there in the waning light for many minutes.
It seemed as if she saw for the first time fully what the doctor had meant. Here before her lay land and water, with the mask of death upon it—since, in nature, winter must ever symbolize death. Yet, even across that still wilderness of rough, gray ice, even from these wailing pines, that crowded like mourners about the house, came the voice and the breath of Life itself. Death, then, could not be real; old age must be an evil dream. For nature, who never lies, either in fact or in metaphor, proclaimed the fresh vigor of youth and vitality in the very teeth of frost and melancholy. The rushing wind blew straight to Pippa's heart. Yes, it was youth she felt, youth and the joy of living and doing once more, and an uplift of something more than her heart alone.
It came to her suddenly—as she watched the gray twilight deepen, and drank the sharp, snow-flavored gale, which was rising with every minute—that it was Christmas Eve.
For a moment the terrible loneliness of that thought struck her through and through like an icy blade. Then she flung up her head and faced it along with the wind. There had been other Christmas Eves worse than this; here, at least, she was alone.
Voices near at hand, heard intermittently above the rush of the air, came to her ears:
“Seems a pity—Christmas Eve an' all!”
“Poor soul! I heard say she couldn't last long, an' mebbe the best thing, too.”
“But, what'll become o' the baby?”
Now, there were a few words that were absolutely, definitely certain to catch Pippa Carpenter's interest at any or all times; one of them was “baby.” Like many childless women, she was a born mother, and yearned over every pink scrap of humanity she saw.
Turning quickly, she caught sight of two of the inn guides. She knew both by sight.
“Who is ill?” she asked, without preamble.
“Woman back at Miller's Camp, ma'am,” said the older of the two men. “Used to come up here with her family an' camp, they say, but left years ago. I don't remember her myself. She come up here a while back and rented that drafty old log cabin.”
“An' she's got a baby, only three or four months old,” put in the other warmly. “She's got a cough, an' I guess she's real sick, but the women hereabouts, they won't do nothin'. Seems she ran away, or somethin'. But it's a darned shame—that's what I say—lettin' a sick woman alone weather like this—an' it Christmas Eve an' all!” .
He was young and a sentimentalist.
“Where is Miller's Camp?” Pippa asked abruptly
It took her only about ten minutes to reach it. There were various cabins and bungalows dotted about among the pines—summer camps that would be pleasant enough from April to October, but bitterly uncomfortable during December weather. Of these, Miller's Camp was the least habitable, and the farthest from the inn and the lake. At last she came to it—a lonely little cabin swept by the winds that roared down an old lumber trail close at hand.
Pippa went in, and closed the door.
{[dhr]} The Reverend Clarence Arden, discussing Chinese politics with the gouty broker in the half hour preceding dinner, was startled by a singularly sweet and imperative voice speaking his name. He was further disconcerted by the sight of the owner of the voice—an unusually beautiful person, in coat and cap of sealskin. The warm tones of the fur melted into a ripple of deep red hair. Even the frosty air outside had been barely able to send a fleck of color into the white cheeks. The purple-gray eyes burned at him; in some way, guiltless as he knew himself to be in all ways, they made him feel vaguely afraid.
“Mr. Arden,” she said brusquely, but not discourteously, “will you please come with me at once?”
Like one mesmerized, Arden rose and followed her.
“Get your hat and coat,” she told him, and he obeyed like a child.
“Now come!” she said.
They went out into the chilly uproar of the winter dusk. The blast was tearing in from the north across the frozen lake; the pines were screaming under the lash of it. It was almost impossible to catch one's breath at first, and Arden offered his companion his arm. She shook her head. As they reached the lee of a wing of the inn, they paused for a moment, and Pippa spoke:
“I am taking you to a sick woman, Mr. Arden—one whom I believe you can help. I suppose that is enough for a clergyman?”
She was glad that he said at once, and sincerely:
“Quite enough. You are sure you will not take my arm? The wind is very severe.”
“I think I can get along, thanks.”
They went forward into the darkness of the pines, she leading the way. Sometimes she staggered from the gale and the rough going, but she pressed on unrestingly.
Short as the distance was, it seemed a long time before they found themselves at that desolate door, and Pippa said:
“It is here.”
In a moment they were inside. Such a sad room as it was! The fire was dying on the hearth; the wind shrieked outside. From a dim corner came the low wail of a baby.
Pippa flung off coat and cap, and went to quiet the baby. As she did so, she flung over her shoulder a careless command to “get the things out of the coat pockets.” Rather dazed, Arden lifted the fur garment; even the wind had not been able to utterly destroy the faint, elusive perfume that clung to it. From one pocket he extracted a small screw-top jar, from the other a pint thermos bottle.
Holding a small, whimpering bundle against her breast, Philippa raised her eyes to the young man's face.
“Mr. Arden,” she said, in a low voice, “in that room—there—with the door almost closed—is the sick woman I told you of. I don't know what is the matter with her, but there is no doctor within call here, and anyway I believe that she is more ill in mind than in body. Did I say mind? I mean—heart. Did you ever hear of—Alice Clement?”
The clergyman started.
“I was engaged to her,” he said, in a bewildered way. “But that was—five years ago.”
“You did not marry her because her people were—beneath you—isn't that true? Wait! I know, because she told me everything. You met her here, the year before you finally took orders, and fell in love, but because you were thinking of your career, you had not the courage or the manhood to—make good. She loved you, but when she found how little she counted in your life, she rebelled. In a fit of pique, she ran away with another man. It was rather a scandal, in a small way. Is all that true?”
He drew a long breath.
“It is—yes; it is all true.”
Pippa's voice softened a little.
“Did you know,” she said, “that every year at this time, the season when you had first met, she has come back here simply to renew her memory of you?”
He bowed his head
“No,” he said, “I did not know. But—I this year have done the same. That is really why I am here. Memory was too strong for me.”
“You!” Pippa exclaimed incredulously.
The hard shell of the man was not yet broken, but it seemed to her that she could see the possibilities, as it were, of coming, hopeful cracks.
“I—I have hardly allowed myself to think why I came back,” Arden hastened to explain, though still in a low voice. “I made excuses to myself—and always had good reasons—my theological work is”
Something of his wonted self-importance returned fleetingly to his tone.
“Yes,” broke in Philippa dryly. “I know. I've heard of it. You have played your part very well, Mr. Arden. No one could possibly suspect you of a romance, even in retrospect!”
“It is not precisely—romance” said the clergyman, as if trying to analyze and differentiate carefully. “It is merely”
Pippa Carpenter lost patience.
“And this?” she said, and held out her arms with something in them.
The Reverend Mr. Arden changed color, and a look of horror crossed his chiseled face.
“Her child!” he whispered. “Her child—and his!”
“Yes,” said Pippa relentlessly, not permitting herself to be moved by his obvious suffering. “The child of a live, human man, who loved her enough to—take her! I don't know even if the poor little love has a name! And I know,” she went on fiercely, “he's never been baptized! So I suppose he is—lost?”
The clergyman, at sea among strange, living facts, groped for the safe and familiar rocks of his traditions.
“It—I mean, he—should be baptized at once,” he said.
He thought that the fire had overflowed the hearth, as Mrs. Carpenter confronted him.
“If you dare to waste time baptizing that baby” she gasped, white with rage. Sharply she controlled herself, and her lips set themselves tightly.
“I brought some milk down with me from the inn,” she said, with comparative calm. “Get it. It's in that jar. And there's a little saucepan hanging on a nail on the farther wall. Get that. Now—heat the milk!”
For one brief, breathless moment it occurred to Mr. Arden to rebel.
“But” he began.
“Heat it, please; the baby needs it,” said Pippa.
And he went unhappily for the milk and the saucepan. Pippa was already unscrewing the other bottle, and pouring out hot broth for the sick woman.
“Don't let the milk boil!” she cautioned, as she went lightly into the next room.
Mr. Arden held the little saucepan over the blaze—such a very inadequate blaze, too!—and considered the various upheavals of the last hour. The baby, which, according to his most sacred convictions, was “lost,” lay on a chair and regarded him. After a while it emitted a faint gurgle. Arden, greatly startled, nearly dropped the saucepan.
At the same moment, Pippa came back into the room, closing the door softly behind her.
“I—I think it's ready,” said Mr. Arden nervously.
Mrs. Carpenter smothered a forgiving smile, and said, as she took the saucepan:
“See if you can find a spoon in that drawer over there.”
He went meekly to look.
“How—is she?” he asked, having returned with the spoon.
“She's very weak,” said Pippa quietly, “and very, very unhappy. Of course, she should never have come up here in this weather, but—the man is dead, and she has no other ties, and she says it made her feel less lonely to come to the place where you and she had once been happy together for a little while Just a moment! I think she called.”
To Mr. Arden's horror, she put the lost baby into his arms, before she went to the door. The lost baby gurgled again ingratiatingly; it almost smiled. The young clergyman felt distinctly odd; he had never held a baby before except at the font when he was baptizing one. He looked doubtfully down at the small, crinkled, pink face. “Lost”—that was what he had said of babies such as this. Condemned to eternal death, forbidden that gracious Welcome given once on a time to all little children—this helpless, nestling, not wholly disagreeable little
“I'll take him now,” said Pippa brusquely.
She wondered if it were her imagination that made it seem as if the man gave up the child almost reluctantly.
“Do, please, build up the fire,” she said, and the clergyman carried an armful of wood from the pile in the corner of the cabin. There were bits of damp bark sticking to his admirable black clothes when he had finished with the fire, but he quite forgot to brush them off. The blaze leaped gayly up the chimney, and in its riotous singing and sputtering vied with the crying wind outside. The gale was still fierce, and the call and wail of it was like that of ghosts and witches riding the storm.
Inside, the ruddy light played everywhere now, and shone with a special kindliness upon the baby lying on Pippa's lap—a baby like all other babies since the world began, even like that other Baby in the East two centuries since. We do not often think of Him as cooing and gurgling in the straw, and yet it must have been like that.
Pippa looked up at Arden.
“Go in there!” she said, under her breath—the words came with a rush—“go in there, not as a priest, but as a man—if you can.”
The goad was not intentionally applied, but the young clergyman winced under it. Pippa plunged on:
“Go in, and take her hand, and make her tell you what she's gone through—all the pain she's borne, and all the sins she's sinned. Oh, if you've one spark of God in you—go in!”
The Reverend Clarence Arden went into the other room, and Pippa rocked the baby in her arms, and tried to sing a lullaby, and cried all the time.
All the pent-up mother passion in her welled forth like a fountain unsealed, and she was filled with—was it happy pain, or tragic rapture? She buried her face on the baby's little, warm body, and tried to dream what it would be like to hold thus in her arms, against her heart, something that was flesh of her flesh, blood of her blood.
“You are as wonderful—as wonderful as first love!” she whispered to the lost baby, who promptly went to sleep.
Then she began to think. She yearned to do something for the woman in the next room, but her hands seemed tied; one couldn't offer her charity, and yet if any one in the world ever needed it, she did! Then came an inspiration.
Philippa seized one of her dogskin gloves, and into it she stuffed every ring and brooch that she was wearing—worth some thousands of dollars.
“Anybody can accept jewelry as a Christmas present,” she reasoned.
She fastened the glove to the mantelpiece with a pearl stickpin, and caught the lost baby to her breast once more.
“Oh, darling,” she murmured brokenly, “it isn't exactly what anybody could call a stocking, but—honey love, you've given me a Christmas—a real, hang-your-stocking-up, baby Christmas!”
Arden came back very white, but there was a look in his eyes that Philippa had not seen there before. He stood by the fireplace looking down into the flame for a long minute without speaking. Pippa still rocked the baby and crooned to it very softly. The tears had dried on her cheeks, but she looked very, very tired. The eternal hurt of frustrated motherhood stared from her eyes, but she did not know it.
After a while the clergyman spoke.
“He—the man—never married her,” he said rather harshly.
“I know,” said Pippa, rocking the baby gently to and fro.
“But—but”—for the first time she heard him stammer, eagerly, almost boyishly—“I—I swear to you, Mrs. Carpenter, I believe she's—at heart—as good and pure as—as you yourself!”
Philippa laid the baby down, still gently, but very, very quickly. She was whiter than ever as she rose. But she brushed her own feelings aside to put her hand on his arm.
“You must make it up to her,” she said. “You must make it all up to her.”
She waited for his answer, and was half surprised that it came so simply.
“Yes,” said Mr. Arden.
The firelight danced over the room restfully. The lost baby slept in its glow. There was a glimpse through an open door of a quiet, white bed.
“She fell asleep while I was sitting by her,” said the man irrelevently.
Philippa nodded understandingly. She still kept her hand on his arm. There seemed so much to say, and no one but her to say it!
“Life is always changing,” she said slowly, “being built up, or torn down. And—sometimes—we can't be sure, all at once, which it is that is happening. Sometimes it seems as if it were all—all taking away—tearing apart”—her lips quivered—“but even then we can't be certain. It may be only that They, the Fate people, just want to build it over again—better. But if ever something is put into our own hands to build with, we've got to go ahead and build! Do you understand? We've got to build!”
The Reverend Mr. Arden was still staring into the fire, and answered never a word, but Pippa knew that he had heard.
All at once she started, and pulled out her watch.
“Why—it's Christmas!” she said, in a hushed voice.
The man turned and looked through the half-open door into the room beyond. The wind had begun to grow drowsy, and the cabin was at peace.
“We shall be married as soon as she is strong enough,” said the Reverend Clarence Arden.
“And—the lost baby?” said Pippa, with a smile behind the tears.
Arden put out an awkward hand to touch the warm bundle. She had lifted the child preparatory to carrying him in to sleep beside his mother. There was a quaint mixture of tenderness and shyness in the twist of the man's mouth.
“Do you know,” he said, and there was no trace of hardness left in his clear-cut young face, “I think, maybe, it might have been my soul that would have been lost, if it hadn't been for—the lost baby!”