Early in the year, Florabelle Barbour married Raoul Bouchard with great pomp and ceremony. Six weeks later, over her mother’s protest and with Ernest’s approval, Dorcas married Eugene Bouchard, with less pomp and ceremony. Florabelle was fond of Raoul, fascinated by his handsomeness and gay manners, but she was sicker of her mother’s querulous discipline and prim, old-fashioned notions. Florabelle was pert of tongue and flippant of manner, two things that caused Hilda to utter dire prophecies of her ultimate end. It was to escape the constant scolding, reprimanding, regimentation of her home, that Florabelle married Raoul so precipitately.
Armand gave Raoul a fine large new house in a good quarter of Old-town, where Florabelle proceeded to set up housekeeping in a grand style. Within an incredibly short time her soirées and dinners were famous for their food, conversation, gaiety, music, and the lustre of the guests. Having married a Frenchman, she archly furnished her new home with elaborate, frivolous French-style furniture, all tufts and brocades and dainty-colored damasks, pale gray walls and frescoed ceilings rose-silk hangings and pale primrose or blue rugs, pallid paintings of gay ladies dressed in Empire fashion, white carved commodes and gilt-framed mirrors stretching from floor to ceiling, spindly tables with delicate bow-legs and rosettes and leaves and blossoms, an ivory-colored piano and little gilt chairs. She would say to a new guest: “Ah, you see, dear Raoul is French, and my house must be in accord with his nature!” Raoul smiled, bowed, showed his brilliant white teeth, and cursed his pretty wife amiably to himself. He was too indolent, or too good-natured, to tell her what he thought of her furnishings, and how he loathed them, shuddered away from their pastels and gilt and carvings, kicked them savagely in private. Raoul’s idea of a fine and comfortable home was the peasant’s lusty idea: great stone fireplaces in which a man could stand upright, iron vessels with flavorsome contents bubbling and steaming on the fire, high, mighty featherbeds like vast apple pies, bare scrubbed floors, low, comfortable rocking chairs well cushioned, sturdy plain tables spread with checked or white cloths, thick plain silver, pewter cups, strong, plentiful wines in earthenware jugs, brass andirons, and a hooded cradle on the hearth. But he was really too fond of Florabelle to dismay her by telling her this; she was such a dainty little thing with her blond ringlets and sparkling blue eyes, dimples and tiny elegant white fingers, small plump breast like a white dove’s, and a manner at once peremptory and coaxing. Had he told her what sort of home he preferred, she would have been horrified and disillusioned, almost brokenhearted. After all, he thought, she was a fine young lady from a fastidious female academy, where coarsenesses such as his desires were never mentioned, and everything was spun sugar, graciousness, politeness and silver filigree, tinkling of pianos and handling of fans, tilting of hoops, singing in high sweet sopranos and painting on china.
There was an awkward time when it was anxiously discussed as to how Martin and Ernest were to be kept apart at Florabelle’s wedding. Florabelle had no love for Martin, said “pish!” with much pretty impatience and head-tossing whenever Martin was mentioned, and declared it to be a bore. Once she frankly suggested that he not be invited, but this aroused such horror, even in the indolent Raoul, that she poutingly dropped the subject. She did not like Amy, either, and thought it still more of a bore that her sister-in-law must be present. There was something in Amy’s calm, her clear and straightforward eyes, her sweetness, integrity and lack of affectation, that aroused active dislike in the young Florabelle. She could not understand why everyone thought Amy such a great lady, and spoke of her with such respect. She, herself, thought Amy very plain and pale, without vivacity and those social graces taught at the female academy, which she had been assured were totally devastating to gentlemen. When she mentioned this to May, and her always-indulgent elder brother, she thought she discerned sympathy in May’s faint smile and averted head, but was not at all prepared for the gust of livid anger that burst over Ernest’s face. He sternly forbade her to criticize her elders, and stalked huffily from the room. Florabelle, in tears, turned to May for consolation, but May’s expression had become rigid and cold as snow.
No one, whimpered Florabelle, ever saw Martin and Amy these days, anyway. If Martin was in town, he was at his old hospital, but Amy was always buried in the country with her babies and the chickens and the cows. Why, she had only seen her little niece, Lucy, once in all these weeks!
But Martin and Amy were invited, of course. They accepted, as was to be expected. But events saved the anxious ones the fear of a meeting between the two brothers, and spared them a lot of embarrassment. For Martin took quite ill with a sort of cholera a week before the wedding, sufficiently ill so that Amy would not leave him. The wedding present arrived safely, however, a small, modest little boudoir clock of old silver, all cupids and roses and leaves, with a piquant face of silver-gilt. Florabelle, daughter of Joseph, “bootlicker to Squire Broderick,” turned up her pretty tilted nose at this gift, and hurried it out of sight. When May, with frank disapproval, called her a little upstart, and pointed out to her that Martin and Amy were now comparatively poor, and that the gift was in excellent taste though inexpensive, Florabelle merely tossed her head, pouted and wept because her sister-in-law was so harsh to her!
With Dorcas, it was an entirely different matter. She had a passion for her brother Martin that was deep, silent and almost fierce. Sometimes when she looked at his thin face, so worn and tired, so gentle and invariably kind for all its anxieties and the bewilderment that frequently stood upon it, she ached wildly with her pity and her love. She loved Amy deeply, partly for herself, and partly because her sister-in-law was so obviously devoted to her husband. At first, she had been inclined to be bitterly jealous of Amy, but no one of real perception could have been resentful of her for very long, and now her devotion to her was only less than her devotion to Martin. Martin’s children had a share in her passion, and hardly three days passed in succession without her driving out in her own smart little buggy to the isolated farm.
Dorcas had grown very tall, taller than her sister, quite as tall as Ernest, and was not much shorter than Martin. Where Florabelle was petite, vivacious and dainty, all flutters and laces and perfumed kerchiefs and dancing ringlets, Dorcas was long of body and limb, silent, dignified, almost unsmiling, moving with slow and quiet grace, dressing in rich plain stuffs and dark furs and wide, untrimmed hats. Her beauty had become even more extraordinary than was expected. Strangers stared unbelievingly at the slim oval of her face, her clear white skin, her red, beautifully shaped mouth. Her dark blue eyes with their bronze lashes, her smooth silvery-gold hair in a great roll coiled on her long white neck, her tall, exquisite figure, her long and transparent hands, were incredible in their splendor.
Almost everyone was fond of Florabelle, but few people liked Dorcas. She had so little to say, was so cold and reserved, so without social arts, so evidently indifferent to the necessity of pleasing. She was shy, not with Martin’s fearful and uneasy shyness, but with a shyness born of her real and inherent aversion to people. She had no genius for friendship, in fact, she had no friends. Many said disparagingly that she was cast in her brother Martin’s image, but this character-likeness was in a measure superficial. For where he was silent because of an agony of embarrassment, she was silent because she had no desire to speak to those whom she felt were not in sympathy with her; where he was kind, she was polite; where he was simple and straightforward because he was without deviousness and guile, she was so because she despised others too deeply to take the time to be complex and illusive. Where he was apprehensive and weak, she was strong, for she had the courage of unspoken scorn. But she had his own passion for justice, hatred for abstract exploitation, contempt for craft and greed, indifference to money. Martin could be deceived by noble words, but no one could deceive Dorcas. She did not have his mercy and compassion, his keen sympathy for suffering and misfortune; but not even Martin suspected this, for she was constantly in his hospital, helping with the sick, tirele
ss of body, ready and strong of hand, always attentive and efficient. (There was something of her brother Ernest in this phase of her character.) She saw there was suffering in this hospital, and coldly accepted it as her duty to help alleviate it. But much of this sense of duty lay in her desire to please Martin, to see him smile in gratitude, to have his confidence. Like Amy, she had a fierce desire to protect him and shield him, to stand between him and a reality that he sometimes painfully glimpsed and found unbearable.
It was a distinct shock to Martin when Dorcas told him quietly one late summer evening that she was going to marry Eugene Bouchard. He was deeply disturbed, and looked at her in apprehension and bewilderment.
“I know,” said Dorcas in her quiet voice, “that you can’t understand this, Martin, for you have always said that Eugene was much like Ernest. But he really isn’t. He is very gentle and good to me, very honorable and true. And I love him very much. I believe I have loved him all my life.”
Amy put her arm about the girl in silent understanding, but Martin rubbed his head in pale confusion. Then he said heavily: “I have never disliked Eugene, in spite of everything. I think he would be all right, if it were not for his aping of Ernest, and his attitude that Ernest can do no wrong and is all-wise and omnipotent. He—he is quite simple-minded about Ernest. He doesn’t know that Ernest is blighting him, really destroying him, eating him up as he tries to eat everyone up. I have noted that though he unconsciously quotes Ernest, his nature is really against what he is saying. Perhaps, Dorcas, you help save him from hardening into a smaller mould of Ernest.”
“Ernest will do no eating-up if I can prevent it,” said Dorcas, with her cold and lovely smile.
Ernest was proud and fond of Dorcas. Moreover, he respected her, as he did not respect Florabelle. But he also thought her a little repellent and pathetic. He wanted her to be married from the Sessions house, as Florabelle had been married, but she refused. She would be married in her mother’s house, she said. Then the old impasse about Ernest and Martin arrived tiresomely again. As the day approached, Ernest saw that no act of nature was going to relieve him this time. Martin, from all reports, remained healthy. Ernest finally confessed to Dorcas and to May that he simply could not endure meeting Martin face to face, to have to carry on the farce of smooth relationship. It would be, he said, too much of a strain. Dorcas was to be given in marriage by Martin, so he. Ernest, was not really necessary at all. He would remain in the background, watch the ceremony with himself unobserved, then quietly eliminate himself until the bridal couple had gone away and the guests had departed. Though even Dorcas protested, everyone was finally convinced that his decision was wise, though the necessity was exceedingly tedious
Martin gave his sister a bracelet of old gold set with exquisite opals her birthstone. Amy had chosen the gift, and May, who examined it, said with all sincerity that it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. “But then,” she added a little jealously, “Amy’s taste was always irreproachable.” She and Ernest gave the bride a string of magnificent shell-pink pearls, “a quarter’s dividends,” Ernest had said, more than a little ruefully.
Eugene was more thrifty than his brother, Raoul, and hoped until the last moment that either Ernest or Armand would present him with a house. But Armand remained bland, and Ernest, silent. Both of them knew he had saved frugally for years, and had at least three times the money that Raoul, the careless, had. Eugene personally possessed, in his own name, ten per cent of the Kinsolving stock. Finally, when matters were becoming embarrassingly acute, Armand offered the young couple a home with him. The Canadian cousin, he said, could remain as housekeeper, and Dorcas and Eugene could refinish and refurnish the house as they would; the expense, Armand added mischievously, watching Eugene’s dark and cautious face, to be entirely his son’s. Eugene, after consultation with Ernest, who assured him smilingly that the arrangement would be very economical, accepted with a gratitude surlily shadowed by his unspoken disappointment that a house of his own had not been offered him.
After Dorcas’ marriage, the problem arose as to what to do with old Hilda. She was bitterly set against going to live “out in the bush” with Martin, and May was still candid in her refusal to live under the same roof with her mother-in-law. So Hilda’s state was pathetic, to say the least. She shut herself obdurately in her house while the debate raged outside. Of course, it was decided, she could not live alone. Her sons and her daughters-in-law came and went, argued with her, waved their hands helplessly. For nearly three months the argument went on, with Hilda, behind her curtains, grimly enjoying the new commotion about her, and the unwonted excitement.
Then, when things were really becoming desperate, Florabelle discovered that she was pregnant. She immediately subsided into a helpless and childish condition, wailed for her mother, longed to be girlishly free of the responsibility of a household. Raoul, good-natured and bored as ever, suggested that Hilda come to live with them. He was privately pleased at his own suggestion: he thought that for the first time a decently sturdy meal might be served on the frivolous table, and a secretly longed-for substantiality of living be restored to his existence. So Hilda, needed once more, and in triumph, packed up and went to live with Florabelle. There she scolded and managed, bustled and arranged, dictated and cooked, fought with the daintily aproned maids, and behind the silly gilt and damask and frescoed façade of the household built a sturdy background of stone and brick.
CHAPTER XLIV
Florabelle’s and Raoul’s son, Philip, or Philippe, was born amid great excitement, much running about with cologne and smelling salts, much screaming, tears, lacy pillows and ruffles, perspiring maids and nurses and two eminent doctors. It was Christmas, and the house was decorated with holly and hothouse flowers from the Sessions conservatory, and there was still a litter of papers and boxes and ribbons in the rooms when the young Philip Bouchard decided to make his entry into the world.
Four months later, Dorcas presented Eugene with a son, a handsome child they called Etienne, after Eugene’s grandfather.
“The family,” said Gregory bluntly to his cousin, May, “has become just a breeding kennel.” May laughed with enjoyment; she always relished a little indelicacy. Besides, she was carrying, with much resentment, her third child; when he was born, they called him Reginald. Five months after his birth, Amy bore her fourth and last child, John Charles Barbour. He was born in September, 1860. Three months later, Florabelle, with much more fortitude than before, produced Jules, and Dorcas, six months after that, bore a sallow little daughter, Renee. Eleven children now composed the Barbour and the Bouchard families.
After Gertrude’s birth, May accused Ernest of losing interest in her darling, Godfrey James, or Frey, as she called him. Ernest denied it conventionally, but he was indeed almost indifferent to his first born. In some vague and uncomfortable way, the child reminded him of Martin. He became deeply involved with Reginald, who was plump and robust, and rosy as a peach, but Gertrude remained his love and his passion. The little girl returned this love whole-heartedly, and May, subtly pushed aside, was tormented by a jealousy of which she was ashamed.
The young matrons were so busy, their husbands so occupied with the gigantically increasing business, that Martin and Amy, on their isolated and lonely farm, were rarely visited except by Dorcas. And now, she, too, was bearing children. Therefore, months passed without any one visiting Amy, alone with her homesickness and babies, having no companion but old Mrs. Heckl, seeing no friends whatsoever.
Martin, with the single-mindedness of the reformer and the altruist, lived and breathed only for his hospital. Father Dominick directed many of its activities. Its dozen beds were almost always filled, its two doctors having as other patients only those who were employed by the Kinsolving and the Barbour & Bouchard shops. Father Dominick had interested a few of the more affluent members of his parish, and by heavy and continued pressure, had induced them to part with money for the hospital.
It was, fo
r that time, a model hospital. It was in charge of two Sisters of Charity, intelligent, middle-aged women from Canada. The other attendants were youngish and sober young women, clean and competent, who endured with silence and indifference the slurs and slights put upon them by the townsfolk. Many of them were German women. The doctors were young, one of them being the physician who had saved the life of the child that Martin had rescued. Though the theory of asepsis was as yet unknown, the hospital had remarkably few fatalities, even after serious operations; there was little gangrene, very little infection. The hospital was lavishly supplied with linen and blankets, the newest operative equipment, the newest medicines, the newest theories. “Why,” exclaimed one lady who had inspected the hospital, “it is actually as clean as my kitchen!”
Martin called it Sisters’ Hospital. He was proud of it, felt satisfied and contented. But it was taking nearly three-quarters of his dividends. Consequently, as it was a practically free hospital, he was obliged to canvass with grim anxiety and determination among the Catholics of Windsor, and even among the wealthier Protestants. With the latter, he had very little success, first because they considered hospitals pest-holes of infection and degeneracy: (“Anyone with a decent respectable home doesn’t need a hospital!”) and secondly because they were dourly suspicious of anything that smacked of “Popery.”
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