I. AN ARRIVAL.
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IT was one of the changing days of our Oldport
midsummer. In the morning it had
rained in rather a dismal way, and Aunt Jane
had said she should put it in her diary. It was
a very serious thing for the elements when
they got into Aunt Jane's diary. By noon the
sun came out as clear and sultry as if there
had never been a cloud, the northeast wind
died away, the bay was motionless, the first locust
of the summer shrilled from the elms, and
the robins seemed to be serving up butterflies
hot for their insatiable second brood, while
nothing seemed desirable for a human luncheon
except ice-cream and fans. In the
afternoon the southwest wind came up the bay,
with its line of dark-blue ripple and its delicious
coolness; while the hue of the water grew
more and more intense, till we seemed to be
living in the heart of a sapphire.
The household sat beneath the large western
doorway of the old Maxwell House, — the rear
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door, which looks on the water. The house
had just been reoccupied by my Aunt Jane,
whose great-grandfather had built it, though it
had for several generations been out of the
family. I know no finer specimen of those
large colonial dwellings in which the genius
of Sir Christopher Wren bequeathed traditions
of stateliness to our democratic days. Its central
hall has a carved archway; most of the
rooms have painted tiles and are wainscoted to
the ceiling; the sashes are red-cedar, the great
staircase mahogany; there are pilasters with
delicate Corinthian capitals; there are cherubs'
heads and wings that go astray and lose themselves
in closets and behind glass doors; there
are curling acanthus-leaves that cluster over
shelves and ledges, and there are those graceful
shell-patterns which one often sees on old
furniture, but rarely in houses. The high front
door still retains its Ionic cornice; and the
western entrance, looking on the bay, is surmounted
by carved fruit and flowers, and is
crowned, as is the roof, with that pineapple in
whose symbolic wealth the rich merchants of
the last century delighted.
Like most of the statelier houses in that region
of Oldport, this abode had its rumors of
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a ghost and of secret chambers. The ghost had
never been properly lionized nor laid, for Aunt
Jane, the neatest of housekeepers, had discouraged
all silly explorations, had at once required
all barred windows to be opened, all
superfluous partitions to be taken down, and
several highly eligible dark-closets to be nailed
up. If there was anything she hated, it was
nooks and odd corners. Yet there had been
times that year, when the household would have
been glad to find a few more such hiding-places;
for during the first few weeks the
house had been crammed with guests so closely
that the very mice had been ill-accommodated
and obliged to sit up all night, which had
caused them much discomfort and many audible
disagreements.
But this first tumult had passed away; and
now there remained only the various nephews
and nieces of the house, including a due proportion
of small children. Two final guests
were to arrive that day, bringing the latest
breath of Europe on their wings, — Philip
Malbone, Hope's betrothed; and little Emilia,
Hope's half-sister.
None of the family had seen Emilia since
her wandering mother had taken her abroad,
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a fascinating spoiled child of four, and they
were all eager to see in how many ways the
succeeding twelve years had completed or corrected
the spoiling. As for Philip, he had
been spoiled, as Aunt Jane declared, from the
day of his birth, by the joint effort of all
friends and neighbors. Everybody had conspired
to carry on the process except Aunt
Jane herself, who directed toward him one of
her honest, steady, immovable dislikes, which
may be said to have dated back to the time
when his father and mother were married,
some years before he personally entered on the
scene.
The New York steamer, detained by the
heavy fog of the night before, now came in
unwonted daylight up the bay. At the first
glimpse, Harry and the boys pushed off in the
row-boat; for, as one of the children said, anybody
who had been to Venice would naturally
wish to come to the very house in a gondola.
In another half-hour there was a great entanglement
of embraces at the water-side, for
the guests had landed.
Malbone's self-poised easy grace was the
same as ever; his chestnut-brown eyes were
as winning, his features as handsome; his
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complexion, too clearly pink for a man, had a sea
bronze upon it: he was the same Philip who
had left home, though with some added lines
of care. But in the brilliant little fairy beside
him all looked in vain for the Emilia they remembered
as a child. Her eyes were more
beautiful than ever, — the darkest violet eyes,
that grew luminous with thought and almost
black with sorrow. Her gypsy taste, as everybody
used to call it, still showed itself in the
scarlet and dark blue of her dress; but the
clouded gypsy tint had gone from her cheek,
and in its place shone a deep carnation, so
hard and brilliant that it appeared to be enamelled
on the surface, yet so firm and deep-dyed
that it seemed as if not even death could
ever blanch it. There is a kind of beauty
that seems made to be painted on ivory, and
such was hers. Only the microscopic pencil
of a miniature-painter could portray those
slender eyebrows, that arched caressingly over
the beautiful eyes, — or the silky hair of darkest
chestnut that crept in a wavy line along
the temples, as if longing to meet the brows, —
or those unequalled lashes! “Unnecessarily
long,” Aunt Jane afterwards pronounced them;
while Kate had to admit that they did indeed
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give Emilia an overdressed look at breakfast,
and that she ought to have a less showy set to
match her morning costume.
But what was most irresistible about Emilia,—
that which we all noticed in this interview,
and which haunted us all thenceforward, — was
a certain wild, entangled look she wore, as of
some untamed out-door thing, and a kind of
pathetic lost sweetness in her voice, which
made her at once and forever a heroine of romance
with the children. Yet she scarcely
seemed to heed their existence, and only submitted
to the kisses of Hope and Kate as if
that were a part of the price of coming home,
and she must pay it.
Had she been alone, there might have been
an awkward pause; for if you expect a cousin,
and there alights a butterfly of the tropics,
what hospitality can you offer? But no sense
of embarrassment ever came near Malbone,
especially with the children to swarm over him
and claim him for their own. Moreover, little
Helen got in the first remark in the way of
serious conversation.
“Let me tell him something!” said the
child. “Philip! that doll of mine that you
used to know, only think! she was sick and
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died last summer, and went into the rag-bag.
And the other split down the back, so there
was an end of her.”
Polar ice would have been thawed by this
reopening of communication. Philip soon had
the little maid on his shoulder, — the natural
throne of all children, — and they went in together
to greet Aunt Jane.
Aunt Jane was the head of the house, — a
lady who had spent more than fifty years in
educating her brains and battling with her ailments.
She had received from her parents a
considerable inheritance in the way of whims,
and had nursed it up into a handsome fortune.
Being one of the most impulsive of human beings,
she was naturally one of the most entertaining;
and behind all her eccentricities there
was a fund of the soundest sense and the tenderest
affection. She had seen much and varied
society, had been greatly admired in her
youth, but had chosen to remain unmarried.
Obliged by her physical condition to make herself
the first object, she was saved from utter
selfishness by sympathies as democratic as her
personal habits were exclusive. Unexpected
and commonly fantastic in her doings, often
dismayed by small difficulties, but never by
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large ones, she sagaciously administered the
affairs of all those around her, — planned their
dinners and their marriages, fought out their
bargains and their feuds.
She hated everything irresolute or vague;
people might play at cat's-cradle or study
Spinoza, just as they pleased; but, whatever
they did, they must give their minds to it.
She kept house from an easy-chair, and ruled
her dependants with severity tempered by wit,
and by the very sweetest voice in which reproof
was ever uttered. She never praised them,
but if they did anything particularly well, rebuked
them retrospectively, asking why they
had never done it well before? But she treated
them munificently, made all manner of plans
for their comfort, and they all thought her the
wisest and wittiest of the human race. So did
the youths and maidens of her large circle;
they all came to see her, and she counselled,
admired, scolded, and petted them all. She
had the gayest spirits, and an unerring eye for
the ludicrous, and she spoke her mind with absolute
plainness to all comers. Her intuitions
were instantaneous as lightning, and, like that,
struck very often in the wrong place. She
was thus extremely unreasonable and altogether
charming.
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Such was the lady whom Emilia and Malbone
went up to greet, — the one shyly, the
other with an easy assurance, such as she
always disliked. Emilia submitted to another
kiss, while Philip pressed Aunt Jane's hand, as
he pressed all women's, and they sat down.
“Now begin to tell your adventures,” said
Kate. “People always tell their adventures
till tea is ready.”
“Who can have any adventures left,” said
Philip, “after such letters as I wrote you all?”
“Of which we got precisely one!” said
Kate. “That made it such an event, after we
had wondered in what part of the globe you
might be looking for the post-office! It was
like finding a letter in a bottle, or disentangling
a person from the Dark Ages.”
“I was at Neuchâtel two months; but I had
no adventures. I lodged with a good pasteur,
who taught me geology and German.”
“That is suspicious,” said Kate. “Had he
a daughter passing fair?”
“Indeed he had.”
“And you taught her English? That is
what these beguiling youths always do in novels.”
“Yes.”
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“What was her name?”
“Lili.”
“What a pretty name! How old was she?”
“She was six.”
“O Philip!” cried Kate; “but I might
have known it. Did she love you very
much?”
Hope looked up, her eyes full of mild reproach
at the possibility of doubting any
child's love for Philip. He had been her betrothed
for more than a year, during which
time she had habitually seen him wooing every
child he had met as if it were a woman, —
which, for Philip, was saying a great deal.
Happily they had in common the one trait of
perfect amiability, and she knew no more how
to be jealous than he to be constant.
“Lili was easily won,” he said. “Other
things being equal, people of six prefer that
man who is tallest.”
“Philip is not so very tall,” said the eldest
of the boys, who was listening eagerly, and
growing rapidly.
“No,” said Philip, meekly. “But then the
pasteur was short, and his brother was a
dwarf.”
“When Lili found that she could reach the
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ceiling from Mr. Malbone's shoulder,” said
Emilia, “she asked no more.”
“Then you knew the pastor's family also,
my child,” said Aunt Jane, looking at her kindly
and a little keenly.
“I was allowed to go there sometimes,” she
began, timidly.
“To meet her American Cousin,” interrupted
Philip. “I got some relaxation in the rules of
the school. But, Aunt Jane, you have told us
nothing about your health.”
“There is nothing to tell,” she answered. “I
should like, if it were convenient, to be a little
better. But in this life, if one can walk across
the floor, and not be an idiot, it is something:
That is all I aim at.”
“Is n't it rather tiresome?” said Emilia, as
the elder lady happened to look at her.
“Not at all,” said Aunt Jane, composedly.
“I naturally fall back into happiness, when
left to myself.”
“So you have returned to the house of your
fathers,” said Philip. “I hope you like it.”
“It is commonplace in one respect,” said
Aunt Jane. “General Washington once slept
here.”
“Oh!” said Philip. “It is one of that class
of houses?”
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“Yes,” said she. “There is not a village in
America that has not half a dozen of them,
not counting those where he only breakfasted.
Did ever man sleep like that man? What
else could he ever have done? Who governed,
I wonder, while he was asleep? How he must
have travelled! The swiftest horse could
scarcely have carried him from one of these
houses to another.”
“I never was attached to the memory of
Washington,” meditated Philip; “but I always
thought it was the pear-tree. It must have
been that he was such a very unsettled person.”
“He certainly was not what is called a domestic
character,” said Aunt Jane.
“I suppose you are, Miss Maxwell,” said
Philip. “Do you often go out?”
“Sometimes, to drive,” said Aunt Jane.
“Yesterday I went shopping with Kate, and
sat in the carriage while she bought under-sleeves
enough for a centipede. It is always
so with that child. People talk about the
trouble of getting a daughter ready to be married;
but it is like being married once a month
to live with her.”
“I wonder that you take her to drive with
you,” suggested Philip, sympathetically.
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“It is a great deal worse to drive without
her,” said the impetuous lady. “She is the
only person who lets me enjoy things, and now
I cannot enjoy them in her absence. Yesterday
I drove alone over the three beaches, and
left her at home with a dress-maker. Never
did I see so many lines of surf; but they only
seemed to me like some of Kate's ball-dresses,
with the prevailing flounces, six deep. I was
so enraged that she was not there, I wished to
cover my face with my handkerchief. By the
third beach I was ready for the madhouse.”
“Is Oldport a pleasant place to live in?”
asked Emilia, eagerly.
“It is amusing in the summer,” said Aunt
Jane, “though the society is nothing but a
pack of visiting-cards. In winter it is too dull
for young people, and only suits quiet old
women like me, who merely live here to keep
the Ten Commandments and darn their stockings.”
Meantime the children were aiming at
Emilia, whose butterfly looks amazed and
charmed them, but who evidently did not
know what to do with their eager affection.
“I know about you,” said little Helen; “I
know what you said when you were little.”
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“Did I say anything?” asked Emilia, carelessly.
“Yes,” replied the child, and began to repeat
the oft-told domestic tradition in an
accurate way, as if it were a school lesson.
“Once you had been naughty, and your papa
thought it his duty to slap you, and you
cried; and he told you in French, because he
always spoke French with you, that he did not
punish you for his own pleasure. Then you
stopped crying, and asked, `Pour le plaisir de
qui alors?' That means `For whose pleasure
then?' Hope said it was a droll question for
a little girl to ask.”
“I do not think it was Emilia who asked that
remarkable question, little girl,” said Kate.
“I dare say it was,” said Emilia; “I have
been asking it all my life.” Her eyes grew
very moist, what with fatigue and excitement.
But just then, as is apt to happen in this world,
they were all suddenly recalled from tears to
tea, and the children smothered their curiosity
in strawberries and cream.
They sat again beside the western door, after
tea. The young moon came from a cloud and
dropped a broad path of glory upon the bay;
a black yacht glided noiselessly in, and
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anchored amid this tract of splendor. The shadow
of its masts was on the luminous surface, while
their reflection lay at a different angle, and
seemed to penetrate far below. Then the departing
steamer went flashing across this bright
realm with gorgeous lustre; its red and green
lights were doubled in the paler waves, its four
reflected chimneys chased each other among
the reflected masts. This jewelled wonder
passing, a single fishing-boat drifted silently
by, with its one dark sail; and then the moon
and the anchored yacht were left alone.
Presently some of the luggage came from
the wharf. Malbone brought out presents for
everybody; then all the family went to Europe
in photographs, and with some reluctance came
back to America for bed.
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II. PLACE AUX DAMES!
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IN every town there is one young maiden
who is the universal favorite, who belongs
to all sets and is made an exception to all
family feuds, who is the confidante of all girls
and the adopted sister of all young men, up to
the time when they respectively offer themselves
to her, and again after they are rejected.
This post was filled in Oldport, in those days,
by my cousin Kate.
Born into the world with many other gifts,
this last and least definable gift of popularity
was added to complete them all. Nobody criticised
her, nobody was jealous of her, her very
rivals lent her their new music and their lovers;
and her own discarded wooers always
sought her to be a bridesmaid when they married
somebody else.
She was one of those persons who seem to
have come into the world well-dressed. There
was an atmosphere of elegance around her,
like a costume; every attitude implied a
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presence-chamber or a ball-room. The girls complained
that in private theatricals no combination
of disguises could reduce Kate to the
ranks, nor give her the “make-up” of a waiting-maid.
Yet as her father was a New York
merchant of the precarious or spasmodic description,
she had been used from childhood to
the wildest fluctuations of wardrobe; — a year
of Paris dresses, — then another year spent in
making over ancient finery, that never looked
like either finery or antiquity when it came
from her magic hands. Without a particle of
vanity or fear, secure in health and good-nature
and invariable prettiness, she cared little
whether the appointed means of grace were
ancient silk or modern muslin. In her periods
of poverty, she made no secret of the necessary
devices; the other girls, of course, guessed
them, but her lovers never did, because she
always told them. There was one particular
tarlatan dress of hers which was a sort of local
institution. It was known to all her companions,
like the State House. There was a
report that she had first worn it at her christening;
the report originated with herself.
The young men knew that she was going to
the party if she could turn that pink tarlatan
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once more; but they had only the vaguest impression
what a tarlatan was, and cared little
on which side it was worn, so long as Kate was
inside.
During these epochs of privation her life, in
respect to dress, was a perpetual Christmas-tree
of second-hand gifts. Wealthy aunts supplied
her with cast-off shoes of all sizes, from two
and a half up to five, and she used them all.
She was reported to have worn one straw hat
through five changes of fashion. It was averred
that, when square crowns were in vogue,
she flattened it over a tin pan, and that, when
round crowns returned, she bent it on the bed-post.
There was such a charm in her way of
adapting these treasures, that the other girls
liked to test her with new problems in the way
of millinery and dress-making; millionnaire
friends implored her to trim their hats, and
lent her their own things in order to learn how
to wear them. This applied especially to certain
rich cousins, shy and studious girls, who
adored her, and to whom society only ceased
to be alarming when the brilliant Kate took
them under her wing, and graciously accepted
a few of their newest feathers. Well might
they acquiesce, for she stood by them superbly,
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and her most favored partners found no way to
her hand so sure as to dance systematically
through that staid sisterhood. Dear, sunshiny,
gracious, generous Kate! — who has ever done
justice to the charm given to this grave old
world by the presence of one free-hearted and
joyous girl?
At the time now to be described, however,
Kate's purse was well filled; and if she wore
only second-best finery, it was because she had
lent her very best to somebody else. All that
her doting father asked was to pay for her
dresses, and to see her wear them; and if her
friends wore a part of them, it only made
necessary a larger wardrobe, and more varied
and pleasurable shopping. She was as good
a manager in wealth as in poverty, wasted
nothing, took exquisite care of everything, and
saved faithfully for some one else all that was
not needed for her own pretty person.
Pretty she was throughout, from the parting
of her jet-black hair to the high instep of her
slender foot; a glancing, brilliant, brunette
beauty, with the piquant charm of perpetual
spirits, and the equipoise of a perfectly healthy
nature. She was altogether graceful, yet she
had not the fresh, free grace of her cousin
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Hope, who was lithe and strong as a hawthorne
spray: Kate's was the narrower grace
of culture grown hereditary, an in-door elegance
that was born in her, and of which dancing-school
was but the natural development.
You could not picture Hope to your mind in
one position more than in another; she had
an endless variety of easy motion. When you
thought of Kate, you remembered precisely
how she sat, how she stood, and how she
walked. That was all, and it was always the
same. But is not that enough? We do not
ask of Mary Stuart's portrait that it should
represent her in more than one attitude, and
why should a living beauty need more than
two or three?
Kate was betrothed to her cousin Harry,
Hope's brother, and, though she was barely
twenty, they had seemed to appertain to each
other for a time so long that the memory of
man or maiden aunt ran not to the contrary.
She always declared, indeed, that they were
born married, and that their wedding-day
would seem like a silver wedding. Harry was
quiet, unobtrusive, and manly. He might seem
commonplace at first beside the brilliant Kate
and his more gifted sister; but thorough
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manhood is never commonplace, and he was a
person to whom one could anchor. His strong,
steadfast physique was the type of his whole
nature; when he came into the room, you felt
as if a good many people had been added to
the company. He made steady progress in
his profession of the law, through sheer
worth; he never dazzled, but he led. His
type was pure Saxon, with short, curling hair,
blue eyes, and thin, fair skin, to which the
color readily mounted. Up to a certain point
he was imperturbably patient and amiable,
but, when overtaxed, was fiery and impetuous
for a single instant, and no more. It seemed
as if a sudden flash of anger went over him,
like the flash that glides along the glutinous
stem of the fraxinella, when you touch it with
a candle; the next moment it had utterly
vanished, and was forgotten as if it had never
been.
Kate's love for her lover was one of those
healthy and assured ties that often outlast
the ardors of more passionate natures. For
other temperaments it might have been inadequate;
but theirs matched perfectly, and it
was all sufficient for them. If there was
within Kate's range a more heroic and
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ardent emotion than that inspired by Harry, it
was put forth toward Hope. This was her
idolatry; she always said that it was fortunate
Hope was Hal's sister, or she should have felt
it her duty to give them to each other, and
not die till the wedding was accomplished.
Harry shared this adoration to quite a reasonable
extent, for a brother; but his admiration
for Philip Malbone was one that Kate
did not quite share. Harry's quieter mood
had been dazzled from childhood by Philip,
who had always been a privileged guest in
the household. Kate's clear, penetrating, buoyant
nature had divined Phil's weaknesses, and
had sometimes laughed at them, even from her
childhood; though she did not dislike him,
for she did not dislike anybody. But Harry
was magnetized by him very much as women
were; believed him true, because he was tender,
and called him only fastidious where Kate
called him lazy.
Kate was spending that summer with her
aunt Jane, whose especial pet and pride she
was. Hope was spending there the summer
vacation of a Normal School in which she had
just become a teacher. Her father had shared
in the family ups and downs, but had finally
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stayed down, while the rest had remained up.
Fortunately, his elder children were indifferent
to this, and indeed rather preferred it; it was
a tradition that Hope had expressed the wish,
when a child, that her father might lose his
property, so that she could become a teacher.
As for Harry, he infinitely preferred the drudgery
of a law office to that of a gentleman of
leisure; and as for their step-mother, it turned
out, when she was left a widow, that she had
secured for herself and Emilia whatever property
remained, so that she suffered only the
delightful need of living in Europe for economy.
The elder brother and sister had alike that
fine physical vigor which New England is now
developing, just in time to save it from decay.
Hope was of Saxon type, though a shade less
blonde than her brother; she was a little taller,
and of more commanding presence, with a peculiarly
noble carriage of the shoulders. Her
brow was sometimes criticised as being a little
too full for a woman; but her nose was straight,
her mouth and teeth beautiful, and her profile
almost perfect. Her complexion had lost by
out-door life something of its delicacy, but had
gained a freshness and firmness that no
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sunlight could impair. She had that wealth of
hair which young girls find the most enviable
point of beauty in each other. Hers reached
below her knees, when loosened, or else lay
coiled, in munificent braids of gold, full of
sparkling lights and contrasted shadows, upon
her queenly head.
Her eyes were much darker than her hair,
and had a way of opening naively and suddenly,
with a perfectly infantine expression, as
if she at that moment saw the sunlight for the
first time. Her long lashes were somewhat
like Emilia's, and she had the same deeply
curved eyebrows; in no other point was there
a shade of resemblance between the half-sisters.
As compared with Kate, Hope showed
a more abundant physical life; there was more
blood in her; she had ampler outlines, and
health more absolutely unvaried, for she had
yet to know the experience of a day's illness.
Kate seemed born to tread upon a Brussels
carpet, and Hope on the softer luxury of the
forest floor. Out of doors her vigor became a
sort of ecstasy, and she walked the earth with
a jubilee of the senses, such as Browning attributes
to his Saul.
This inexhaustible freshness of physical
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organization seemed to open the windows of
her soul, and make for her a new heaven
and earth every day. It gave also a peculiar
and almost embarrassing directness to
her mental processes, and suggested in them
a sort of final and absolute value, as if truth
had for the first time found a perfectly translucent
medium. It was not so much that
she said rare things, but her very silence was
eloquent, and there was a great deal of it.
Her girlhood had in it a certain dignity as of a
virgin priestess or sibyl. Yet her hearty sympathies
and her healthy energy made her at
home in daily life, and in a democratic society.
To Kate, for instance, she was a necessity of
existence, like light or air. Kate's nature was
limited; part of her graceful equipoise was
narrowness. Hope was capable of far more
self-abandonment to a controlling emotion,
and, if she ever erred, would err more widely,
for it would be because the whole power of
her conscience was misdirected. “Once let
her take wrong for right,” said Aunt Jane,
“and stop her if you can; these born saints
give a great deal more trouble than children
of this world, like my Kate.” Yet in daily
life Hope yielded to her cousin nine times out
-- 028 --
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of ten; but the tenth time was the key to the
situation. Hope loved Kate devotedly; but
Kate believed in her as the hunted fugitive
believes in the north star.
To these maidens, thus united, came Emilia
home from Europe. The father of Herry and
Hope had been lured into a second marriage
with Emilia's mother, a charming and unscrupulous
woman, born with an American body
and a French soul. She having once won him
to Paris, held him there life-long, and kept her
step-children at a safe distance. She arranged
that, even after her own death, her daughter
should still remain abroad for education; nor
was Emilia ordered back until she brought
down some scandal by a romantic attempt
to elope from boarding-school with a Swiss
servant. It was by weaning her heart from
this man that Philip Malbone had earned the
thanks of the whole household during his
hasty flight through Europe. He possessed
some skill in withdrawing the female heart
from an undesirable attachment, though it was
apt to be done by substituting another. It
was fortunate that, in this case, no fears could
be entertained. Since his engagement Philip
had not permitted himself so much as a
-- 029 --
[figure description] Page 029.[end figure description]
flirtation; he and Hope were to be married soon;
he loved and admired her heartily, and had an
indifference to her want of fortune that was
quite amazing, when we consider that he had
a fortune of his own.
-- 030 -- p586-043
III. A DRIVE ON THE AVENUE.
[figure description] Page 030.[end figure description]
OLDPORT AVENUE is a place where a
great many carriages may be seen driving
so slowly that they might almost be photographed
without halting, and where their occupants
already wear the dismal expression which
befits that process. In these fine vehicles, following
each other in an endless file, one sees
such faces as used to be exhibited in ball-rooms
during the performance of quadrilles, before
round dances came in, — faces marked by the
renunciation of all human joy. Sometimes a
faint suspicion suggests itself on the Avenue,
that these torpid countenances might be roused
to life, in case some horse should run away.
But that one chance never occurs; the riders
may not yet be toned down into perfect breeding,
but the horses are. I do not know what
could ever break the gloom of this joyless procession,
were it not that youth and beauty
are always in fashion, and one sometimes
meets an exceptional barouche full of boys
-- 031 --
[figure description] Page 031.[end figure description]
and girls, who could absolutely be no happier
if they were a thousand miles away from the
best society. And such a joyous company
were our four youths and maidens when they
went to drive that day, Emilia being left at
home to rest after the fatigues of the voyage.
“What beautiful horses!” was Hope's first
exclamation. “What grave people!” was her
second.
“What though in solemn silence all
Roll round —”
quoted Philip.
“Hope is thinking,” said Harry, “whether
`in reason's ear they all rejoice.' ”
“How could you know that?” said she,
opening her eyes.
“One thing always strikes me,” said Kate.
“The sentence of stupefaction does not seem
to be enforced till after five-and-twenty. That
young lady we just met looked quite lively
and juvenile last year, I remember, and now
she has graduated into a dowager.”
“Like little Helen's kitten,” said Philip.
“She justly remarks that, since I saw it last,
it is all spoiled into a great big cat.”
“Those must be snobs,” said Harry, as a
carriage with unusually gorgeous liveries rolled
by.
-- 032 --
[figure description] Page 032.[end figure description]
“I suppose so,” said Malbone, indifferently.
“In Oldport we call all new-comers snobs,
you know, till they have invited us to their
grand ball. Then we go to it, and afterwards
speak well of them, and only abuse their
wine.”
“How do you know them for new-comers?”
asked Hope, looking after the carriage.
“By their improperly intelligent expression,”
returned Phil. “They look around
them as you do, my child, with the air of
wide-awake curiosity which marks the American
traveller. That is out of place here. The
Avenue abhors everything but a vacuum.”
“I never can find out,” continued Hope,
“how people recognize each other here. They
do not look at each other, unless they know
each other: and how are they to know if they
know, unless they look first?”
“It seems an embarrassment,” said Malbone.
“But it is supposed that fashion perforates the
eyelids and looks through. If you attempt it
in any other way, you are lost. Newly arrived
people look about them, and, the more new
wealth they have, the more they gaze. The
men are uneasy behind their recently educated
mustaches, and the women hold their parasols
-- 033 --
[figure description] Page 033.[end figure description]
with trembling hands. It takes two years to
learn to drive on the Avenue. Come again
next summer, and you will see in those
same carriages faces of remote superciliousness,
that suggest generations of gout and
ancestors.”
“What a pity one feels,” said Harry, “for
these people who still suffer from lingering
modesty, and need a master to teach them to
be insolent!”
“They learn it soon enough,” said Kate.
“Philip is right. Fashion lies in the eye.
People fix their own position by the way they
don't look at you.”
“There is a certain indifference of manner,”
philosophized Malbone, “before which ingenuous
youth is crushed. I may know that a
man can hardly read or write, and that his
father was a ragpicker till one day he picked
up bank-notes for a million. No matter. If
he does not take the trouble to look at me,
I must look reverentially at him.”
“Here is somebody who will look at Hope,”
cried Kate, suddenly.
A carriage passed, bearing a young lady
with fair hair, and a keen, bright look, talking
eagerly to a small and quiet youth beside her.
-- 034 --
[figure description] Page 034.[end figure description]
Her face brightened still more as she caught
the eye of Hope, whose face lighted up in return,
and who then sank back with a sort of
sigh of relief, as if she had at last seen somebody
she cared for. The lady waved an ungloved
hand, and drove by.
“Who is that?” asked Philip, eagerly. He
was used to knowing every one.
“Hope's pet,” said Kate, “and she who pets
Hope, Lady Antwerp.”
“Is it possible?” said Malbone. “That
young creature? I fancied her ladyship in
spectacles, with little side curls. Men speak
of her with such dismay.”
“Of course,” said Kate, “she asks them
sensible questions.”
“That is bad,” admitted Philip. “Nothing
exasperates fashionable Americans like a really
intelligent foreigner. They feel as Sydney
Smith says the English clergy felt about Elizabeth
Fry; she disturbs their repose, and gives
rise to distressing comparisons, — they long
to burn her alive. It is not their notion of a
countess.”
“I am sure it was not mine,” said Hope; “I
can hardly remember that she is one; I only
know that I like her, she is so simple and
-- 035 --
[figure description] Page 035.[end figure description]
intelligent. She might be a girl from a Normal
School.
“It is because you are just that,” said Kate,
“that she likes you. She came here supposing
that we had all been at such schools.
Then she complained of us, — us girls in what
we call good society, I mean, — because, as she
more than hinted, we did not seem to know
anything.”
“Some of the mothers were angry,” said
Hope. “But Aunt Jane told her that it was
perfectly true, and that her ladyship had not
yet seen the best-educated girls in America,
who were generally the daughters of old ministers
and well-to-do shopkeepers in small New
England towns, Aunt Jane said.”
“Yes,” said Kate, “she said that the best
of those girls went to High Schools and
Normal Schools, and learned things thoroughly,
you know; but that we were only
taught at boarding-schools and by governesses,
and came out at eighteen, and what could we
know? Then came Hope, who had been at
those schools, and was the child of refined
people too, and Lady Antwerp was perfectly
satisfied.”
“Especially,” said Hope, “when Aunt Jane
-- 036 --
[figure description] Page 036.[end figure description]
told her that, after all, schools did not do very
much good, for if people were born stupid
they only became more tiresome by schooling.
She said that she had forgotten all she learned
at school except the boundaries of ancient
Cappadocia.”
Aunt Jane's fearless sayings always passed
current among her nieces; and they drove on,
Hope not being lowered in Philip's estimation,
nor raised in her own, by being the pet of a
passing countess.
Who would not be charmed (he thought to
himself) by this noble girl, who walks the earth
fresh and strong as a Greek goddess, pure as
Diana, stately as Juno? She belongs to the
unspoiled womanhood of another age, and is
wasted among these dolls and butterflies.
He looked at her. She sat erect and graceful,
unable to droop into the debility of fashionable
reclining, — her breezy hair lifted a
little by the soft wind, her face flushed, her
full brown eyes looking eagerly about, her
mouth smiling happily. To be with those she
loved best, and to be driving over the beautiful
earth! She was so happy that no mob of
fashionables could have lessened her enjoyment,
or made her for a moment conscious
-- 037 --
[figure description] Page 037.[end figure description]
that anybody looked at her. The brilliant
equipages which they met each moment were
not wholly uninteresting even to her, for her
affections went forth to some of the riders
and to all the horses. She was as well contented
at that moment, on the glittering Avenue,
as if they had all been riding home through
country lanes, and in constant peril of being
jolted out among the whortleberry-bushes.
Her face brightened yet more as they met
a carriage containing a graceful lady dressed
with that exquisiteness of taste that charms
both man and woman, even if no man can
analyze and no woman rival its effect. She
had a perfectly high-bred look, and an eye that
in an instant would calculate one's ancestors
as far back as Nebuchadnezzar, and bow to
them all together. She smiled good-naturedly
on Hope, and kissed her hand to Kate.
“So, Hope,” said Philip, “you are bent on
teaching music to Mrs. Meredith's children.”
“Indeed I am!” said Hope, eagerly. “O
Philip, I shall enjoy it so! I do not care so
very much about her, but she has dear little
girls. And you know I am a born drudge.
I have not been working hard enough to enjoy
an entire vacation, but I shall be so very
-- 038 --
[figure description] Page 038.[end figure description]
happy here if I can have some real work for
an hour or two every other day.”
“Hope,” said Philip, gravely, “look steadily
at these people whom we are meeting, and
reflect. Should you like to have them say,
`There goes Mrs. Meredith's music teacher'?”
“Why not?” said Hope, with surprise. “The
children are young, and it is not very presumptuous.
I ought to know enough for that.”
Malbone looked at Kate, who smiled with
delight, and put her hand on that of Hope.
Indeed, she kept it there so long that one or
two passing ladies stopped their salutations in
mid career, and actually looked after them in
amazement at their attitude, as who should
say, “What a very mixed society!”
So they drove on, — meeting four-in-hands,
and tandems, and donkey-carts, and a goat-cart,
and basket-wagons driven by pretty girls,
with uncomfortable youths in or out of livery
behind. They met, had they but known it,
many who were aiming at notoriety, and some
who had it; many who looked contented with
their lot, and some who actually were so.
They met some who put on courtesy and
grace with their kid gloves, and laid away
those virtues in their glove-boxes afterwards;
-- 039 --
[figure description] Page 039.[end figure description]
while to others the mere consciousness of kid
gloves brought uneasiness, redness of the face,
and a general impression of being all made of
hands. They met the four white horses of
an ex-harness-maker, and the superb harnesses
of an ex-horse-dealer. Behind these came the
gayest and most plebeian equipage of all, a
party of journeymen carpenters returning
from their work in a four-horse wagon. Their
only fit compeers were an Italian opera-troupe,
who were chatting and gesticulating on the
piazza of the great hotel, and planning, amid
jest and laughter, their future campaigns.
Their work seemed like play, while the play
around them seemed like work. Indeed, most
people on the Avenue seemed to be happy in
inverse ratio to their income list.
As our youths and maidens passed the hotel,
a group of French naval officers strolled forth,
some of whom had a good deal of inexplicable
gold lace dangling in festoons from their
shoulders, — “topsail halyards” the American
midshipmen called them. Philip looked hard
at one of these gentlemen.
“I have seen that young fellow before,”
said he, “or his twin brother. But who can
swear to the personal identity of a Frenchman?”
-- 040 -- p586-053
IV. AUNT JANE DEFINES HER POSITION.
[figure description] Page 040.[end figure description]
THE next morning had that luminous morning
haze, not quite dense enough to be
called a fog, which is often so lovely in Oldport.
It was perfectly still; the tide swelled
and swelled till it touched the edge of the green
lawn behind the house, and seemed ready to
submerge the slender pier; the water looked
at first like glass, till closer gaze revealed long
sinuous undulations, as if from unseen watersnakes
beneath. A few rags of storm-cloud
lay over the half-seen hills beyond the bay, and
behind them came little mutterings of thunder,
now here, now there, as if some wild creature
were roaming up and down, dissatisfied, in the
shelter of the clouds. The pale haze extended
into the foreground, and half veiled the schooners
that lay at anchor with their sails up. It
was sultry, and there was something in the atmosphere
that at once threatened and soothed.
Sometimes a few drops dimpled the water and
then ceased; the muttering creature in the
-- 041 --
[figure description] Page 041.[end figure description]
sky moved northward and grew still. It was a
day when every one would be tempted to go
out rowing, but when only lovers would go.
Philip and Hope went.
Kate and Harry, meanwhile, awaited their
opportunity to go in and visit Aunt Jane. This
was a thing that never could be done till near
noon, because that dear lady was very deliberate
in her morning habits, and always averred
that she had never seen the sun rise except in
a panorama. She hated to be hurried in dressing,
too; for she was accustomed to say that
she must have leisure to understand herself,
and this was clearly an affair of time.
But she was never more charming than when,
after dressing and breakfasting in seclusion,
and then vigilantly watching her handmaiden
through the necessary dustings and arrangements,
she sat at last, with her affairs in order,
to await events. Every day she expected
something entirely new to happen, and was
never disappointed. For she herself always
happened, if nothing else did; she could no
more repeat herself than the sunrise can; and
the liveliest visitor always carried away something
fresher and more remarkable than he
brought.
-- 042 --
[figure description] Page 042.[end figure description]
Her book that morning had displeased her,
and she was boiling with indignation against
its author.
“I am reading a book so dry,” she said, “it
makes me cough. No wonder there was a
drought last summer. It was printed then.
Worcester's Geography seems in my memory
as fascinating as Shakespeare, when I look
back upon it from this book. How can a man
write such a thing and live?”
“Perhaps he lived by writing it,” said Kate.
“Perhaps it was the best he could do,” added
the more literal Harry.
“It certainly was not the best he could do,
for he might have died, — died instead of dried.
O, I should like to prick that man with something
sharp, and see if sawdust did not run out
of him! Kate, ask the bookseller to let me
know if he ever really dies, and then life may
seem fresh again.”
“What is it?” asked Kate.
“Somebody's memoirs,” said Aunt Jane.
“Was there no man left worth writing about,
that they should make a biography about this
one? It is like a life of Napoleon with all the
battles left out. They are conceited enough to
put his age in the upper corner of each page
too, as if anybody cared how old he was.”
-- 043 --
[figure description] Page 043.[end figure description]
“Such pretty covers!” said Kate. “It is
too bad.”
“Yes,” said Aunt Jane. “I mean to send
them back and have new leaves put in. These
are so wretched, there is not a teakettle in the
land so insignificant that it would boil over
them. Don't let us talk any more about it.
Have Philip and Hope gone out upon the
water?”
“Yes, dear,” said Kate. “Did Ruth tell
you?”
“When did that aimless infant ever tell
anything?”
“Then how did you know it?”
“If I waited for knowledge till that sweet-tempered
parrot chose to tell me,” Aunt Jane
went on, “I should be even more foolish than
I am.”
“Then how did you know?”
“Of course I heard the boat hauled down,
and of course I knew that none but lovers
would go out just before a thunder-storm.
Then you and Harry came in, and I knew it
was the others.”
“Aunt Jane,” said Kate, “you divine everything:
what a brain you have!”
“Brain! it is nothing but a collection of
-- 044 --
[figure description] Page 044.[end figure description]
shreds, like a little girl's work-basket, — a scrap
of blue silk and a bit of white muslin.”
“Now she is fishing for compliments,” said
Kate, “and she shall have one. She was very
sweet and good to Philip last night.”
“I know it,” said Aunt Jane, with a groan.
“I waked in the night and thought about it.
I was awake a great deal last night. I have
heard cocks crowing all my life, but I never
knew what that creature could accomplish before.
So I lay and thought how good and forgiving
I was; it was quite distressing.”
“Remorse?” said Kate.
“Yes, indeed. I hate to be a saint all the
time. There ought to be vacations. Instead
of suffering from a bad conscience, I suffer
from a good one.”
“It was no merit of yours, aunt,” put in
Harry. “Who was ever more agreeable and
lovable than Malbone last night?”
“Lovable!” burst out Aunt Jane, who never
could be managed or manipulated by anybody
but Kate, and who often rebelled against Harry's
blunt assertions. “Of course he is lovable,
and that is why I dislike him. His father
was so before him. That is the worst of it. I
never in my life saw any harm done by a
-- 045 --
[figure description] Page 045.[end figure description]
villain; I wish I could. All the mischief in this
world is done by lovable people. Thank
Heaven, nobody ever dared to call me lovable!”
“I should like to see any one dare call you
anything else, — you dear, old, soft-hearted
darling!” interposed Kate.
“But, aunt,” persisted Harry, “if you only
knew what the mass of young men are —”
“Don't I?” interrupted the impetuous lady.
“What is there that is not known to any
woman who has common sense, and eyes
enough to look out of a window?”
“If you only knew,” Harry went on, “how
superior Phil Malbone is, in his whole tone,
to any fellow of my acquaintance.”
“Lord help the rest!” she answered.
“Philip has a sort of refinement instead of
principles, and a heart instead of a conscience,—
just heart enough to keep himself happy
and everybody else miserable.”
“Do you mean to say,” asked the obstinate
Hal, “that there is no difference between refinement
and coarseness?”
“Yes, there is,” she said.
“Well, which is best?”
“Coarseness is safer by a great deal,” said
-- 046 --
[figure description] Page 046.[end figure description]
Aunt Jane, “in the hands of a man like
Philip. What harm can that swearing coachman
do, I should like to know, in the street
yonder? To be sure it is very unpleasant,
and I wonder they let people swear so, except,
perhaps, in waste places outside the town;
but that is his way of expressing himself, and
he only frightens people, after all.”
“Which Philip does not,” said Hal.
“Exactly. That is the danger. He frightens
nobody, not even himself, when he ought
to wear a label round his neck marked `Dangerous,
' such as they have at other places
where it is slippery and brittle. When he is
here, I keep saying to myself, `Too smooth,
too smooth!' ”
“Aunt Jane,” said Harry, gravely, “I know
Malbone very well, and I never knew any man
whom it was more unjust to call a hypocrite?”
“Did I say he was a hypocrite?” she cried.
“He is worse than that; at least, more really
dangerous. It is these high-strung sentimentalists
who do all the mischief; who play on
their own lovely emotions, forsooth, till they
wear out those fine fiddlestrings, and then
have nothing left but the flesh and the D.
Don't tell me!”
-- 047 --
[figure description] Page 047.[end figure description]
“Do stop, auntie,” interposed Kate, quite
alarmed, “you are really worse than a coachman.
You are growing very profane indeed.”
“I have a much harder time than any
coachman, Kate,” retorted the injured lady.
“Nobody tries to stop him, and you are always
hushing me up.”
“Hushing you up, darling?” said Kate.
“When we only spoil you by praising and
quoting everything you say.”
“Only when it amuses you,” said Aunt
Jane. “So long as I sit and cry my eyes out
over a book, you all love me, and when I talk
nonsense, you are ready to encourage it;
but when I begin to utter a little sense, you
all want to silence me, or else run out of the
room! Yesterday I read about a newspaper
somewhere, called the `Daily Evening Voice';
I wish you would allow me a daily morning
voice.”
“Do not interfere, Kate,” said Hal. “Aunt
Jane and I only wish to understand each
other.”
“I am sure we don't,” said Aunt Jane;
“I have no desire to understand you, and you
never will understand me till you comprehend
Philip.”
-- 048 --
[figure description] Page 048.[end figure description]
“Let us agree on one thing,” Harry said.
“Surely, aunt, you know how he loves Hope?”
Aunt Jane approached a degree nearer the
equator, and said, gently, “I fear I do.”
“Fear?”
“Yes, fear. That is just what troubles me.
I know precisely how he loves her. Il se laisse
aimer. Philip likes to be petted, as much as
any cat, and, while he will purr, Hope is
happy. Very few men accept idolatry with
any degree of grace, but he unfortunately
does.”
“Unfortunately?” remonstrated Hal, as far
as ever from being satisfied. “This is really
too bad. You never will do him any justice.”
“Ah?” said Aunt Jane, chilling again, “I
thought I did. I observe he is very much
afraid of me, and there seems to be no other
reason.”
“The real trouble is,” said Harry, after a
pause, “that you doubt his constancy.”
“What do you call constancy?” said she.
“Kissing a woman's picture ten years after a
man has broken her heart? Philip Malbone
has that kind of constancy, and so had his
father before him.”
This was too much for Harry, who was
-- 049 --
[figure description] Page 049.[end figure description]
making for the door in indignation, when little
Ruth came in with Aunt Jane's luncheon, and
that lady was soon absorbed in the hopeless
task of keeping her handmaiden's pretty blue
and white gingham sleeve out of the butterplate.
-- 050 -- p586-063
V. A MULTIVALVE HEART.
[figure description] Page 050.[end figure description]
PHILIP MALBONE had that perfectly
sunny temperament which is peculiarly
captivating among Americans, because it is so
rare. He liked everybody and everybody
liked him; he had a thousand ways of affording
pleasure, and he received it in the giving.
He had a personal beauty, which, strange to
say, was recognized by both sexes, — for handsome
men must often consent to be mildly
hated by their own. He had travelled much,
and had mingled in very varied society; he
had a moderate fortune, no vices, no ambition,
and no capacity of ennui.
He was fastidious and over-critical, it might
be, in his theories, but in practice he was
easily suited and never vexed.
He liked travelling, and he liked staying at
home; he was so continually occupied as to
give an apparent activity to all his life, and yet
he was never too busy to be interrupted, especially
if the intruder were a woman or a
-- 051 --
[figure description] Page 051.[end figure description]
child. He liked to be with people of his own
age, whatever their condition; he also liked
old people because they were old, and children
because they were young. In travelling by
rail, he would woo crying babies out of their
mothers' arms, and still them; it was always
his back that Irishwomen thumped, to ask if
they must get out at the next station; and he
might be seen handing out decrepit paupers,
as if they were of royal blood and bore concealed
sceptres in their old umbrellas. Exquisitely
nice in his personal habits, he had
the practical democracy of a good-natured
young prince; he had never yet seen a human
being who awed him, nor one whom he had
the slightest wish to awe. His courtesy,
had, therefore, that comprehensiveness which
we call republican, though it was really the
least republican thing about him. All felt its
attraction; there was really no one who disliked
him, except Aunt Jane; and even she
admitted that he was the only person who
knew how to cut her lead-pencil.
That cheerful English premier who thought
that any man ought to find happiness enough
in walking London streets and looking at the
lobsters in the fish-markets, was not more easily
-- 052 --
[figure description] Page 052.[end figure description]
satisfied than Malbone. He liked to observe
the groups of boys fishing at the wharves,
or to hear the chat of their fathers about
coral-reefs and penguins' eggs; or to sketch
the fisher's little daughter awaiting her father
at night on some deserted and crumbling
wharf, his blue pea-jacket over her fair ringleted
head, and a great cat standing by with
tail uplifted, her sole protector. He liked the
luxurious indolence of yachting, and he liked
as well to float in his wherry among the fleet
of fishing schooners getting under way after
a three days' storm, each vessel slipping out
in turn from the closely packed crowd, and
spreading its white wings for flight. He liked
to watch the groups of negro boys and girls
strolling by the window at evening, and strumming
on the banjo, — the only vestige of tropical
life that haunts our busy Northern zone.
But he liked just as well to note the ways of
well-dressed girls and boys at croquet parties,
or to sit at the club window and hear the gossip.
He was a jewel of a listener, and was
not easily bored even when Philadelphians
talked about families, or New-Yorkers about
bargains, or Bostonians about books. A man
who has not one absorbing aim can get a great
-- 053 --
[figure description] Page 053.[end figure description]
many miscellaneous things into each twenty-four
hours; and there was not a day in which
Philip did not make himself agreeable and
useful to many people, receive many confidences,
and give much good-humored advice
about matters of which he knew nothing.
His friends' children ran after him in the
street, and he knew the pet theories and wines
of elderly gentlemen. He said that he won
their hearts by remembering every occurrence
in their lives except their birthdays.
It was, perhaps, no drawback on the popularity
of Philip Malbone that he had been for
some ten years reproached as a systematic flirt
by all women with whom he did not happen at
the moment to be flirting. The reproach was
unjust; he had never done anything systematically
in his life; it was his temperament that
flirted, not his will. He simply had that most
perilous of all seductive natures, in which the
seducer is himself seduced. With a personal
refinement that almost amounted to purity, he
was constantly drifting into loves more profoundly
perilous than if they had belonged to
a grosser man. Almost all women loved him,
because he loved almost all; he never had to
assume an ardor, for he always felt it. His
-- 054 --
[figure description] Page 054.[end figure description]
heart was multivalve; he could love a dozen at
once in various modes and gradations, press a
dozen hands in a day, gaze into a dozen pair
of eyes with unfeigned tenderness; while the
last pair wept for him, he was looking into the
next. In truth, he loved to explore those sweet
depths; humanity is the highest thing to investigate,
he said, and the proper study of mankind
is woman. Woman needs to be studied
while under the influence of emotion; let us
therefore have the emotions. This was the
reason he gave to himself; but this refined
Mormonism of the heart was not based on
reason, but on temperament and habit. In
such matters logic is only for the by-standers.
His very generosity harmed him, as all our
good qualities may harm us when linked with
bad ones; he had so many excuses for doing
kindnesses to his friends, it was hard to quarrel
with him if he did them too tenderly. He
was no more capable of unkindness than of
constancy; and so strongly did he fix the allegiance
of those who loved him, that the women
to whom he had caused most anguish would
still defend him when accused; would have
crossed the continent, if needed, to nurse him
in illness, and would have rained rivers of tears
-- 055 --
[figure description] Page 055.[end figure description]
on his grave. To do him justice, he would
have done almost as much for them, — for any
of them. He could torture a devoted heart,
but only through a sort of half-wilful unconsciousness;
he could not bear to see tears shed
in his presence, nor to let his imagination
dwell very much on those which flowed in his
absence. When he had once loved a woman,
or even fancied that he loved her, he built for
her a shrine that was never dismantled, and in
which a very little faint incense would sometimes
be found burning for years after; he
never quite ceased to feel a languid thrill at
the mention of her name; he would make even
for a past love the most generous sacrifices of
time, convenience, truth perhaps, — everything,
in short, but the present love. To those who
had given him all that an undivided heart can
give he would deny nothing but an undivided
heart in return. The misfortune was that this
was the only thing they cared to possess.
This abundant and spontaneous feeling gave
him an air of earnestness, without which he
could not have charmed any woman, and, least
of all, one like Hope. No woman really loves
a trifler; she must at least convince herself
that he who trifles with others is serious with
-- 056 --
[figure description] Page 056.[end figure description]
her. Philip was never quite serious and never
quite otherwise; he never deliberately got up
a passion, for it was never needful; he simply
found an object for his emotions, opened their
valves, and then watched their flow. To love
a charming woman in her presence is no test
of genuine passion; let us know how much
you long for her in absence. This longing
had never yet seriously troubled Malbone,
provided there was another charming person
within an easy walk.
If it was sometimes forced upon him that all
this ended in anguish to some of these various
charmers, first or last, then there was always
in reserve the pleasure of repentance. He
was very winning and generous in his repentances,
and he enjoyed them so much they were
often repeated. He did not pass for a weak
person, and he was not exactly weak; but he
spent his life in putting away temptations with
one hand and pulling them back with the
other. There was for him something piquant
in being thus neither innocent nor guilty, but
always on some delicious middle ground. He
loved dearly to skate on thin ice, — that was
the trouble, — especially where he fancied the
water to be just within his depth. Unluckily
the sea of life deepens rather fast.
-- 057 --
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Malbone had known Hope from her childhood,
as he had known her cousins, but their
love dated from their meetings beside the sickbed
of his mother, over whom he had watched
with unstinted devotion for weary months.
She had been very fond of the young girl, and
her last earthly act was to place Hope's hand
in Philip's. Long before this final consecration,
Hope had won his heart more thoroughly,
he fancied, than any woman he had ever
seen. The secret of this crowning charm was,
perhaps, that she was a new sensation. He
had prided himself on his knowledge of her
sex, and yet here was a wholly new species.
He was acquainted with the women of society,
and with the women who only wished to be in
society. But here was one who was in the
chrysalis, and had never been a grub, and had
no wish to be a butterfly, and what should he
make of her? He was like a student of insects
who had never seen a bee. Never had
he known a young girl who cared for the things
which this maiden sought, or who was not dazzled
by things to which Hope seemed perfectly
indifferent. She was not a devotee, she was
not a prude; people seemed to amuse and interest
her; she liked them, she declared, as
-- 058 --
[figure description] Page 058.[end figure description]
much as she liked books. But this very way
of putting the thing seemed like inverting the
accustomed order of affairs in the polite world,
and was of itself a novelty.
Of course he had previously taken his turn
for a while among Kate's admirers; but it was
when she was very young, and, moreover, it
was hard to get up anything like a tender and
confidential relation with that frank maiden;
she never would have accepted Philip Malbone
for herself, and she was by no means satisfied
with his betrothal to her best beloved. But
that Hope loved him ardently there was no
doubt, however it might be explained. Perhaps
it was some law of opposites, and she
needed some one of lighter nature than her
own. As her resolute purpose charmed him,
so she may have found a certain fascination in
the airy way in which he took hold on life; he
was so full of thought and intelligence; possessing
infinite leisure, and yet incapable of
ennui; ready to oblige every one, and doing so
many kind acts at so little personal sacrifice;
always easy, graceful, lovable, and kind. In
her just indignation at those who called him
heartless, she forgot to notice that his heart
was not deep. He was interested in all her
-- 059 --
[figure description] Page 059.[end figure description]
pursuits, could aid her in all her studies, suggest
schemes for her benevolent desires, and
could then make others work for her, and even
work himself. People usually loved Philip,
even while they criticised him; but Hope
loved him first, and then could not criticise him
at all.
Nature seems always planning to equalize
characters, and to protect our friends from
growing too perfect for our deserts. Love, for
instance, is apt to strengthen the weak, and yet
sometimes weakens the strong. Under its influence
Hope sometimes appeared at disadvantage.
Had the object of her love been indifferent,
the result might have been otherwise,
but her ample nature apparently needed to
contract itself a little, to find room within
Philip's heart. Not that in his presence she
became vain or petty or jealous; that would
have been impossible. She only grew credulous
and absorbed and blind. A kind of
gentle obstinacy, too, developed itself in her
nature, and all suggestion of defects in him
fell off from her as from a marble image of
Faith. If he said or did anything, there was
no appeal; that was settled, let us pass to
something else.
-- 060 --
[figure description] Page 060.[end figure description]
I almost blush to admit that Aunt Jane —
of whom it could by no means be asserted
that she was a saintly lady, but only a very
charming one — rather rejoiced in this transformation.
“I like it better, my dear,” she said, with
her usual frankness, to Kate. “Hope was altogether
too heavenly for my style. When
she first came here, I secretly thought I never
should care anything about her. She seemed
nothing but a little moral tale. I thought she
would not last me five minutes. But now she
is growing quite human and ridiculous about
that Philip, and I think I may find her very
attractive indeed.”
-- 061 -- p586-074
VI. “SOME LOVER'S CLEAR DAY. ”
[figure description] Page 061.[end figure description]
“HOPE!” said Philip Malbone, as they
sailed together in a little boat the
next morning, “I have come back to you from
months of bewildered dreaming. I have been
wandering, — no matter where. I need you.
You cannot tell how much I need you.”
“I can estimate it,” she answered, gently,
“by my need of you.”
“Not at all,” said Philip, gazing in her
trustful face. “Any one whom you loved
would adore you, could he be by your side.
You need nothing. It is I who need you.”
“Why?” she asked, simply.
“Because,” he said, “I am capable of behaving
very much like a fool. Hope, I am
not worthy of you; why do you love me?
why do you trust me?”
“I do not know how I learned to love you,”
said Hope. “It is a blessing that was given
to me. But I learned to trust you in your
mother's sick-room.”
-- 062 --
[figure description] Page 062.[end figure description]
“Ay,” said Philip, sadly, “there, at least, I
did my full duty.”
“As few would have done it,” said Hope,
firmly, — “very few. Such prolonged self-sacrifice
must strengthen a man for life.”
“Not always,” said Philip, uneasily. “Too
much of that sort of thing may hurt one, I
fancy, as well as too little. He may come to
imagine that the balance of virtue is in his
favor, and that he may grant himself a little
indulgence to make up for lost time. That
sort of recoil is a little dangerous, as I sometimes
feel, do you know?”
“And you show it,” said Hope, ardently,
“by fresh sacrifices! How much trouble you
have taken about Emilia! Some time, when
you are willing, you shall tell me all about it.
You always seemed to me a magician, but
I did not think that even you could restore
her to sense and wisdom so soon.”
Malbone was just then very busy putting
the boat about; but when he had it on the
other tack, he said, “How do you like her?”
“Philip,” said Hope, her eyes filling with
tears, “I wonder if you have the slightest conception
how my heart is fixed on that child.
She has always been a sort of dream to me,
-- 063 --
[figure description] Page 063.[end figure description]
and the difficulty of getting any letters from
her has only added to the excitement. Now
that she is here, my whole heart yearns
toward her. Yet, when I look into her eyes,
a sort of blank hopelessness comes over me.
They seem like the eyes of some untamable
creature whose language I shall never learn.
Philip, you are older and wiser than I, and
have shown already that you understand her.
Tell me what I can do to make her love me?”
“Tell me how any one could help it?” said
Malbone, looking fondly on the sweet, pleading
face before him.
“I am beginning to fear that it can be
helped,” she said. Her thoughts were still
with Emilia.
“Perhaps it can,” said Phil, “if you sit so
far away from people. Here we are alone on
the bay. Come and sit by me, Hope.”
She had been sitting amidships, but she
came aft at once, and nestled by him as he sat
holding the tiller. She put her face against
his knee, like a tired child, and shut her eyes;
her hair was lifted by the summer breeze; a
scent of roses came from her; the mere contact
of anything so fresh and pure was a delight.
He put his arm around her, and all the
-- 064 --
[figure description] Page 064.[end figure description]
first ardor of passion came back to him again;
he remembered how he had longed to win
this Diana, and how thoroughly she was won.
“It is you who do me good,” said she. “O
Philip, sail as slowly as you can.” But he
only sailed farther, instead of more slowly,
gliding in and out among the rocky islands
in the light north wind, which, for a wonder,
lasted all that day, — dappling the bare hills
of the Isle of Shadows with a shifting beauty.
The tide was in and brimming, the fishing-boats
were busy, white gulls soared and clattered
round them, and heavy cormorants
flapped away as they neared the rocks. Beneath
the boat the soft multitudinous jelly-fishes
waved their fringed pendants, or glittered
with tremulous gold along their pink,
translucent sides. Long lines and streaks of
paler blue lay smoothly along the enamelled
surface, the low, amethystine hills lay couched
beyond them, and little clouds stretched themselves
in lazy length above the beautiful expanse.
They reached the ruined fort at last,
and Philip, surrendering Hope to others, was
himself besieged by a joyous group.
As you stand upon the crumbling parapet
of old Fort Louis, you feel yourself poised
-- 065 --
[figure description] Page 065.[end figure description]
in middle air; the sea-birds soar and swoop
around you, the white surf lashes the rocks far
below, the white vessels come and go, the water
is around you on all sides but one, and spreads
in pale blue beauty up the lovely bay, or, in
deeper tints, southward towards the horizon
line. I know of no ruin in American which
nature has so resumed; it seems a part of the
living rock; you cannot imagine it away.
It is a single round, low tower, shaped like
the tomb of Cæcilia Metella. But its stately
position makes it rank with the vast sisterhood
of wave-washed strongholds; it might be King
Arthur's Cornish Tyntagel; it might be “the
teocallis tower” of Tuloom. As you gaze
down from its height, all things that float
upon the ocean seem equalized. Look at the
crowded life on yonder frigate, coming in fullsailed
before the steady sea-breeze. To furl
that heavy canvas, a hundred men cluster
like bees upon the yards, yet to us upon
this height it is all but a plaything for the
eyes, and we turn with equal interest from
that thronged floating citadel to some lonely
boy in his skiff.
Yonder there sail to the ocean, beating
wearily to windward, a few slow vessels.
-- 066 --
[figure description] Page 066.[end figure description]
Inward come jubilant white schooners, wing-and-wing.
There are fishing-smacks towing their
boats behind them like a family of children;
and there are slender yachts that bear only
their own light burden. Once from this height
I saw the whole yacht squadron round Point
Judith, and glide in like a flock of land-bound
sea-birds; and above them, yet more snowy
and with softer curves, pressed onward the
white squadrons of the sky.
Within, the tower is full of débris, now disintegrated
into one solid mass, and covered
with vegetation. You can lie on the blossoming
clover, where the bees hum and the crickets
chirp around you, and can look through
the arch which frames its own fair picture.
In the foreground lies the steep slope overgrown
with bayberry and gay with thistle
blooms; then the little winding cove with its
bordering cliffs; and the rough pastures with
their grazing sheep beyond. Or, ascending
the parapet, you can look across the bay to the
men making hay picturesquely on far-off lawns,
or to the cannon on the outer works of Fort
Adams, looking like vast black insects that
have crawled forth to die.
Here our young people spent the day; some
-- 067 --
[figure description] Page 067.[end figure description]
sketched, some played croquet, some bathed
in rocky inlets where the kingfisher screamed
above them, some rowed to little craggy isles
for wild roses, some fished, and then were
taught by the boatmen to cook their fish in
novel island ways. The morning grew more
and more cloudless, and then in the afternoon
a fog came and went again, marching by with
its white armies, soon met and annihilated by
a rainbow.
The conversation that day was very gay and
incoherent, — little fragments of all manner of
things; science, sentiment, everything: “Like
a distracted dictionary,” Kate said. At last
this lively maiden got Philip away from the
rest, and began to cross-question him.
“Tell me,” she said, “about Emilia's Swiss
lover. She shuddered when she spoke of him.
Was he so very bad?”
“Not at all,” was the answer. “You had
false impressions of him. He was a handsome,
manly fellow, a little over-sentimental. He had
travelled, and had been a merchant's clerk
in Paris and London. Then he came back,
and became a boatman on the lake, some said,
for love of her.”
“Did she love him?”
-- 068 --
[figure description] Page 068.[end figure description]
“Passionately, as she thought.”
“Did he love her much?”
“I suppose so.”
“Then why did she stop loving him?”
“She does not hate him?”
“No,” said Kate, “that is what surprises me.
Lovers hate, or those who have been lovers.
She is only indifferent. Philip, she had wound
silk upon a torn piece of his carte-de-visite,
and did not know it till I showed it to her.
Even then she did not care.”
“Such is woman!” said Philip.
“Nonsense,” said Kate. “She had seen
somebody whom she loved better, and she still
loves that somebody. Who was it? She had
not been introduced into society. Were there
any superior men among her teachers? She
is just the girl to fall in love with her teacher,
at least in Europe, where they are the only
men one sees.”
“There were some very superior men among
them,” said Philip. “Professor Schirmer has
a European reputation; he wears blue spectacles
and a maroon wig.”
“Do not talk so,” said Kate. “I tell you,
Emilia is not changeable, like you, sir. She is
passionate and constant. She would have
-- 069 --
[figure description] Page 069.[end figure description]
married that man or died for him. You may
think that your sage counsels restrained her,
but they did not; it was that she loved some
one else. Tell me honestly. Do you not
know that there is somebody in Europe whom
she loves to distraction?”
“I do not know it,” said Philip.
“Of course you do not know it,” returned
the questioner. “Do you not think it?”
“I have no reason to believe it.”
“That has nothing to do with it,” said Kate.
“Things that we believe without any reason
have a great deal more weight with us. Do
you not believe it?”
“No,” said Philip, point-blank.
“It is very strange,” mused Kate. “Of
course you do not know much about it. She
may have misled you, but I am sure that
neither you nor any one else could have cured
her of a passion, especially an unreasonable
one, without putting another in its place. If
you did it without that, you are a magician, as
Hope once called you. Philip, I am afraid of
you.”
“There we sympathize,” said Phil. “I am
sometimes afraid of myself, but I discover within
half an hour what a very commonplace and
harmless person I am.”
-- 070 --
[figure description] Page 070.[end figure description]
Meantime Emilia found herself beside her
sister, who was sketching. After watching
Hope for a time in silence, she began to question
her.
“Tell me what you have been doing in all
these years,” she said.
“O, I have been at school,” said Hope.
“First I went through the High School; then
I stayed out of school a year, and studied
Greek and German with my uncle, and music
with my aunt, who plays uncommonly well.
Then I persuaded them to let me go to the
Normal School for two years, and learn to be
a teacher.”
“A teacher!” said Emilia, with surprise. “Is
it necessary that you should be a teacher?”
“Very necessary,” replied Hope. “I must
have something to do, you know, after I leave
school.”
“To do?” said the other. “Cannot you go
to parties?”
“Not all the time,” said her sister.
“Well,” said Emilia, “in the mean time you
can go to drive, or make calls, or stay at home
and make pretty little things to wear, as other
girls do.”
“I can find time for that too; little sister,
-- 071 --
[figure description] Page 071.[end figure description]
when I need them. But I love children, you
know, and I like to teach interesting studies.
I have splendid health, and I enjoy it all. I
like it as you love dancing, my child, only I like
dancing too, so I have a greater variety of enjoyments.”
“But shall you not sometimes find it very
hard?” said Emilia.
“That is why I shall like it,” was the answer.
“What a girl you are!” exclaimed the
younger sister. “You know everything and
can do everything.”
“A very short everything,” interposed Hope.
“Kate says,” continued Emilia, “that you
speak French as well as I do, and I dare say
you dance a great deal better; and those are
the only things I know.”
“If we both had French partners, dear,” replied
the elder maiden, “they would soon find
the difference in both respects. My dancing
came by nature, I believe, and I learned French
as a child, by talking with my old uncle, who
was half a Parisian. I believe I have a good
accent, but I have so little practice that I have
no command of the language compared to
yours. In a week or two we can both try our
skill, as there is to be a ball for the officers of
-- 072 --
[figure description] Page 072.[end figure description]
the French corvette yonder,” and Hope pointed
to the heavy spars, the dark canvas, and
the high quarter-deck which made the “Jean
Hoche” seem as if she had floated out of the
days of Nelson.
The calm day waned, the sun drooped to his
setting amid a few golden bars and pencilled
lines of light. Ere they were ready for departure,
the tide had ebbed, and, in getting the
boats to a practicable landing-place, Malbone
was delayed behind the others. As he at
length brought his boat to the rock, Hope sat
upon the ruined fort, far above him, and sang.
Her noble contralto voice echoed among the
cliffs down to the smooth water; the sun went
down behind her, and still she sat stately and
noble, her white dress looking more and more
spirit-like against the golden sky; and still the
song rang on, —
“Never a scornful word should grieve thee,
I'd smile on thee, sweet, as the angels do;
Sweet as thy smile on me shone ever,
Douglas, Douglas, tender and true.”
All sacredness and sweetness, all that was pure
and brave and truthful, seemed to rest in her.
And when the song ceased at his summons,
and she came down to meet him, — glowing,
-- 073 --
[figure description] Page 073.[end figure description]
beautiful, appealing, tender, — then all meaner
spells vanished, if such had ever haunted him,
and he was hers alone.
Later that evening, after the household had
separated, Hope went into the empty drawing-room
for a light. Philip, after a moment's
hesitation, followed her, and paused in the
doorway. She stood, a white-robed figure,
holding the lighted candle; behind her rose
the arched alcove, whose quaint cherubs
looked down on her; she seemed to have
stepped forth, the awakened image of a saint.
Looking up, she saw his eager glance; then
she colored, trembled, and put the candle
down. He came to her, took her hand and
kissed it, then put his hand upon her brow and
gazed into her face, then kissed her lips. She
quietly yielded, but her color came and went,
and her lips moved as if to speak. For a moment
he saw her only, thought only of her.
Then, even while he gazed into her eyes, a
flood of other memories surged over him, and
his own eyes grew dim. His head swam, the
lips he had just kissed appeared to fade away,
and something of darker, richer beauty seemed
to burn through those fair features; he looked
through those gentle eyes into orbs more
-- 074 --
[figure description] Page 074.[end figure description]
radiant, and it was as if a countenance of eager
passion obliterated that fair head, and spoke
with substituted lips, “Behold your love.”
There was a thrill of infinite ecstasy in the
work his imagination did; he gave it rein, then
suddenly drew it in and looked at Hope. Her
touch brought pain for an instant, as she laid
her hand upon him, but he bore it. Then
some influence of calmness came; there swept
by him a flood of earlier, serener memories;
he sat down in the window-seat beside her,
and when she put her face beside his, and her
soft hair touched his cheek, and he inhaled
the rose-odor that always clung round her,
every atom of his manhood stood up to drive
away the intruding presence, and he again
belonged to her alone.
When he went to his chamber that night,
he drew from his pocket a little note in a girlish
hand, which he lighted in the candle, and
put upon the open hearth to burn. With what
a cruel, tinkling rustle the pages flamed and
twisted and opened, as if the fire read them,
and collapsed again as if in agonizing effort
to hold their secret even in death! The
closely folded paper refused to burn, it went
out again and again; while each time Philip
-- 075 --
[figure description] Page 075.[end figure description]
Malbone examined it ere relighting, with a
sort of vague curiosity, to see how much passion
had already vanished out of existence,
and how much yet survived. For each of
these inspections he had to brush aside the
calcined portion of the letter, once so warm
and beautiful with love, but changed to something
that seemed to him a semblance of his
own heart just then, — black, trivial, and
empty.
Then he took from a little folded paper a
long tress of dark silken hair, and, without
trusting himself to kiss it, held it firmly in the
candle. It crisped and sparkled, and sent out
a pungent odor, then turned and writhed between
his fingers, like a living thing in pain.
What part of us has earthly immortality but
our hair? It dies not with death. When all
else of human beauty has decayed beyond
corruption into the more agonizing irrecoverableness
of dust, the hair is still fresh and
beautiful, defying annihilation, and restoring
to the powerless heart the full association
of the living image. These shrinking hairs,
they feared not death, but they seemed to fear
Malbone. Nothing but the hand of man
could destroy what he was destroying; but his
hand shrank not, and it was done.
-- 076 -- p586-089
VII. AN INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION.
[figure description] Page 076.[end figure description]
AT the celebrated Oldport ball for the
French officers, the merit of each
maiden was estimated by the number of foreigners
with whom she could talk at once, for
there were more gentlemen than ladies, and
not more than half the ladies spoke French.
Here Emilia was in her glory; the ice being
once broken, officers were to her but like so
many school-girls, and she rattled away to the
admiral and the fleet captain and two or three
lieutenants at once, while others hovered behind
the circle of her immediate adorers, to
pick up the stray shafts of what passed for wit.
Other girls again drove two-in-hand, at the
most, in the way of conversation; while those
least gifted could only encounter one small
Frenchman in some safe corner, and converse
chiefly by smiles and signs.
On the whole, the evening opened gayly.
Newly arrived Frenchmen are apt to be so
unused to the familiar society of unmarried
-- 077 --
[figure description] Page 077.[end figure description]
girls, that the most innocent share in it has for
them the zest of forbidden fruit, and the most
blameless intercourse seems almost a bonne
fortune. Most of these officers were from the
lower ranks of French society, but they all
had that good-breeding which their race wears
with such ease, and can unhappily put off with
the same.
The admiral and the fleet captain were soon
turned over to Hope, who spoke French as
she did English, with quiet grace. She found
them agreeable companions, while Emilia
drifted among the elder midshipmen, who
were dazzling in gold lace if not in intellect.
Kate fell to the share of a vehement
little surgeon, who danced her out of breath.
Harry officiated as interpreter between the
governor of the State and a lively young
ensign, who yearned for the society of dignitaries.
The governor was quite aware that
he himself could not speak French; the
Frenchman was quite unaware that he himself
could not speak English; but with Harry's
aid they plunged boldly into conversation.
Their talk happened to fall on steam-engines,
English, French, American; their comparative
cost, comparative power, comparative cost
-- 078 --
[figure description] Page 078.[end figure description]
per horse power, — until Harry, who was not
very strong upon the steam-engine in his
own tongue, and was quite helpless on that
point in any other, got a good deal astray
among the numerals, and implanted some
rather wild statistics in the mind of each.
The young Frenchman was far more definite,
when requested by the governor to state in
English the precise number of men engaged
on board the corvette. With the accuracy of
his nation, he beamingly replied, “Seeshundredtousand.”
As is apt to be the case in Oldport, other
European nationalities beside the French were
represented, though the most marked foreign
accent was of course to be found among
Americans just returned. There were European
diplomatists who spoke English perfectly;
there were travellers who spoke no
English at all; and as usual each guest sought
to practise himself in the tongue he knew
least. There was the usual eagerness among
the fashionable vulgar to make acquaintance
with anything that combined broken
English and a title; and two minutes after
a Russian prince had seated himself comfortably
on a sofa beside Kate, he was
-- 079 --
[figure description] Page 079.[end figure description]
vehemently tapped on the shoulder by Mrs.
Courtenay Brash with the endearing summons:
“Why! Prince, I did n't see as you was
here. Do you set comfortable where you be?
Come over to this window, and tell all you
know!”
The prince might have felt that his summons
was abrupt, but knew not that it was
ungrammatical, and so was led away in triumph.
He had been but a month or two in
this country, and so spoke our language no
more correctly than Mrs. Brash, but only with
more grace. There was no great harm in
Mrs. Brash; like most loquacious people, she
was kind-hearted, with a tendency to corpulence
and good works. She was also afflicted
with a high color, and a chronic eruption of
diamonds. Her husband had an eye for them,
having begun life as a jeweller's apprentice,
and having developed sufficient sharpness of
vision in other directions to become a millionnaire,
and a Congressman, and to let his wife
do as she pleased.
What goes forth from the lips may vary in
dialect, but wine and oysters speak the universal
language. The supper-table brought
our party together, and they compared notes.
-- 080 --
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“Parties are very confusing,” philosophized
Hope, — “especially when waiters and partners
dress so much alike. Just now I saw an
ill-looking man elbowing his way up to Mrs.
Meredith, and I thought he was bringing her
something on a plate. Instead of that, it was
his hand he held out, and she put hers into it;
and I was told that he was one of the leaders
of society. There are very few gentlemen
here whom I could positively tell from the
waiters by their faces, and yet Harry says the
fast set are not here.”
“Talk of the angels!” said Philip. “There
come the Inglesides.”
Through the door of the supper-room they
saw entering the drawing-room one of those
pretty, fair-haired women who grow older up
to twenty-five and then remain unchanged till
sixty. She was dressed in the loveliest pale
blue silk, very low in the neck, and she seemed
to smile on all with her white teeth and her
white shoulders. This was Mrs. Ingleside.
With her came her daughter Blanche, a pretty
blonde, whose bearing seemed at first as innocent
and pastoral as her name. Her dress
was of spotless white, what there was of it; and
her skin was so snowy, you could hardly
-- 081 --
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tell where the dress ended. Her complexion
was exquisite, her eyes of the softest blue;
at twenty-three she did not look more than
seventeen; and yet there was such a contrast
between these virginal traits, and the worn,
faithless, hopeless expression, that she looked,
as Philip said, like a depraved lamb. Does it
show the higher nature of woman, that, while
“fast young men” are content to look like
well-dressed stable-boys and billiard-markers,
one may observe that girls of the corresponding
type are apt to addict themselves to white
and rosebuds, and pose themselves for falling
angels?
Mrs. Ingleside was a stray widow (from New
Orleans via Paris), into whose antecedents it
was best not to inquire too closely. After
many ups and downs, she was at present up.
It was difficult to state with certainty what bad
deed she had ever done, or what good deed.
She simply lived by her wits, and perhaps by
some want of that article in her male friends.
Her house was a sort of gentlemanly clubhouse,
where the presence of two women
offered a shade less restraint than if there had
been men alone. She was amiable and unscrupulous,
went regularly to church, and
-- 082 --
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needed only money to be the most respectable and
fastidious of women. It was always rather a
mystery who paid for her charming little dinners;
indeed, several things in her demeanor
were questionable, but as the questions were
never answered, no harm was done, and everybody
invited her because everybody else did.
Had she committed some graceful forgery to-morrow,
or some mild murder the next day,
nobody would have been surprised, and all her
intimate friends would have said it was what
they had always expected.
Meantime the entertainment went on.
“I shall not have scalloped oysters in heaven,”
lamented Kate, as she finished with
healthy appetite her first instalment.
“Are you sure you shall not?” said the
sympathetic Hope, who would have eagerly
followed Kate into Paradise with a supply of
whatever she liked best.
“I suppose you will, darling,” responded
Kate, “but what will you care? It seems hard
that those who are bad enough to long for
them should not be good enough to earn
them.”
At this moment Blanche Ingleside and her
train swept into the supper-room; the girls
-- 083 --
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cleared a passage, their attendant youths collected
chairs. Blanche tilted hers slightly
against a wall, professed utter exhaustion, and
demanded a fresh bottle of champagne in a
voice that showed no signs of weakness. Presently
a sheepish youth drew near the noisy
circle.
“Here comes that Talbot van Alsted,” said
Blanche, bursting at last into a loud whisper.
“What a goose he is, to be sure! Dear baby,
it promised its mother it would n't drink wine
for two months. Let's all drink with him. Talbot,
my boy, just in time! Fill your glass.
Stosst an!”
And Blanche and her attendant spirits in
white muslin thronged around the weak boy,
saw him charged with the three glasses that
were all his head could stand, and sent him
reeling home to his mother. Then they looked
round for fresh worlds to conquer.
“There are the Maxwells!” said Miss Ingleside,
without lowering her voice. “Who is
that party in the high-necked dress? Is she
the schoolmistress? Why do they have such
people here?. Society is getting so common,
there is no bearing it. That Emily who is
with her is too good for that slow set. She's
-- 084 --
[figure description] Page 084.[end figure description]
the school-girl we heard of at Nice, or somewhere;
she wanted to elope with somebody,
and Phil Malbone stopped her, worse luck.
She will be for eloping with us, before long.”
Emilia colored scarlet, and gave a furtive
glance at Hope, half of shame, half of triumph.
Hope looked at Blanche with surprise, made a
movement forward, but was restrained by the
crowd, while the noisy damsel broke out in a
different direction.
“How fiendishly hot it is here, though!
Jones junior, put your elbow through that
window! This champagne is boiling. What a
tiresome time we shall have to-morrow, when
the Frenchmen are gone! Ah, Count, there
you are at last! Ready for the German?
Come for me? Just primed and up to anything,
and so I tell you!”
But as Count Posen, kissing his hand to her,
squeezed his way through the crowd with Hal,
to be presented to Hope, there came over
Blanche's young face such a mingled look of
hatred and weariness and chagrin, that even
her unobserving friends saw it, and asked with
tender commiseration what was up.
The dancing recommenced. There was the
usual array of partners, distributed by
-- 085 --
[figure description] Page 085.[end figure description]
mysterious discrepancies, like soldiers' uniforms, so
that all the tall drew short, and all the short
had tall. There were the timid couples, who
danced with trembling knees and eyes cast
over their shoulders; the feeble couples, who
meandered aimlessly and got tangled in corners;
the rash couples, who tore breathlessly
through the rooms and brought up at last
against the large white waistcoat of the violoncello.
There was the professional lady-killer,
too supreme and indolent to dance, but sitting
amid an admiring bevy of fair women, where
he reared his head of raven curls, and pulled
ceaselessly his black mustache. And there
were certain young girls who, having astonished
the community for a month by the lowness
of their dresses, now brought to bear their
only remaining art, and struck everybody dumb
by appearing clothed. All these came and went
and came again; and had their day or their
night, and danced until the robust Hope went
home exhausted and left her more fragile cousins
to dance on till morning. Indeed, it was
no easy thing for them to tear themselves
away; Kate was always in demand; Philip
knew everybody, and had that latest aroma of
Paris which the soul of fashion covets; Harry
-- 086 --
[figure description] Page 086.[end figure description]
had the tried endurance which befits brothers
and lovers at balls; while Emilia's foreign
court held out till morning, and one handsome
young midshipman, in special, kept revolving
back to her after each long orbit of separation,
like a gold-laced comet.
The young people lingered extravagantly
late at that ball, for the corvette was to sail
next day, and the girls were willing to make the
most of it. As they came to the outer door,
the dawn was inexpressibly beautiful, — deep
rose melting into saffron, beneath a tremulous
morning star. With a sudden impulse, they
agreed to walk home, the fresh air seemed so
delicious. Philip and Emilia went first, outstripping
the others.
Passing the Jewish cemetery, Kate and Harry
paused a moment. The sky was almost
cloudless, the air was full of a thousand scents
and songs, the rose-tints in the sky were deepening,
the star paling, while a few vague clouds
went wandering upward, and dreamed themselves
away.
“There is a grave in that cemetery,” said
Kate, gently, “where lovers should always be
sitting. It lies behind that tall monument; I
cannot see it for the blossoming boughs. There
-- 087 --
[figure description] Page 087.[end figure description]
were two young cousins who loved each other
from childhood, but were separated, because
Jews do not allow such unions. Neither of
them was ever married; and they lived to be
very old, the one in New Orleans, the other at
the North. In their last illnesses each dreamed
of walking in the fields with the other, as in
their early days; and the telegraphic despatches
that told their deaths crossed each other
on the way. That is his monument, and her
grave was made behind it; there was no room
for a stone.”
Kate moved a step or two, that she might
see the graves. The branches opened clear.
What living lovers had met there, at this
strange hour, above the dust of lovers dead?
She saw with amazement, and walked on quickly
that Harry might not also see.
It was Emilia who sat beside the grave, her
dark hair drooping and dishevelled, her carnation
cheek still brilliant after the night's excitement;
and he who sat at her feet, grasping
her hand in both of his, while his lips poured
out passionate words to which she eagerly listened,
was Philip Malbone.
Here, upon the soil of a new nation, lay a
spot whose associations seemed already as old
-- 088 --
[figure description] Page 088.[end figure description]
as time could make them, — the last footprint
of a tribe now vanished from this island forever, —
the resting-place of a race whose very
funerals would soon be no more. Each April
the robins built their nests around these crumbling
stones, each May they reared their broods,
each June the clover blossomed, each July the
wild strawberries grew cool and red; all around
was youth and life and ecstasy, and yet the
stones bore inscriptions in an unknown language,
and the very graves seemed dead.
And lovelier than all the youth of Nature,
little Emilia sat there in the early light, her
girlish existence gliding into that drama of
passion which is older than the buried nations,
older than time, than death, than all things
save life and God.
-- 089 -- p586-102
VIII. TALKING IT OVER.
[figure description] Page 089.[end figure description]
AUNT JANE was eager to hear about the
ball, and called everybody into her breakfast-parlor
the next morning. She was still
hesitating about her bill of fare.
“I wish somebody would invent a new animal,”
she burst forth. “How those sheep
bleated last night! I know it was an expression
of shame for providing such tiresome
food.”
“You must not be so carnally minded, dear,”
said Kate. “You must be very good and
grateful, and not care for your breakfast.
Somebody says that mutton chops with wit
are a great deal better than turtle without.”
“A very foolish somebody,” pronounced
Aunt Jane. “I have had a great deal of wit
in my life, and very little turtle. Dear child,
do not excite me with impossible suggestions.
There are dropped eggs, I might have those.
They look so beautifully, if it only were not
necessary to eat them. Yes, I will certainly
-- 090 --
[figure description] Page 090.[end figure description]
have dropped eggs. I think Ruth could drop
them; she drops everything else.”
“Poor little Ruth!” said Kate. “Not yet
grown up!”
“She will never grow up,” said Aunt Jane,
“but she thinks she is a woman; she even
thinks she has a lover. O that in early life I
had provided myself with a pair of twins from
some asylum; then I should have had some
one to wait on me.”
“Perhaps they would have been married
too,” said Kate.
“They should never have been married,” retorted
Aunt Jane. “They should have signed
a paper at five years old to do no such thing.
Yesterday I told a lady that I was enraged
that a servant should presume to have a heart,
and the woman took it seriously and began to
argue with me. To think of living in a town
where one person could be so idiotic! Such a
town ought to be extinguished from the universe.”
“Auntie!” said Kate, sternly, “you must
grow more charitable.”
“Must I?” said Aunt Jane; “it will not be
at all becoming. I have thought about it;
often have I weighed it in my mind whether to
-- 091 --
[figure description] Page 091.[end figure description]
be monotonously lovely; but I have always
thrust it away. It must make life so tedious.
It is too late for me to change, — at least, anything
about me but my countenance, and that
changes the wrong way. Yet I feel so young
and fresh; I look in my glass every morning
to see if I have not a new face, but it never
comes. I am not what is called well-favored.
In fact, I am not favored at all. Tell me about
the party.”
“What shall I tell?” said Kate.
“Tell me what people were there,” said Aunt
Jane, “and how they were dressed; who were
the happiest and who the most miserable. I
think I would rather hear about the most miserable, —
at least, till I have my breakfast.”
“The most miserable person I saw,” said
Kate, “was Mrs. Meredith. It was very amusing
to hear her and Hope talk at cross-purposes.
You know her daughter Helen is in
Paris, and the mother seemed very sad about
her. A lady was asking if something or other
were true; `Too true,' said Mrs. Meredith;
`with every opportunity she has had no real
success. It was not the poor child's fault.
She was properly presented; but as yet she
has had no success at all.'
-- 092 --
[figure description] Page 092.[end figure description]
“Hope looked up, full of sympathy. She
thought Helen must be some disappointed
school-teacher, and felt an interest in her immediately.
`Will there not be another examination?
' she asked. `What an odd phrase,'
said Mrs. Meredith, looking rather disdainfully
at Hope. `No, I suppose we must give it up,
if that is what you mean. The only remaining
chance is in the skating. I had particular
attention paid to Helen's skating on that very
account. How happy shall I be, if my foresight
is rewarded!'
“Hope thought this meant physical education,
to be sure, and fancied that handsome
Helen Meredith opening a school for calisthenies
in Paris! Luckily she did not say anything.
Then the other lady said, solemnly,
`My dear Mrs. Meredith, it is too true. No
one can tell how things will turn out in society.
How often do we see girls who were not
looked at in America, and yet have a great
success in Paris; then other girls go out who
were here very much admired, and they have
no success at all.'
“Hope understood it all then, but she took
it very calmly. I was so indignant, I could
hardly help speaking. I wanted to say that it
-- 093 --
[figure description] Page 093.[end figure description]
was outrageous. The idea of American mothers
training their children for exhibition before
what everybody calls the most corrupt court in
Europe! Then if they can catch the eye of
the Emperor or the Empress by their faces or
their paces, that is called success!”
“Good Americans when they die go to
Paris,” said Philip, “so says the oracle.
Naughty Americans try it prematurely, and
go while they are alive. Then Paris casts
them out, and when they come back, their
French disrepute is their stock in trade.”
“I think,” said the cheerful Hope, “that it
is not quite so bad.” Hope always thought
things not so bad. She went on. “I was very
dull not to know what Mrs. Meredith was talking
about. Helen Meredith is a warm-hearted,
generous girl, and will not go far wrong, though
her mother is not as wise as she is well-bred.
But Kate forgets that the few hundred people
one sees here or at Paris do not represent the
nation, after all.”
“The most influential part of it,” said
Emilia.
“Are you sure, dear?” said her sister. “I
do not think they influence it half so much as
a great many people who are too busy to go to
-- 094 --
[figure description] Page 094.[end figure description]
either place. I always remember those hundred
girls at the Normal School, and that they
were not at all like Mrs. Meredith, nor would
they care to be like her, any more than she
would wish to be like them.”
“They have not had the same advantages,”
said Emilia.
“Nor the same disadvantages,” said Hope.
“Some of them are not so well bred, and none
of them speak French so well, for she speaks
exquisitely. But in all that belongs to real
training of the mind, they seem to me superior,
and that is why I think they will have
more influence.”
“None of them are rich, though, I suppose,”
said Emilia, “nor of very nice families, or they
would not be teachers. So they will not be so
prominent in society.”
“But they may yet become very prominent
in society,” said Hope, — “they or their pupils
or their children. At any rate, it is as certain
that the noblest lives will have most influence
in the end, as that two and two make four.”
“Is that certain?” said Philip. “Perhaps
there are worlds where two and two do not
make just that desirable amount.”
“I trust there are,” said Aunt Jane. “
-- 095 --
[figure description] Page 095.[end figure description]
Perhaps I was intended to be born in one of them,
and that is why my housekeeping accounts
never add up.”
Here Hope was called away, and Emilia
saucily murmured, “Sour grapes!”
“Not a bit of it!” cried Kate, indignantly.
“Hope might have anything in society she
wishes, if she would only give up some of her
own plans, and let me choose her dresses, and
her rich uncles pay for them. Count Posen
told me, only yesterday, that there was not a
girl in Oldport with such an air as hers.”
“Not Kate herself?” said Emilia, slyly.
“I?” said Kate. “What am I? A silly
chit of a thing, with about a dozen ideas in my
head, nearly every one of which was planted
there by Hope. I like the nonsense of the
world very well as it is, and without her I
should have cared for nothing else. Count
Posen asked me the other day, which country
produced on the whole the most womanly
women, France or America. He is one of the
few foreigners who expect a rational answer.
So I told him that I knew very little of Frenchwomen
personally, but that I had read French
novels ever since I was born, and there was
not a woman worthy to be compared with
-- 096 --
[figure description] Page 096.[end figure description]
Hope in any of them, except Consuelo, and
even she told lies.”
“Do not begin upon Hope,” said Aunt
Jane. “It is the only subject on which Kate
can be tedious. Tell me about the dresses.
Were people over-dressed or under-dressed?”
“Under-dressed,” said Phil. “Miss Ingleside
had a half-inch strip of muslin over her
shoulder.”
Here Philip followed Hope out of the room,
and Emilia presently followed him.
“Tell on!” said Aunt Jane. “How did
Philip enjoy himself?”
“He is easily amused, you know,” said Kate.
“He likes to observe people, and to shoot folly
as it flies.”
“It does not fly,” retorted the elder lady.
“I wish it did. You can shoot it sitting, at
least where Philip is.”
“Auntie,” said Kate, “tell me truly your
objection to Philip. I think you did not like
his parents. Had he not a good mother?”
“She was good,” said Aunt Jane, reluctantly,
“but it was that kind of goodness
which is quite offensive.”
“And did you know his father well?”
“Know him!” exclaimed Aunt Jane. “I
-- 097 --
[figure description] Page 097.[end figure description]
should think I did. I have sat up all night to
hate him.”
“That was very wrong,” said Kate, decisively.
“You do not mean that. You only
mean that you did not admire him very
much.”
“I never admired a dozen people in my life,
Kate. I once made a list of them. There
were six women, three men, and a Newfoundland
dog.”
“What happened?” said Kate. “The Israelites
died after Pharaoh, or somebody,
numbered them. Did anything happen to
yours?”
“It was worse with mine,” said Aunt Jane.
“I grew tired of some and others I forgot, till
at last there was nobody left but the dog, and
he died.”
“Was Philip's father one of them?”
“No.”
“Tell me about him,” said Kate, firmly.
“Ruth,” said the elder lady, as her young
handmaiden passed the door with her wonted
demureness, “come here; no, get me a glass
of water. Kate! I shall die of that girl. She
does some idiotic thing, and then she looks
in here with that contented, beaming look.
-- 098 --
[figure description] Page 098.[end figure description]
There is an air of baseless happiness about
her that drives me nearly frantic.”
“Never mind about that,” persisted Kate.
“Tell me about Philip's father. What was
the matter with him?”
“My dear,” Aunt Jane at last answered, —
with that fearful moderation to which she
usually resorted when even her stock of superlatives
was exhausted, — “he belonged to
a family for whom truth possessed even less
than the usual attractions.”
This neat epitaph implied the erection of a
final tombstone over the whole race, and Kate
asked no more.
Meantime Malbone sat at the western door
with Harry, and was running on with one
of his tirades, half jest, half earnest, against
American society.
“In America,” he said, “everything which
does not tend to money is thought to be
wasted, as our Quaker neighbor thinks the
children's croquet-ground wasted, because it
is not a potato field.”
“Not just!” cried Harry. “Nowhere is
there more respect for those who give their
lives to intellectual pursuits.”
“What are intellectual pursuits?” said
-- 099 --
[figure description] Page 099.[end figure description]
Philip. “Editing daily newspapers? Teaching
arithmetic to children? I see no others
flourishing hereabouts.”
“Science and literature,” answered Harry.
“Who cares for literature in America,” said
Philip, “after a man rises three inches above
the newspaper level? Nobody reads Thoreau;
only an insignificant fraction read Emerson,
or even Hawthorne. The majority of people
have hardly even heard their names. What
inducement has a writer? Nobody has any
weight in America who is not in Congress,
and nobody gets into Congress without the
necessity of bribing or button-holing men
whom he despises.”
“But you do not care for public life?” said
Harry.
“No,” said Malbone, “therefore this does not
trouble me, but it troubles you. I am content.
My digestion is good. I can always
amuse myself. Why are you not satisfied?”
“Because you are not,” said Harry. “You
are dissatisfied with men, and so you care
chiefly to amuse yourself with women and
children.”
“I dare say,” said Malbone, carelessly.
“They are usually less ungraceful and talk
better grammar.”
-- 100 --
[figure description] Page 100.[end figure description]
“But American life does not mean grace
nor grammar. We are all living for the
future. Rough work now, and the graces
by and by.”
“That is what we Americans always say,”
retorted Philip. “Everything is in the future.
What guaranty have we for that future? I see
none. We make no progress towards the
higher arts, except in greater quantities of
mediocrity. We sell larger editions of poor
books. Our artists fill larger frames and travel
farther for materials; but a ten-inch canvas
would tell all they have to say.”
“The wrong point of view,” said Hal. “If
you begin with high art, you begin at the
wrong end. The first essential for any nation
is to put the mass of the people above the
reach of want. We are all usefully employed,
if we contribute to that.”
“So is the cook usefully employed while
preparing dinner,” said Philip. “Nevertheless,
I do not wish to live in the kitchen.”
“Yet you always admire your own country,”
said Harry, “so long as you are in Europe.”
“No doubt,” said Philip. “I do not object to
the kitchen at that distance. And to tell the
truth, America looks well from Europe. No
-- 101 --
[figure description] Page 101.[end figure description]
culture, no art seems so noble as this far-off
spectacle of a self-governing people. The enthusiasm
lasts till one's return. Then there
seems nothing here but to work hard and
keep out of mischief.”
“That is something,” said Harry.
“A good deal in America,” said Phil.
“We talk about the immorality of older
countries. Did you ever notice that no class
of men are so apt to take to drinking as
highly cultivated Americans? It is a very
demoralizing position, when one's tastes outgrow
one's surroundings. Positively, I think
a man is more excusable for coveting his
neighbor's wife in America than in Europe,
because there is so little else to covet.”
“Malbone!” said Hal, “what has got into
you? Do you know what things you are saying?”
“Perfectly,” was the unconcerned reply. “I
am not arguing; I am only testifying. I
know that in Paris, for instance, I myself have
no temptations. Art and history are so delightful,
I absolutely do not care for the society
even of women; but here, where there
is nothing to do, one must have some stimulus,
and for me, who hate drinking, they are,
at least, a more refined excitement.”
-- 102 --
[figure description] Page 102.[end figure description]
“More dangerous,” said Hal. “Infinitely
more dangerous, in the morbid way in which
you look at life. What have these sickly fancies
to do with the career that opens to every
brave man in a great nation?”
“They have everything to do with it, and
there are many for whom there is no career.
As the nation develops, it must produce men
of high culture. Now there is no place for
them except as bookkeepers or pedagogues or
newspaper reporters. Meantime the incessant
unintellectual activity is only a sublime bore
to those who stand aside.”
“Then why stand aside?” persisted the
downright Harry.
“I have no place in it but a loungingplace,”
said Malbone. “I do not wish to
chop blocks with a razor. I envy those men,
born mere Americans, with no ambition in
life but to `swing a railroad' as they say at
the West. Every morning I hope to wake up
like them in the fear of God and the love of
money.”
“You may as well stop,” said Harry, coloring
a little. “Malbone, you used to be my
ideal man in my boyhood, but” —
“I am glad we have got beyond that,”
-- 103 --
[figure description] Page 103.[end figure description]
interrupted the other, cheerily, “I am only an idler
in the land. Meanwhile, I have my little interests, —
read, write, sketch —”
“Flirt?” put in Hal, with growing displeasure.
“Not now,” said Phil, patting his shoulder,
with imperturbable good-nature. “Our beloved
has cured me of that. He who has
won the pearl dives no more.”
“Do not let us speak of Hope,” said Harry.
“Everything that you have been asserting
Hope's daily life disproves.”
“That may be,” answered Malbone, heartily.
“But, Hal, I never flirted; I always despised
it. It was always a grande passion with me,
or what I took for such. I loved to be loved,
I suppose; and there was always something
new and fascinating to be explored in a human
heart, that is, a woman's.”
“Some new temple to profane?” asked
Hal, severely.
“Never!” said Philip. “I never profaned
it. If I deceived, I shared the deception, at
least for a time; and, as for sensuality, I had
none in me.”
“Did you have nothing worse? Rousseau
ends where Tom Jones begins.”
-- 104 --
[figure description] Page 104.[end figure description]
“My temperament saved me,” said Philip.
“A woman is not a woman to me, without
personal refinement.”
“Just what Rousseau said,” replied Harry.
“I act upon it,” answered Malbone. “No
one dislikes Blanche Ingleside and her demi
monde more than I.”
“You ought not,” was the retort. “You
help to bring other girls to her level.”
“Whom?” said Malbone, startled.
“Emilia.”
“Emilia?” repeated the other, coloring
crimson. “I, who have warned her against
Blanche's society.”
“And have left her no other resource,” said
Harry, coloring still more. “Malbone, you
have gained (unconsciously of course) too
much power over that girl, and the only effect
of it is, to keep her in perpetual excitement.
So she seeks Blanche, as she would any other
strong stimulant. Hope does not seem to
have discovered this, but Kate has, and I
have.”
Hope came in, and Harry went out. The
next day he came to Philip and apologized
most warmly for his unjust and inconsiderate
words. Malbone, always generous, bade him
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think no more about it, and Harry for that
day reverted strongly to his first faith. “So
noble, so high-toned,” he said to Kate. Indeed,
a man never appears more magnanimous
than in forgiving a friend who has told him
the truth.
-- 106 -- p586-119
IX. DANGEROUS WAYS.
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IT was true enough what Harry had said.
Philip Malbone's was that perilous Rousseau-like
temperament, neither sincere enough
for safety, nor false enough to alarm; the winning
tenderness that thrills and softens at the
mere neighborhood of a woman, and fascinates
by its reality those whom no hypocrisy can
deceive. It was a nature half amiable, half
voluptuous, that disarmed others, seeming itself
unarmed. He was never wholly ennobled
by passion, for it never touched him deeply
enough; and, on the other hand, he was not
hardened by the habitual attitude of passion,
for he was never really insincere. Sometimes
it seemed as if nothing stood between him and
utter profligacy but a little indolence, a little
kindness, and a good deal of caution.
“There seems no such thing as serious repentance
in me,” he had once said to Kate,
two years before, when she had upbraided him
with some desperate flirtation which had
-- 107 --
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looked as if he would carry it as far as gentlemen
did under King Charles II. “How does
remorse begin?”
“Where you are beginning,” said Kate.
“I do not perceive that,” he answered.
“My conscience seems, after all, to be only a
form of good-nature. I like to be stirred by
emotion, I suppose, and I like to study character.
But I can always stop when it is evident
that I shall cause pain to somebody. Is
there any other motive?”
“In other words,” said she, “you apply the
match, and then turn your back on the burning
house.”
Philip colored. “How unjust you are! Of
course, we all like to play with fire, but I
always put it out before it can spread. Do
you think I have no feeling?”
Kate stopped there, I suppose. Even she
always stopped soon, if she undertook to interfere
with Malbone. This charming Alcibiades
always convinced them, after the wrestling
was over, that he had not been thrown.
The only exception to this was in the case
of Aunt Jane. If she had anything in common
with Philip, — and there was a certain
element of ingenuous unconsciousness in which
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they were not so far unlike, — it only placed
them in the more complete antagonism. Perhaps
if two beings were in absolutely no respect
alike, they never could meet even for purposes
of hostility; there must be some common
ground from which the aversion may proceed.
Moreover, in this case Aunt Jane utterly disbelieved
in Malbone because she had reason to
disbelieve in his father, and the better she knew
the son the more she disliked the father retrospectively.
Philip was apt to be very heedless of such
aversions, — indeed, he had few to heed, — but
it was apparent that Aunt Jane was the only
person with whom he was not quite at ease.
Still, the solicitude did not trouble him very
much, for he instinctively knew that it was not
his particular actions which vexed her, so much
as his very temperament and atmosphere, —
things not to be changed. So he usually went
his way; and if he sometimes felt one of her
sharp retorts, could laugh it off that day and
sleep it off before the next morning.
For you may be sure that Philip was very
little troubled by inconvenient memories. He
never had to affect forgetfulness of anything.
The past slid from him so easily, he forgot
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even to try to forget. He liked to quote from
Emerson, “What have I to do with repentance?”
“What have my yesterday's errors,”
he would say, “to do with the life of to-day?”
“Everything,” interrupted Aunt Jane, “for
you will repeat them to-day, if you can.”
“Not at all,” persisted he, accepting as conversation
what she meant as a stab. “I may,
indeed, commit greater errors,” — here she
grimly nodded, as if she had no doubt of it, —
“but never just the same. To-day must take
thought for itself.”
“I wish it would,” she said, gently, and then
went on with her own thoughts while he was
silent. Presently she broke out again in her
impulsive way.
“Depend upon it,” she said, “there is very
little direct retribution in this world.”
Phil looked up, quite pleased at her indorsing
one of his favorite views. She looked, as
she always did, indignant at having said anything
to please him.
“Yes,” said she, “it is the indirect retribution
that crushes. I've seen enough of that,
God knows. Kate, give me my thimble.”
Malbone had that smooth elasticity of surface
which made even Aunt Jane's strong
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fingers slip from him as they might from a fish, or
from the soft, gelatinous stem of the water-target.
Even in this case he only laughed good-naturedly,
and went out, whistling like a
mocking-bird, to call the children round him.
Toward the more wayward and impulsive
Emilia the good lady was far more merciful.
With all Aunt Jane's formidable keenness, she
was a little apt to be disarmed by youth and
beauty, and had no very stern retributions
except for those past middle age. Emilia especially
charmed her while she repelled. There
was no getting beyond a certain point with
this strange girl, any more than with Philip;
but her depths tantalized, while his apparent
shallows were only vexatious. Emilia was usually
sweet, winning, cordial, and seemed ready
to glide into one's heart as softly as she glided
into the room; she liked to please, and found
it very easy. Yet she left the impression that
this smooth and delicate loveliness went but
an inch beyond the surface, like the soft, thin
foam that enamels yonder tract of ocean, belongs
to it, is a part of it, yet is, after all, but a
bequest of tempests, and covers only a dark
abyss of crossing currents and desolate tangles
of rootless kelp. Everybody was drawn to
-- 111 --
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her, yet not a soul took any comfort in her.
Her very voice had in it a despairing sweetness,
that seemed far in advance of her actual
history; it was an anticipated Miserere, a perpetual
dirge, where nothing had yet gone
down. So Aunt Jane, who was wont to be
perfectly decisive in her treatment of every
human being, was fluctuating and inconsistent
with Emilia. She could not help being fascinated
by the motherless child, and yet scorned
herself for even the doubting love she gave.
“Only think, auntie,” said Kate, “how you
kissed Emilia, yesterday!”
“Of course I did,” she remorsefully owned.
“I have kissed her a great many times too
often. I never will kiss her again. There is
nothing but sorrow to be found in loving her,
and her heart is no larger than her feet. To-day
she was not even pretty! If it were not
for her voice, I think I should never wish to
see her again.”
But when that soft, pleading voice came
once more, and Emilia asked perhaps for luncheon,
in tones fit for Ophelia, Aunt Jane instantly
yielded. One might as well have tried
to enforce indignation against the Babes in the
Wood.
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This perpetual mute appeal was further
strengthened by a peculiar physical habit in
Emilia, which first alarmed the household, but
soon ceased to inspire terror. She fainted
very easily, and had attacks at long intervals
akin to faintness, and lasting for several hours.
The physicians pronounced them cataleptic in
their nature, saying that they brought no danger,
and that she would certainly outgrow
them. They were sometimes produced by fatigue,
sometimes by excitement, but they
brought no agitation with them, nor any development
of abnormal powers. They simply
wrapped her in a profound repose, from which
no effort could rouse her, till the trance passed
by. Her eyes gradually closed, her voice died
away, and all movement ceased, save that her
eyelids sometimes trembled without opening,
and sweet evanescent expressions chased each
other across her face, — the shadows of thoughts
unseen. For a time she seemed to distinguish
the touch of different persons by preference or
pain; but soon even this sign of recognition
vanished, and the household could only wait
and watch, while she sank into deeper and yet
deeper repose.
There was something inexpressibly sweet,
-- 113 --
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appealing, and touching in this impenetrable
slumber, when it was at its deepest. She
looked so young, so delicate, so lovely; it was
as if she had entered into a shrine, and some
sacred curtain had been dropped to shield her
from all the cares and perplexities of life. She
lived, she breathed, and yet all the storms of
life could but beat against her powerless, as
the waves beat on the shore. Safe in this
beautiful semblance of death, — her pulse a
little accelerated, her rich color only softened,
her eyelids drooping, her exquisite mouth
curved into the sweetness it had lacked in
waking, — she lay unconscious and supreme,
the temporary monarch of the household, entranced
upon her throne. A few hours having
passed, she suddenly waked, and was a self-willed,
passionate girl once more. When she
spoke, it was with a voice wholly natural; she
had no recollection of what had happened, and
no curiosity to learn.
-- 114 -- p586-127
X. REMONSTRANCES.
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IT had been a lovely summer day, with a
tinge of autumnal coolness toward nightfall,
ending in what Aunt Jane called a “quincejelly
sunset.” Kate and Emilia sat upon the
Blue Rocks, earnestly talking.
“Promise, Emilia!” said Kate.
Emilia said nothing.
“Remember,” continued Kate, “he is Hope's
betrothed. Promise, promise, promise!”
Emilia looked into Kate's face and saw it
flushed with a generous eagerness, that called
forth an answering look in her. She tried to
speak, and the words died into silence. There
was a pause, while each watched the other.
When one soul is grappling with another for
life, such silence may last an instant too long;
and Kate soon felt her grasp slipping. Momentarily
the spell relaxed. Other thoughts
swelled up, and Emilia's eyes began to wander;
delicious memories stole in, of walks through
blossoming paths with Malbone, — of lingering
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steps, half-stifled words and sentences left unfinished; —
then, alas! of passionate caresses,—
other blossoming paths that only showed
the way to sin, but had never quite led her
there, she fancied. There was so much to tell,
more than could ever be told to Kate, infinitely
more than could ever be explained or justified.
Moment by moment, farther and farther
strayed the wandering thoughts, and when the
poor child looked in Kate's face again, the mist
between them seemed to have grown wide and
dense, as if neither eyes nor words nor hands
could ever meet again. When she spoke it
was to say something evasive and unimportant,
and her voice was as one from the grave.
In truth, Philip had given Emilia his heart
to play with at Neuchâtel, that he might beguile
her from an attachment they had all
regretted. The device succeeded. The toy
once in her hand, the passionate girl had kept
it, had clung to him with all her might; he
could not shake her off. Nor was this the
worst, for to his dismay he found himself responding
to her love with a self-abandonment
of ardor for which all former loves had been
but a cool preparation. He had not intended
this; it seemed hardly his fault: his intentions
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[figure description] Page 116.[end figure description]
had been good, or at least not bad. This
piquant and wonderful fruit of nature, this
girlish soul, he had merely touched it and it
was his. Its mere fragrance was intoxicating.
Good God! what should he do with it?
No clear answer coming, he had drifted
on with that terrible facility for which years
of self-indulged emotion had prepared him.
Each step, while it was intended to be the last,
only made some other last step needful.
He had begun wrong, for he had concealed
his engagement, fancying that he could secure
a stronger influence over this young girl without
the knowledge. He had come to her
simply as a friend of her Transatlantic kindred;
and she, who was always rather indifferent
to them, asked no questions, nor made the
discovery till too late. Then, indeed, she had
burst upon him with an impetuous despair that
had alarmed him. He feared, not that she
would do herself any violence, for she had a
childish dread of death, but that she would
show some desperate animosity toward Hope,
whenever they should meet. After a long
struggle, he had touched, not her sense of justice,
for she had none, but her love for him;
he had aroused her tenderness and her pride.
-- 117 --
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Without his actual assurance, she yet believed
that he would release himself in some way
from his betrothal, and love only her.
Malbone had fortunately great control over
Emilia when near her, and could thus keep the
sight of this stormy passion from the pure and
unconscious Hope. But a new distress opened
before him, from the time when he again
touched Hope's hand. The close intercourse
of the voyage had given him for the time
almost a surfeit of the hot-house atmosphere
of Emilia's love. The first contact of Hope's
cool, smooth fingers, the soft light of her clear
eyes, the breezy grace of her motions, the roseodors
that clung around her, brought back all
his early passion. Apart from this voluptuousness
of the heart into which he had fallen,
Malbone's was a simple and unspoiled nature;
he had no vices, and had always won popularity
too easily to be obliged to stoop for it; so
all that was noblest in him paid allegiance to
Hope. From the moment they again met, his
wayward heart reverted to her. He had been
in a dream, he said to himself; he would conquer
it and be only hers; he would go away
with her into the forests and green fields she
loved, or he would share in the life of
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[figure description] Page 118.[end figure description]
usefulness for which she yearned. But then, what
was he to do with this little waif from the
heart's tropics, — once tampered with, in an
hour of mad dalliance, and now adhering inseparably
to his life? Supposing him ready
to separate from her, could she be detached
from him?
Kate's anxieties, when she at last hinted
them to Malbone, only sent him further into
revery. “How is it,” he asked himself, “that
when I only sought to love and be loved, I
have thus entangled myself in the fate of
others? How is one's heart to be governed?
Is there any such governing? Mlle. Clairon
complained that, so soon as she became seriously
attached to any one, she was sure to
meet somebody else whom she liked better.
Have human hearts,” he said, “or at least, has
my heart, no more stability than this?”
It did not help the matter when Emilia went
to stay awhile with Mrs. Meredith. The event
came about in this way. Hope and Kate had
been to a dinner-party, and were as usual reciting
their experiences to Aunt Jane.
“Was it pleasant?” said that sympathetic
lady.
“It was one of those dreadfully dark
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[figure description] Page 119.[end figure description]
dining-rooms,” said Hope, seating herself at the open
window.
“Why do they make them look so like
tombs?” said Kate.
“Because,” said her aunt, “most Americans
pass from them to the tomb, after eating such
indigestible things. There is a wish for a gentle
transition.”
“Aunt Jane,” said Hope, “Mrs. Meredith
asks to have a little visit from Emilia. Do you
think she had better go?”
“Mrs. Meredith?” asked Aunt Jane. “Is
that woman alive yet?”
“Why, auntie!” said Kate. “We were talking
about her only a week ago.”
“Perhaps so,” conceded Aunt Jane, reluctantly.
“But it seems to me she has great
length of days!”
“How very improperly you are talking,
dear!” said Kate. “She is not more than
forty, and you are —”
“Fifty-four,” interrupted the other.
“Then she has not seen nearly so many days
as you.”
“But they are such long days! That is
what I must have meant. One of her days is
as long as three of mine. She is so tiresome!”
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[figure description] Page 120.[end figure description]
“She does not tire you very often,” said
Kate.
“She comes once a year,” said Aunt Jane.
“And then it is not to see me. She comes
out of respect to the memory of my great-aunt,
with whom Talleyrand fell in love, when he
was in America, before Mrs. Meredith was
born. Yes, Emilia may as well go.”
So Emilia went. To provide her with companionship,
Mrs. Meredith kindly had Blanche
Ingleside to stay there also. Blanche stayed
at different houses a good deal. To do her
justice, she was very good company, when put
upon her best behavior, and beyond the reach
of her demure mamma. She was always in
spirits, often good-natured, and kept everything
in lively motion, you may be sure. She found
it not unpleasant, in rich houses, to escape some
of those little domestic parsimonies which the
world saw not in her own; and to secure this
felicity she could sometimes lay great restraints
upon herself, for as much as twenty-four hours.
She seemed a little out of place, certainly,
amid the precise proprieties of Mrs. Meredith's
establishment. But Blanche and her
mother still held their place in society, and it
was nothing to Mrs. Meredith who came to
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[figure description] Page 121.[end figure description]
her doors, but only from what other doors
they came.
She would have liked to see all “the best
houses” connected by secret galleries or underground
passages, of which she and a few others
should hold the keys. A guest properly presented
could then go the rounds of all unerringly,
leaving his card at each, while improper
acquaintances in vain howled for admission at
the outer wall. For the rest, her ideal of social
happiness was a series of perfectly ordered
entertainments, at each of which there should
be precisely the same guests, the same topics,
the same supper, and the same ennui.
-- 122 -- p586-135
XI. DESCENSUS AVERNI.
[figure description] Page 122.[end figure description]
MALBONE stood one morning on the
pier behind the house. A two days'
fog was dispersing. The southwest breeze
rippled the deep blue water; sailboats, blue,
red, and green, were darting about like white-winged
butterflies; sloops passed and repassed,
cutting the air with the white and slender
points of their gaff-topsails. The liberated
sunbeams spread and penetrated everywhere,
and even came up to play (reflected from the
water) beneath the shadowy, overhanging
counters of dark vessels. Beyond, the atmosphere
was still busy in rolling away its vapors,
brushing the last gray fringes from the low
hills, and leaving over them only the thinnest
aerial veil. Farther down the bay, the pale
tower of the crumbling fort was now shrouded,
now revealed, then hung with floating lines of
vapor as with banners.
Hope came down on the pier to Malbone,
who was looking at the boats. He saw with
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[figure description] Page 123.[end figure description]
surprise that her calm brow was a little clouded,
her lips compressed, and her eyes full of
tears.
“Philip,” she said, abruptly, “do you love
me?”
“Do you doubt it?” said he, smiling, a little
uneasily.
Fixing her eyes upon him, she said, more
seriously: “There is a more important question,
Philip. Tell me truly, do you care about
Emilia?”
He started at the words, and looked eagerly
in her face for an explanation. Her expression
only showed the most anxious solicitude.
For one moment the wild impulse came up
in his mind to put an entire trust in this truthful
woman, and tell her all. Then the habit of
concealment came back to him, the dull hopelessness
of a divided duty, and the impossibility
of explanations. How could he justify
himself to her when he did not really know
himself? So he merely said, “Yes.”
“She is your sister,” he added, in an explanatory
tone, after a pause; and despised himself
for the subterfuge. It is amazing how
long a man may be false in action before he
ceases to shrink from being false in words.
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“Philip,” said the unsuspecting Hope, “I
knew that you cared about her. I have seen
you look at her with so much affection; and
then again I have seen you look cold and
almost stern. She notices it, I am sure she
does, this changeableness. But this is not
why I ask the question. I think you must
have seen something else that I have been
observing, and if you care about her, even for
my sake, it is enough.”
Here Philip started, and felt relieved.
“You must be her friend,” continued Hope,
eagerly. “She has changed her whole manner
and habits very fast. Blanche Ingleside
and that set seem to have wholly controlled
her, and there is something reckless in all her
ways. You are the only person who can help
her.”
“How?”
“I do not know how,” said Hope, almost
impatiently. “You know how. You have
wonderful influence. You saved her before,
and will do it again. I put her in your
hands.”
“What can I do for her?” asked he, with a
strange mingling of terror and delight.
“Everything,” said she. “If she has your
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[figure description] Page 125.[end figure description]
society, she will not care for those people, so
much her inferiors in character. Devote yourself
to her for a time.”
“And leave you?” said Philip, hesitatingly.
“Anything, anything,” said she. “If I do
not see you for a month, I can bear it. Only
promise me two things. First, that you will
go to her this very day. She dines with Mrs.
Ingleside.”
Philip agreed.
“Then,” said Hope, with saddened tones,
“you must not say it was I who sent you.
Indeed you must not. That would spoil all.
Let her think that your own impulse leads
you, and then she will yield. I know Emilia
enough for that.”
Malbone paused, half in ecstasy, half in dismay.
Were all the events of life combining to
ruin or to save him? This young girl, whom
he so passionately loved, was she to be thrust
back into his arms, and was he to be told to
clasp her and be silent? And that by Hope,
and in the name of duty?
It seemed a strange position, even for him
who was so eager for fresh experiences and
difficult combinations. At Hope's appeal he
was to risk Hope's peace forever; he was to
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[figure description] Page 126.[end figure description]
make her sweet sisterly affection its own executioner.
In obedience to her love he must
revive Emilia's. The tender intercourse which
he had been trying to renounce as a crime
must be rebaptized as duty. Was ever a man
placed, he thought, in a position so inextricable,
so disastrous? What could he offer
Emilia? How could he explain to her his
position? He could not even tell her that
it was at Hope's command he sought her.
He who is summoned to rescue a drowning
man, knowing that he himself may go down
with that inevitable clutch around his neck, is
placed in some such situation as Philip's. Yet
Hope had appealed to him so simply, had
trusted him so nobly! Suppose that, by any
self-control, or wisdom, or unexpected aid of
Heaven, he could serve both her and Emilia,
was it not his duty? What if it should prove
that he was right in loving them both, and
had only erred when he cursed himself for
tampering with their destinies? Perhaps,
after all, the Divine Love had been guiding
him, and at some appointed signal all these
complications were to be cleared, and he and
his various loves were somehow to be ingeniously
provided for, and all be made happy
ever after.
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He really grew quite tender and devout
over these meditations. Phil was not a conceited
fellow, by any means, but he had been
so often told by women that their love for him
had been a blessing to their souls, that he
quite acquiesced in being a providential agent
in that particular direction. Considered as a
form of self-sacrifice, it was not without its
pleasures.
Malbone drove that afternoon to Mrs. Ingleside's
charming abode, whither a few ladies
were wont to resort, and a great many gentlemen.
He timed his call between the hours
of dining and driving, and made sure that
Emilia had not yet emerged. Two or three
equipages beside his own were in waiting at the
gate, and gay voices resounded from the house.
A servant received him at the door, and taking
him for a tardy guest, ushered him at once into
the dining-room. He was indifferent to
this, for he had been too often sought as a
guest by Mrs. Ingleside to stand on any ceremony
beneath her roof.
That fair hostess, in all the beauty of her
shoulders, rose to greet him, from a table
where six or eight guests yet lingered over
flowers and wine. The gentlemen were
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[figure description] Page 128.[end figure description]
smoking, and some of the ladies were trying to
look at ease with cigarettes. Malbone knew
the whole company, and greeted them with
his accustomed ease. He would not have
been embarrassed if they had been the Forty
Thieves. Some of them, indeed, were not so
far removed from that fabled band, only it was
their fortunes, instead of themselves, that lay
in the jars of oil.
“You find us all here,” said Mrs. Ingleside,
sweetly. “We will wait till the gentlemen
finish their cigars, before driving.”
“Count me in, please,” said Blanche, in her
usual vein of frankness. “Unless mamma
wishes me to conclude my weed on the Avenue.
It would be fun, though. Fancy the
dismay of the Frenchmen and the dowagers!”
“And old Lambert,” said one of the other
girls, delightedly.
“Yes,” said Blanche. “The elderly party
from the rural districts, who talks to us about
the domestic virtues of the wife of his youth.”
“Thinks women should cruise with a broom
at their mast-heads, like Admiral somebody in
England,” said another damsel, who was rolling
a cigarette for a midshipman.
“You see we do not follow the English
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[figure description] Page 129.[end figure description]
style,” said the smooth hostess to Philip.
“Ladies retiring after dinner! After all, it
is a coarse practice. You agree with me,
Mr. Malbone?”
“Speak your mind,” said Blanche, coolly.
“Don't say yes if you'd rather not. Because
we find a thing a bore, you've no call to say
so.”
“I always say,” continued the matron, “that
the presence of woman is needed as a refining
influence.”
Malbone looked round for the refining influences.
Blanche was tilted back in her chair,
with one foot on the rung of the chair before
her, resuming a loud-toned discourse with
Count Posen as to his projected work on
American society. She was trying to extort
a promise that she should appear in its pages,
which, as we all remember, she did. One of
her attendant nymphs sat leaning her elbows
on the table, “talking horse” with a gentleman
who had an undoubted professional claim to a
knowledge of that commodity. Another, having
finished her manufactured cigarette, was
making the grinning midshipman open his
lips wider and wider to receive it. Mrs. Ingleside
was talking in her mincing way with a
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[figure description] Page 130.[end figure description]
Jew broker, whose English was as imperfect
as his morals, and who needed nothing to
make him a millionnaire but a turn of bad
luck for somebody else. Half the men in the
room would have felt quite ill at ease in any
circle of refined women, but there was not one
who did not feel perfectly unembarrassed
around Mrs. Ingleside's board.
“Upon my word,” thought Malbone, “I
never fancied the English after-dinner practice,
any more than did Napoleon. But if
this goes on, it is the gentlemen who ought to
withdraw. Cannot somebody lead the way to
the drawing-room, and leave the ladies to finish
their cigars?”
Till now he had hardly dared to look at
Emilia. He saw with a thrill of love that she
was the one person in the room who appeared
out of place or ill at ease. She did not glance
at him, but held her cigarette in silence and
refused to light it. She had boasted to him
once of having learned to smoke at school.
“What's the matter, Emmy?” suddenly
exclaimed Blanche. “Are you under a cloud,
that you don't blow one?”
“Blanche, Blanche,” said her mother, in
sweet reproof. “Mr. Malbone, what shall I
-- 131 --
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do with this wild girl? Such a light way of
talking! But I can assure you that she is
really very fond of the society of intellectual,
superior men. I often tell her that they are,
after all, her most congenial associates. More
so than the young and giddy.”
“You'd better believe it,” said the unabashed
damsel. “Take notice that whenever
I go to a dinner-party I look round for a clergyman
to drink wine with.”
“Incorrigible!” said the caressing mother.
“Mr. Malbone would hardly imagine you had
been bred in a Christian land.”
“I have, though,” retorted Blanche. “My
esteemed parent always accustomed me to
give up something during Lent, — champagne,
or the New York Herald, or something.”
The young men roared, and, had time and
cosmetics made it possible, Mrs. Ingleside
would have blushed becomingly. After all,
the daughter was the better of the two. Her
bluntness was refreshing beside the mother's
suavity; she had a certain generosity, too,
and in a case of real destitution would have
lent her best ear-rings to a friend.
By this time Malbone had edged himself to
Emilia's side. “Will you drive with me?” he
murmured in an undertone.
-- 132 --
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She nodded slightly, abruptly, and he withdrew
again.
“It seems barbarous,” said he aloud, “to
break up the party. But I must claim my
promised drive with Miss Emilia.”
Blanche looked up, for once amazed, having
heard a different programme arranged. Count
Posen looked up also. But he thought he
must have misunderstood Emilia's acceptance
of his previous offer to drive her; and as he
prided himself even more on his English than
on his gallantry, he said no more. It was no
great matter. Young Jones's dog-cart was at
the door, and always opened eagerly its arms
to anybody with a title.
-- 133 -- p586-146
XII. A NEW ENGAGEMENT.
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TEN days later Philip came into Aunt
Jane's parlor, looking excited and gloomy,
with a letter in his hand. He put it down on
her table without its envelope, — a thing that
always particularly annoyed her. A letter
without its envelope, she was wont to say,
was like a man without a face, or a key without
a string, — something incomplete, preposterous.
As usual, however, he strode across
her prejudices, and said, “I have something to
tell you. It is a fact.”
“Is it?” said Aunt Jane, curtly. “That is
refreshing in these times.”
“A good beginning,” said Kate. “Go on.
You have prepared us for something incredible.”
“You will think it so,” said Malbone.
“Emilia is engaged to Mr. John Lambert.”
And he went out of the room.
“Good Heavens!” said Aunt Jane, taking
off her spectacles. “What a man! He is
-- 134 --
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ugly enough to frighten the neighboring
crows. His face looks as if it had fallen
together out of chaos, and the features had
come where it had pleased Fate. There is a
look of industrious nothingness about him,
such as busy dogs have. I know the whole
family. They used to bake our bread.”
“I suppose they are good and sensible,”
said Kate.
“Like boiled potatoes, my dear,” was the
response, — “wholesome but perfectly uninteresting.”
“Is he of that sort?” asked Kate.
“No,” said her aunt; “not uninteresting,
but ungracious. But I like an ungracious man
better than one like Philip, who hangs over
young girls like a soft-hearted avalanche. This
Lambert will govern Emilia, which is what
she needs.”
“She will never love him,” said Kate,
“which is the one thing she needs. There
is nothing that could not be done with Emilia
by any person with whom she was in love;
and nothing can ever be done with her by
anybody else. No good will ever come of
this, and I hope she will never marry him.”
With this unusual burst, Kate retreated to
-- 135 --
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Hope. Hope took the news more patiently
than any one, but with deep solicitude. A
worldly marriage seemed the natural result
of the Ingleside influence, but it had not occurred
to anybody that it would come so soon.
It had not seemed Emilia's peculiar temptation;
and yet nobody could suppose that she
looked at John Lambert through any glamour
of the affections.
Mr. John Lambert was a millionnaire, a
politician, and a widower. The late Mrs.
Lambert had been a specimen of that cheerful
hopelessness of temperament that one finds
abundantly developed among the middle-aged
women of country towns. She enjoyed her
daily murders in the newspapers, and wept
profusely at the funerals of strangers. On
every occasion, however felicitous, she offered
her condolences in a feeble voice, that seemed
to have been washed a great many times and
to have faded. But she was a good manager,
a devoted wife, and was more cheerful at home
than elsewhere, for she had there plenty of
trials to exercise her eloquence, and not enough
joy to make it her duty to be doleful. At last
her poor, meek, fatiguing voice faded out altogether,
and her husband mourned her as
-- 136 --
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heartily as she would have bemoaned the
demise of the most insignificant neighbor.
After her death, being left childless, he had
nothing to do but to make money, and he
naturally made it. Having taken his primary
financial education in New England, he graduated
at that great business university, Chicago,
and then entered on the public practice
of wealth in New York.
Aunt Jane had perhaps done injustice to
the personal appearance of Mr. John Lambert.
His features were irregular, but not insignificant,
and there was a certain air of slow
command about him, which made some persons
call him handsome. He was heavily
built, with a large, well-shaped head, light
whiskers tinged with gray, and a sort of dusty
complexion. His face was full of little curved
wrinkles, as if it were a slate just ruled for
sums in long division, and his small blue eyes
winked anxiously a dozen different ways, as
if they were doing the sums. He seemed to
bristle with memorandum-books, and kept
drawing them from every pocket, to put
something down. He was slow of speech,
and his very heaviness of look added to the
impression of reserved power about the man.
-- 137 --
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All his career in life had been a solid progress,
and his boldest speculations seemed securer
than the legitimate business of less potent
financiers. Beginning business life by peddling
gingerbread on a railway train, he had
developed such a genius for railway management
as some men show for chess or for virtue;
and his accumulating property had the
momentum of a planet.
He had read a good deal at odd times, and
had seen a great deal of men. His private
morals were unstained, he was equable and
amiable, had strong good sense, and never got
beyond his depth. He had travelled in Europe
and brought home many statistics, some
new thoughts, and a few good pictures selected
by his friends. He spent his money liberally
for the things needful to his position,
owned a yacht, bred trotting-horses, and had
founded a theological school.
He submitted to these and other social observances
from a vague sense of duty as an
American citizen; his real interest lay in
business and in politics. Yet he conducted
these two vocations on principles diametrically
opposite. In business he was more honest
than the average; in politics he had no
-- 138 --
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conception of honesty, for he could see no difference
between a politician and any other merchandise.
He always succeeded in business,
for he thoroughly understood its principles;
in politics he always failed in the end, for he
recognized no principles at all. In business
he was active, resolute, and seldom deceived;
in politics he was equally active, but was apt
to be irresolute, and was deceived every day
of his life. In both cases it was not so much
from love of power that he labored, as from
the excitement of the game. The larger the
scale the better he liked it; a large railroad
operation, a large tract of real estate, a big
and noisy statesman, — these investments he
found irresistible.
On which of his two sets of principles he
would manage a wife remained to be proved.
It is the misfortune of what are called selfmade
men in America, that, though early accustomed
to the society of men of the world,
they often remain utterly unacquainted with
women of the world, until those charming
perils are at last sprung upon them in full
force, at New York or Washington. John
Lambert at forty was as absolutely ignorant
of the qualities and habits of a cultivated
-- 139 --
[figure description] Page 139.[end figure description]
woman as of the details of her toilet. The
plain domesticity of his departed wife he had
understood and prized; he remembered her
household ways as he did her black alpaca
dress; indeed, except for that item of apparel,
she was not so unlike himself. In later years
he had seen the women of society; he had
heard them talk; he had heard men talk about
them, wittily or wickedly, at the clubs; he
had perceived that a good many of them
wished to marry him, and yet, after all, he
knew no more of them than of the rearing of
humming-birds of orchids, — dainty, tropical
things which he allowed his gardener to raise,
he keeping his hands off, and only paying the
bills. Whether there was in existence a class
of women who were both useful and refined,—
any intermediate type between the butterfly
and the drudge, — was a question which
he had sometimes asked himself, without having
the materials to construct a reply.
With imagination thus touched and heart
unfilled, this man had been bewitched from
the very first moment by Emilia. He kept it
to himself, and heard in silence the criticisms
made at the club-windows. To those perpetual
jokes about marriage, which are showered
-- 140 --
[figure description] Page 140.[end figure description]
with such graceful courtesy about the path
of widowers, he had no reply; or at most
would only admit that he needed some elegant
woman to preside over his establishment,
and that he had better take her young, as having
habits less fixed. But in his secret soul
he treasured every tone of this girl's voice,
every glance of her eye, and would have kept
in a casket of gold and diamonds the little
fragrant glove she once let fall. He envied
the penniless and brainless boys, who, with
ready gallantry, pushed by him to escort her
to her carriage; and he lay awake at night to
form into words the answer he ought to have
made, when she threw at him some careless
phrase, and gave him the opportunity to blunder.
And she, meanwhile, unconscious of his passion,
went by him in her beauty, and caught
him in the net she never threw. Emilia
was always piquant, because she was indifferent;
she had never made an effort in her
life, and she had no respect for persons. She
was capable of marrying for money, perhaps,
but the sacrifice must all be completed in a
single vow. She would not tutor nor control
herself for the purpose. Hand and heart
-- 141 --
[figure description] Page 141.[end figure description]
must be duly transferred, she supposed, whenever
the time was up; but till then she must
be free.
This with her was not art, but necessity;
yet the most accomplished art could have
devised nothing so effectual to hold her lover.
His strong sense had always protected him
from the tricks of matchmaking mammas and
their guileless maids. Had Emilia made one
effort to please him, once concealed a dislike,
once affected a preference, the spell might
have been broken. Had she been his slave,
he might have become a very unyielding
or a very heedless despot. Making him her
slave, she kept him at the very height of bliss.
This king of railways and purchaser of statesmen,
this man who made or wrecked the fortunes
of others by his whim, was absolutely
governed by a reckless, passionate, inexperienced,
ignorant girl.
And this passion was made all the stronger
by being a good deal confined to his own
breast. Somehow it was very hard for him to
talk sentiment to Emilia; he instinctively
saw she disliked it, and indeed he liked her
for not approving the stiff phrases which were
all he could command. Nor could he find
-- 142 --
[figure description] Page 142.[end figure description]
any relief of mind in talking with others
about her. It enraged him to be clapped on
the back and congratulated by his compeers;
and he stopped their coarse jokes, often rudely
enough. As for the young men at the club,
he could not bear to hear them mention his
darling's name, however courteously. He
knew well enough that for them the betrothal
had neither dignity nor purity; that
they held it to be as much a matter of bargain
and sale as their worst amours. He
would far rather have talked to the theological
professors whose salaries he paid, for he
saw that they had a sort of grave, formal tradition
of the sacredness of marriage. And he
had a right to claim that to him it was sacred,
at least as yet; all the ideal side of his nature
was suddenly developed; he walked in a
dream; he even read Tennyson.
Sometimes he talked a little to his future
brother-in-law, Harry, — assuming, as lovers
are wont, that brothers see sisters on their
ideal side. This was quite true of Harry and
Hope, but not at all true as regarded Emilia.
She seemed to him simply a beautiful and ungoverned
girl whom he could not respect, and
whom he therefore found it very hard to
-- 143 --
[figure description] Page 143.[end figure description]
idealize. Therefore he heard with a sort of sadness
the outpourings of generous devotion from
John Lambert.
“I don't know how it is, Henry,” the merchant
would gravely say, “I can't get rightly
used to it, that I feel so strange. Honestly,
now, I feel as if I was beginning life over
again. It ain't a selfish feeling, so I know
there's some good in it. I used to be selfish
enough, but I ain't so to her. You may not
think it, but if it would make her happy, I believe
I could lie down and let her carriage roll
over me. By —, I would build her a palace
to live in, and keep the lodge at the gate myself,
just to see her pass by. That is, if she was
to live in it alone by herself. I could n't stand
sharing her. It must be me or nobody.”
Probably there was no male acquaintance
of the parties, however hardened, to whom
these fine flights would have seemed more
utterly preposterous than to the immediate
friend and prospective bridesmaid, Miss
Blanche Ingleside. To that young lady,
trained sedulously by a devoted mother, life
was really a serious thing. It meant the full
rigor of the marriage market, tempered only
by dancing and new dresses. There was a
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[figure description] Page 144.[end figure description]
stern sense of duty beneath all her robing and
disrobing; she conscientiously did what was
expected of her, and took her little amusements
meanwhile. It was supposed that most
of the purchasers in the market preferred slang
and bare shoulders, and so she favored them
with plenty of both. It was merely the law
of supply and demand. Had John Lambert
once hinted that he would accept her in decent
black, she would have gone to the next
ball as a Sister of Charity; but where was
the need of it, when she and her mother both
knew that, had she appeared as the Veiled
Prophet of Khorassan, she would not have
won him? So her only resource was a cheerful
acquiescence in Emilia's luck, and a judicious
propitiation of the accepted favorite.
“I would n't mind playing Virtue Rewarded
myself, young woman,” said Blanche, “at such
a scale of prices. I would do it even to so
slow an audience as old Lambert. But you
see, it is n't my line. Don't forget your humble
friends when you come into your property,
that's all.” Then the tender coterie of innocents
entered on some preliminary consideration
of wedding-dresses.
When Emilia came home, she dismissed the
-- 145 --
[figure description] Page 145.[end figure description]
whole matter lightly as a settled thing, evaded
all talk with Aunt Jane, and coolly said
to Kate that she had no objection to Mr. Lambert,
and might as well marry him as anybody
else.
“I am not like you and Hal, you know,”
said she. “I have no fancy for love in a cottage.
I never look well in anything that is
not costly. I have not a taste that does not
imply a fortune. What is the use of love?
One marries for love, and is unhappy ever
after. One marries for money, and perhaps
gets love after all. I dare say Mr. Lambert
loves me, though I do not see why he should.”
“I fear he does,” said Kate, almost severely.
“Fear?” said Emilia.
“Yes,” said Kate. “It is an unequal bargain,
where one side does all the loving.”
“Don't be troubled,” said Emilia. “I dare
say he will not love me long. Nobody ever
did!” And her eyes filled with tears which
she dashed away angrily, as she ran up to her
room.
It was harder yet for her to talk with Hope,
but she did it, and that in a very serious mood.
She had never been so open with her sister.
“Aunt Jane once told me,” she said, “that
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[figure description] Page 146.[end figure description]
my only safety was in marrying a good man.
Now I am engaged to one.”
“Do you love him, Emilia?” asked Hope,
gravely.
“Not much,” said Emilia, honestly. “But
perhaps I shall, by and by.”
“Emilia,” cried Hope, “there is no such
thing as happiness in a marriage without
love.”
“Mine is not without love,” the girl answered.
“He loves me. It frightens me to
see how much he loves me. I can have the
devotion of a lifetime, if I will. Perhaps it is
hard to receive it in such a way, but I can
have it. Do you blame me very much?”
Hope hesitated. “I cannot blame you so
much, my child,” she said, “as if I thought
it were money for which you cared. It seems
to me that there must be something beside
that, and yet —”
“O Hope, how I thank you,” interrupted
Emilia. “It is not money. You know I do
not care about money, except just to buy my
clothes and things. At least, I do not care
about so much as he has, — more than a million
dollars, only think! Perhaps they said
two million. Is it wrong for me to marry him,
just because he has that?”
-- 147 --
[figure description] Page 147.[end figure description]
“Not if you love him.”
“I do not exactly love him, but O Hope, I
cannot tell you about it. I am not so frivolous
as you think. I want to do my duty. I
want to make you happy too: you have been
so sweet to me.”
“Did you think it would make me happy to
have you married?” asked Hope, surprised,
and kissing again and again the young, sad
face. And the two girls went upstairs together
brought for the moment into more
sisterly nearness by the very thing that had
seemed likely to set them forever apart.
-- 148 -- p586-161
XIII. DREAMING DREAMS.
[figure description] Page 148.[end figure description]
SO short was the period between Emilia's
betrothal and her marriage, that Aunt
Jane's sufferings over trousseau and visits did
not last long. Mr. Lambert's society was the
worst thing to bear.
“He makes such long calls!” she said, despairingly.
“He should bring an almanac
with him to know when the days go by.”
“But Harry and Philip are here all the
time,” said Kate, the accustomed soother.
“Harry is quiet, and Philip keeps out of the
way lately,” she answered. “But I always
thought lovers the most inconvenient thing
about a house. They are more troublesome
than the mice, and all those people who live
in the wainscot; for though the lovers make
less noise, yet you have to see them.”
“A necessary evil, dear,” said Kate, with
much philosophy.
“I am not sure,” said the complainant.
“They might be excluded in the deed of a
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[figure description] Page 149.[end figure description]
house, or by the terms of the lease. The
next house I take, I shall say to the owner,
`Have you a good well of water on the premises?
Are you troubled with rats or lovers?'
That will settle it.”
It was true, what Aunt Jane said about
Malbone. He had changed his habits a good
deal. While the girls were desperately busy
about the dresses, he beguiled Harry to the
club, and sat on the piazza, talking sentiment
and sarcasm, regardless of hearers.
“When we are young,” he would say, “we
are all idealists in love. Every imaginative
boy has such a passion, while his intellect is
crude and his senses indifferent. It is the
height of bliss. All other pleasures are not
worth its pains. With older men this ecstasy
of the imagination is rare; it is the senses
that clutch or reason which holds.”
“Is that an improvement?” asked some
juvenile listener.
“No!” said Philip, strongly. “Reason is
cold and sensuality hateful; a man of any
feeling must feed his imagination; there must
be a woman of whom he can dream.”
“That is,” put in some more critical auditor,
“whom he can love as a woman loves a man.”
-- 150 --
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“For want of the experience of such a passion,”
Malbone went on, unheeding, “nobody
comprehends Petrarch. Philosophers and sensualists
all refuse to believe that his dream of
Laura went on, even when he had a mistress
and a child. Why not? Every one must
have something to which his dreams can cling,
amid the degradations of actual life, and this
tie is more real than the degradation; and if
he holds to the tie, it will one day save him.”
“What is the need of the degradation?”
put in the clear-headed Harry.
“None, except in weakness,” said Philip.
“A stronger nature may escape it. Good
God! do I not know how Petrarch must
have felt? What sorrow life brings! Suppose
a man hopelessly separated from one
whom he passionately loves. Then, as he
looks up at the starry sky, something says to
him: `You can bear all these agonies of privation,
loss of life, loss of love, — what are
they? If the tie between you is what you
thought, neither life nor death, neither folly
nor sin, can keep her forever from you.'
Would that one could always feel so! But
I am weak. Then comes impulse, it thirsts
for some immediate gratification; I yield, and
-- 151 --
[figure description] Page 151.[end figure description]
plunge into any happiness since I cannot obtain
her. Then comes quiet again, with the
stars, and I bitterly reproach myself for needing
anything more than that stainless ideal.
And so, I fancy, did Petrarch.”
Philip was getting into a dangerous mood
with his sentimentalism. No lawful passion
can ever be so bewildering or ecstatic as an
unlawful one. For that which is right has
all the powers of the universe on its side, and
can afford to wait; but the wrong, having all
those vast forces against it, must hurry to its
fulfilment, reserve nothing, concentrate all its
ecstasies upon to-day. Malbone, greedy of
emotion, was drinking to the dregs a passion
that could have no to-morrow.
Sympathetic persons are apt to assume that
every refined emotion must be ennobling. This
is not true of men like Malbone, voluptuaries
of the heart. He ordinarily got up a passion
very much as Lord Russell got up an appetite,—
he, of Spence's Anecdotes, who went out
hunting for that sole purpose and left the
chase when the sensation came. Malbone
did not leave his more spiritual chase so soon,—
it made him too happy. Sometimes, indeed,
when he had thus caught his emotion,
-- 152 --
[figure description] Page 152.[end figure description]
it caught him in return, and for a few moments
made him almost unhappy. This he
liked best of all; he nursed the delicious pain,
knowing that it would die out soon enough,
there was no need of hurrying it to a close.
At least, there had never been need for such
solicitude before.
Except for his genius for keeping his own
counsel, every acquaintance of Malbone's
would have divined the meaning of these
reveries. As it was, he was called whimsical
and sentimental, but he was a man of sufficiently
assured position to have whims of
his own, and could even treat himself to an
emotion or so, if he saw fit. Besides, he
talked well to anybody on anything, and was
admitted to exhibit, for a man of literary
tastes, a good deal of sense. If he had engaged
himself to a handsome schoolmistress,
it was his fancy, and he could afford it. Moreover
she was well connected, and had an air.
And what more natural than that he should
stand at the club-window and watch, when his
young half-sister (that was to be) drove by
with John Lambert? So every afternoon he
saw them pass in a vehicle of lofty description,
with two wretched appendages in dark
-- 153 --
[figure description] Page 153.[end figure description]
blue broadcloth, who sat with their backs
turned to their masters, kept their arms
folded, and nearly rolled off at every corner.
Hope would have dreaded the close neighborhood
of those Irish ears; she would rather
have ridden even in an omnibus, could she
and Philip have taken all the seats. But then
Hope seldom cared to drive on the Avenue at
all, except as a means of reaching the ocean,
whereas with most people it appears the appointed
means to escape from that spectacle.
And as for the footmen, there was nothing
in the conversation worth their hearing or
repeating; and their presence was a relief
to Emilia, for who knew but Mr. Lambert
himself might end in growing sentimental?
Yet she did not find him always equally
tedious. Their drives had some variety. For
instance, he sometimes gave her some lovely
present before they set forth, and she could
feel that, if his lips did not yield diamonds and
rubies, his pockets did. Sometimes he conversed
about money and investments, which
she rather liked; this was his strong and commanding
point; he explained things quite
clearly, and they found, with mutual surprise,
that she also had a shrewd little brain for
-- 154 --
[figure description] Page 154.[end figure description]
those matters, if she would but take the
trouble to think about them. Sometimes he
insisted on being tender, and even this was
not so bad as she expected, at least for a
few minutes at a time; she rather enjoyed
having her hand pressed so seriously, and
his studied phrases amused her. It was
only when he wished the conversation to be
brilliant and intellectual, that he became intolerable;
then she must entertain him, must
get up little repartees, must tell him lively anecdotes,
which he swallowed as a dog bolts a
morsel, being at once ready for the next. He
never made a comment, of course, but at the
height of his enjoyment he gave a quick,
short, stupid laugh, that so jarred upon her
ears, she would have liked to be struck deaf
rather than hear it again.
At these times she thought of Malbone,
how gifted he was, how inexhaustible, how
agreeable, with a faculty for happiness that
would have been almost provoking had it not
been contagious. Then she looked from her
airy perch and smiled at him at the club-window,
where he stood in the most negligent of
attitudes, and with every faculty strained in
observation. A moment and she was gone.
-- 155 --
[figure description] Page 155.[end figure description]
Then all was gone, and a mob of queens might
have blocked the way, without his caring to
discuss their genealogies, even with old General
Le Breton, who had spent his best (or
his worst) years abroad, and was supposed
to have been confidential adviser to most of
the crowned heads of Europe.
For the first time in his life Malbone found
himself in the grasp of a passion too strong
to be delightful. For the first time his own
heart frightened him. He had sometimes
feared that it was growing harder, but now
he discovered that it was not hard enough.
He knew it was not merely mercenary motives
that had made Emilia accept John Lambert;
but what troubled him was a vague
knowledge that it was not mere pique. He
was used to dealing with pique in women, and
had found it the most manageable of weaknesses.
It was an element of spasmodic conscience
that he saw here, and it troubled him.
Something told him that she had said to
herself: “I will be married, and thus do my
duty to Hope. Other girls marry persons
whom they do not love, and it helps them to
forget. Perhaps it will help me. This is a
good man, they say, and I think he loves me.”
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[figure description] Page 156.[end figure description]
“Think?” John Lambert had adored her
when she had passed by him without looking
at him; and now when the thought came over
him that she would be his wife, he became
stupid with bliss. And as latterly he had
thought of little else, he remained more or
less stupid all the time.
To a man like Malbone, self-indulgent
rather than selfish, this poor, blind semblance
of a moral purpose in Emilia was a great embarrassment.
It is a terrible thing for a lover
when he detects conscience amidst the armory
of weapons used against him, and faces the
fact that he must blunt a woman's principles
to win her heart. Philip was rather accustomed
to evade conscience, but he never liked
to look it in the face and defy it.
Yet if the thought of Hope at this time
came over him, it came as a constraint, and
he disliked it as such; and the more generous
and beautiful she was, the greater the constraint.
He cursed himself that he had allowed
himself to be swayed back to her,
and so had lost Emilia forever. And thus
he drifted on, not knowing what he wished
for, but knowing extremely well what he
feared.
-- 157 -- p586-170
XIV. THE NEMESIS OF PASSION.
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MALBONE was a person of such ready,
emotional nature, and such easy expression,
that it was not hard for Hope to
hide from herself the gradual ebbing of his
love. Whenever he was fresh and full of
spirits, he had enough to overflow upon her
and every one. But when other thoughts and
cares were weighing on him, he could not
share them, nor could he at such times, out
of the narrowing channel of his own life, furnish
more than a few scanty drops for her.
At these times he watched with torturing
fluctuations the signs of solicitude in Hope,
the timid withdrawing of her fingers, the
questioning of her eyes, the weary drooping
of her whole expression. Often he cursed
himself as a wretch for paining that pure and
noble heart. Yet there were moments when
a vague inexpressible delight stole in; a glimmering
of shame-faced pleasure as he pondered
on this visible dawning of distrust; a
-- 158 --
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sudden taste of freedom in being no longer
fettered by her confidence. By degrees he
led himself, still half ashamed, to the dream
that she might yet be somehow weaned from
him, and leave his conscience free. By constantly
building upon this thought, and putting
aside all others, he made room upon the
waste of his life for a house of cards, glittering,
unsubstantial, lofty, — until there came
some sudden breath that swept it away; and
then he began on it again.
In one of those moments of more familiar
faith which still alternated with these cold,
sad intervals, she asked him with some sudden
impulse, how he should feel if she loved
another? She said it, as if guided by an
instinct, to sound the depth of his love for
her. Starting with amazement, he looked at
her, and then, divining her feeling, he only
replied by an expression of reproach, and by
kissing her hands with an habitual tenderness
that had grown easy to him, — and they were
such lovely hands! But his heart told him
that no spent swimmer ever transferred more
eagerly to another's arms some precious burden
beneath which he was consciously sinking,
than he would yield her up to any one
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whom she would consent to love, and who
could be trusted with the treasure. Until
that ecstasy of release should come, he would
do his duty, — yes, his duty.
When these flushed hopes grew pale, as
they soon did, he could at least play with the
wan fancies that took their place. Hour
after hour, while she lavished upon him the
sweetness of her devotion, he was half consciously
shaping with his tongue some word
of terrible revealing that should divide them
like a spell, if spoken, and then recalling it
before it left his lips. Daily and hourly he
felt the last agony of a weak and passionate
nature, — to dream of one woman in another's
arms.
She, too, watched him with an ever-increasing
instinct of danger, studied with a chilly
terror the workings of his face, weighed and
reweighed his words in absence, agonized herself
with new and ever new suspicions; and
then, when these had accumulated beyond
endurance, seized them convulsively and threw
them all away. Then, coming back to him
with a great overwhelming ardor of affection,
she poured upon him more and more in proportion
as he gave her less.
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Sometimes in these moments of renewed
affection he half gave words to his remorse,
accused himself before her of unnamed wrong,
and besought her to help him return to his
better self. These were the most dangerous
moments of all, for such appeals made tenderness
and patience appear a duty; she must
put away her doubts as sins, and hold him to
her; she must refuse to see his signs of faltering
faith, or treat them as mere symptoms of
ill health. Should not a wife cling the closer
to her husband in proportion as he seemed
alienated through the wanderings of disease?
And was not this her position? So she
said within herself, and meanwhile it was
not hard to penetrate her changing thoughts,
at least for so keen an observer as Aunt
Jane. Hope, at length, almost ceased to
speak of Malbone, and revealed her grief by
this evasion, as the robin reveals her nest by
flitting from it.
Yet there were times when he really tried
to force himself into a revival of this calmer
emotion. He studied Hope's beauty with his
eyes, he pondered on all her nobleness. He
wished to bring his whole heart back to her,—
or at least wished that he wished it. But
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hearts that have educated themselves into
faithlessness must sooner or later share the
suffering they give. Love will be avenged on
them. Nothing could have now recalled this
epicure in passion, except, possibly, a little
withholding or semi-coquetry on Hope's part,
and this was utterly impossible for her. Absolute
directness was a part of her nature;
she could die, but not manœuvre.
It actually diminished Hope's hold on Philip,
that she had at this time the whole field to
herself. Emilia had gone for a few weeks to
the mountains, with the household of which
she was a guest. An ideal and unreasonable
passion is strongest in absence, when the
dream is all pure dream, and safe from the
discrepancies of daily life. When the two
girls were together, Emilia often showed herself
so plainly Hope's inferior, that it jarred
on Philip's fine perceptions. But in Emilia's
absence the spell of temperament, or whatever
else brought them together, resumed
its sway unchecked; she became one great
magnet of attraction, and all the currents
of the universe appeared to flow from the
direction where her eyes were shining. When
she was out of sight, he needed to make no
-- 162 --
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allowance for her defects, to reproach himself
with no overt acts of disloyalty to Hope, to
recognize no criticisms of his own intellect
or conscience. He could resign himself to his
reveries, and pursue them into new subtleties
day by day.
There was Mrs. Meredith's house, too,
where they had been so happy. And now
the blinds were pitilessly closed, all but one
where the Venetian slats had slipped, and
stood half open as if some dainty fingers held
them, and some lovely eyes looked through.
He gazed so long and so often on that silent
house, — by day, when the scorching sunshine
searched its pores as if to purge away every
haunting association, or by night, when the
mantle of darkness hung tenderly above it,
and seemed to collect the dear remembrances
again, — that his fancy by degrees grew morbid,
and its pictures unreal. “It is impossible,”
he one day thought to himself, “that
she should have lived in that room so long,
sat in that window, dreamed on that couch,
reflected herself in that mirror, breathed that
air, without somehow detaching invisible fibres
of her being, delicate films of herself, that
must gradually, she being gone, draw together
-- 163 --
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into a separate individuality an image not
quite bodiless, that replaces her in her absence,
as the holy Theocrite was replaced by the
angel. If there are ghosts of the dead why
not ghosts of the living also?” This lover's
fancy so pleased him that he brought to bear
upon it the whole force of his imagination,
and it grew stronger day by day. To him,
thenceforth, the house was haunted, and all
its floating traces of herself visible or invisible,—
from the ribbon that he saw entangled in
the window-blind to every intangible and fancied
atom she had imparted to the atmosphere,—
came at last to organize themselves into
one phantom shape for him and looked out, a
wraith of Emilia, through those relentless
blinds. As the vision grew more vivid, he
saw the dim figure moving through the house,
wan, restless, tender, lingering where they had
lingered, haunting every nook where they had
been happy once. In the windy moanings
of the silent night he could put his ear at the
keyhole, and could fancy that he heard the
wild signals of her love and despair.
-- 164 -- p586-177
XV. ACROSS THE BAY.
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THE children, as has been said, were all
devoted to Malbone, and this was, in a
certain degree, to his credit. But it is a mistake
to call children good judges of character,
except in one direction, namely, their own.
They understand it, up to the level of their
own stature; they know who loves them, but
not who loves virtue. Many a sinner has a
great affection for children, and no child will
ever detect the sins of such a friend; because,
toward them, the sins do not exist.
The children, therefore, all loved Philip, and
yet they turned with delight, when out-door
pleasures were in hand, to the strong and
adroit Harry. Philip inclined to the daintier
exercises, fencing, billiards, riding; but Harry's
vigorous physique enjoyed hard work.
He taught all the household to swim, for
instance. Jenny, aged five, a sturdy, deepchested
little thing, seemed as amphibious as
himself. She could already swim alone, but
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she liked to keep close to him, as all young
animals do to their elders in the water, not
seeming to need actual support, but stronger
for the contact. Her favorite position, however,
was on his back, where she triumphantly
clung, grasping his bathing-dress with one
hand, swinging herself to and fro, dipping her
head beneath the water, singing and shouting,
easily shifting her position when he wished to
vary his, and floating by him like a little fish,
when he was tired of supporting her. It was
pretty to see the child in her one little crimson
garment, her face flushed with delight, her fair
hair glistening from the water, and the waves
rippling and dancing round her buoyant form.
As Harry swam farther and farther out, his
head was hidden from view by her small person,
and she might have passed for a red sea-bird
rocking on the gentle waves. It was one
of the regular delights of the household to see
them bathe.
Kate came in to Aunt Jane's room, one
August morning, to say that they were going
to the water-side. How differently people
may enter a room! Hope always came in as
the summer breeze comes, quiet, strong, soft,
fragrant, resistless. Emilia never seemed to
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come in at all; you looked up, and she had
somehow drifted where she stood, pleading,
evasive, lovely. This was especially the case
where one person was awaiting her alone;
with two she was more fearless, with a dozen
she was buoyant, and with a hundred she forgot
herself utterly and was a spirit of irresistible
delight.
But Kate entered any room, whether nur-sery
or kitchen, as if it were the private boudoir
of a princess and she the favorite maid of
honor. Thus it was she came that morning
to Aunt Jane.
“We are going down to see the bathers,
dear,” said Kate. “Shall you miss me?”
“I miss you every minute,” said her aunt,
decisively. “But I shall do very well. I have
delightful times here by myself. What a ridiculous
man it was who said that it was impossible
to imagine a woman's laughing at her own
comic fancies. I sit and laugh at my own
nonsense very often,”
“It is a shame to waste it,” said Kate.
“It is a blessing that any of it is disposed
of while you are not here,” said Aunt Jane.
“You have quite enough of it.”
“We never have enough,” said Kate. “And
-- 167 --
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we never can make you repeat any of yesterday's.”
“Of course not,” said Aunt Jane. “Nonsense
must have the dew on it, or it is good
for nothing.”
“So you are really happiest alone?”
“Not so happy as when you are with me, —
you or Hope. I like to have Hope with me
now; she does me good. Really, I do not
care for anybody else. Sometimes I think if
I could always have four or five young kittens
by me, in a champagne-basket, with a nurse to
watch them, I should be happier. But perhaps
not; they would grow up so fast!”
“Then I will leave you alone without compunction,”
said Kate.
“I am not alone,” said Aunt Jane; “I have
my man in the boat to watch through the
window. What a singular being he is! I
think he spends hours in that boat, and what
he does I can't conceive. There it is, quietly
anchored, and there is he in it. I never saw
anybody but myself who could get up so much
industry out of nothing. He has all his housework
there, a broom and a duster, and I dare
say he has a cooking-stove and a gridiron.
He sits a little while, then he stoops down,
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then he goes to the other end. Sometimes he
goes ashore in that absurd little tub, with a
stick that he twirls at one end.”
“That is called sculling,” interrupted Kate.
“Sculling! I suppose he runs for a baked
potato. Then he goes back. He is Robinson
Crusoe on an island that never keeps still a
single instant. It is all he has, and he never
looks away, and never wants anything more.
So I have him to watch. Think of living so
near a beaver or a water-rat with clothes on!
Good-by. Leave the door ajar, it is so warm.”
And Kate went down to the landing. It
was near the “baptismal shore,” where every
Sunday the young people used to watch the
immersions; they liked to see the crowd of
spectators, the eager friends, the dripping convert,
the serene young minister, the old men
and girls who burst forth in song as the
new disciple rose from the waves. It was the
weekly festival in that region, and the sunshine
and the ripples made it gladdening, not
gloomy. Every other day in the week the
children of the fishermen waded waist-deep in
the water, and played at baptism.
Near this shore stood the family bathing-house;
and the girls came down to sit in its
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shadow and watch the swimming. It was late
in August, and on the first of September
Emilia was to be married.
Nothing looked cool, that day, but the bay
and those who were going into it. Out came
Hope from the bathing-house, in a new bathing-dress
of dark blue, which was evidently
what the others had come forth to behold.
“Hope, what an imposter you are!” cried
Kate, instantly. “You declined all my proffers
of aid in cutting that dress, and now see
how it fits you! You never looked so beautifully
in your life. There is not such another
bathing-dress in Oldport, nor such a figure to
wear it.”
And she put both her arms round that supple,
stately waist, that might have belonged to
a Greek goddess, or to some queen in the
Nibelungen Lied.
The party watched the swimmers as they
struck out over the clear expanse. It was
high noon; the fishing-boats were all off, but
a few pleasure-boats swung different ways at
their moorings, in the perfect calm. The
white light-house stood reflected opposite, at
the end of its long pier; a few vessels lay at
anchor, with their sails up to dry, but with
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that deserted look which coasters in port are
wont to wear. A few fishes dimpled the still
surface, and as the three swam out farther and
farther, their merry voices still sounded close
at hand. Suddenly they all clapped their
hands and called; then pointed forward to
the light-house, across the narrow harbor.
“They are going to swim across,” said Kate.
“What creatures they are! Hope and little
Jenny have always begged for it, and now
Harry thinks it is so still a day they can safely
venture. It is more than half a mile. See!
he has called that boy in a boat, and he will
keep near them. They have swum farther
than that along the shore.”
So the others went away with no fears.
Hope said afterwards that she never swam
with such delight as on that day. The water
seemed to be peculiarly thin and clear, she
said, as well as tranquil, and to retain its usual
buoyancy without its density. It gave a
delicious sense of freedom; she seemed to
swim in air, and felt singularly secure. For
the first time she felt what she had always
wished to experience, — that swimming was
as natural as walking, and might be indefinitely
prolonged. Her strength seemed limitless,
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she struck out more and more strongly; she
splashed and played with little Jenny, when
the child began to grow weary of the long
motion. A fisherman's boy in a boat rowed
slowly along by their side.
Nine tenths of the distance had been accomplished,
when the little girl grew quite
impatient, and Hope bade Harry swim on
before her, and land his charge. Light and
buoyant as the child was, her tightened clasp
had begun to tell on him.
“It tires you, Hal, to bear that weight so
long, and you know I have nothing to carry.
You must see that I am not in the least tired,
only a little dazzled by the sun. Here, Charley,
give me your hat, and then row on with
Mr. Harry.” She put on the boy's torn straw
hat, and they yielded to her wish. People
almost always yielded to Hope's wishes when
she expressed them, — it was so very seldom.
Somehow the remaining distance seemed
very great, as Hope saw them glide away,
leaving her in the water alone, her feet unsupported
by any firm element, the bright and
pitiless sky arching far above her, and her
head burning with more heat than she had
liked to own. She was conscious of her full
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strength, and swam more vigorously than
ever; but her head was hot and her ears
rang, and she felt chilly vibrations passing up
and down her sides, that were like, she fancied,
the innumerable fringing oars of the little
jelly-fishes she had so often watched. Her
body felt almost unnaturally strong, and she
took powerful strokes; but it seemed as if her
heart went out into them and left a vacant
cavity within. More and more her life seemed
boiling up into her head; queer fancies came
to her, as, for instance, that she was an inverted
thermometer with the mercury all ascending
into a bulb at the top. She shook her
head and the fancy cleared away, and then
others came.
She began to grow seriously anxious, but
the distance was diminishing; Harry was
almost at the steps with the child, and the
boy had rowed his skiff round the breakwater
out of sight; a young fisherman leaned over
the railing with his back to her, watching the
lobster-catchers on the other side. She was
almost in; it was only a slight dizziness, yet
she could not see the light-house. Concentrating
all her efforts, she shut her eyes and
swam on, her arms still unaccountably
-- 173 --
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vigorous, though the rest of her body seemed losing
itself in languor. The sound in her ear had
grown to a roar, as of many mill-wheels. It
seemed a long distance that she thus swam
with her eyes closed. Then she half opened
her eyes, and the breakwater seemed all in
motion, with tier above tier of eager faces
looking down on her. In an instant there
was a sharp splash close beside her, and she
felt herself grasped and drawn downwards,
with a whirl of something just above her, and
then all consciousness went out as suddenly as
when ether brings at last to a patient, after
the roaring and the tumult in his brain, its
blessed foretaste of the deliciousness of death.
When Hope came again to consciousness,
she found herself approaching her own pier
in a sail-boat, with several very wet gentlemen
around her, and little Jenny nestled close
to her, crying as profusely as if her pretty
scarlet bathing-dress were being wrung out
through her eyes. Hope asked no questions,
and hardly felt the impulse to inquire what
had happened. The truth was, that in the
temporary dizziness produced by her prolonged
swim, she had found herself in the
track of a steamboat that was passing the
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pier, unobserved by her brother. A young
man, leaping from the deck, had caught her
in his arms, and had dived with her below the
paddle-wheels, just as they came upon her.
It was a daring act, but nothing else could
have saved her. When they came to the surface,
they had been picked up by Aunt Jane's
Robinson Crusoe, who had at last unmoored
his pilot-boat and was rounding the light-house
for the outer harbor.
She and the child were soon landed, and
given over to the ladies. Due attention was
paid to her young rescuer, whose dripping
garments seemed for the moment as glorious
as a blood-stained flag. He seemed a simple,
frank young fellow of French or German origin,
but speaking English remarkably well; he
was not high-bred, by any means, but had apparently
the culture of an average German of
the middle class. Harry fancied that he had
seen him before, and at last traced back the
impression of his features to the ball for the
French officers. It turned out, on inquiry,
that he had a brother in the service, and on
board the corvette; but he himself was a
commercial agent, now in America with a
view to business, though he had made several
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voyages as mate of a vessel, and would not
object to some such berth as that. He
promised to return and receive the thanks of
the family, read with interest the name on
Harry's card, seemed about to ask a question,
but forbore, and took his leave amid the general
confusion, without even giving his address.
When sought next day, he was not to be
found, and to the children he at once became
as much a creature of romance as the seaserpent
or the Flying Dutchman.
Even Hope's strong constitution felt the
shock of this adventure. She was confined
to her room for a week or two, but begged
that there might be no postponement of the
wedding, which, therefore, took place without
her. Her illness gave excuse for a privacy
that was welcome to all but the bridesmaids,
and suited Malbone best of all.
-- 176 -- p586-189
XVI. ON THE STAIRS.
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AUGUST drew toward its close, and guests
departed from the neighborhood.
“What a short little thing summer is,” meditated
Aunt Jane, “and butterflies are caterpillars
most of the time after all. How quiet
it seems. The wrens whisper in their box
above the window, and there has not been a
blast from the peacock for a week. He seems
ashamed of the summer shortness of his tail.
He keeps glancing at it over his shoulder to
see if it is not looking better than yesterday,
while the staring eyes of the old tail are in the
bushes all about.”
“Poor, dear little thing!” said coaxing
Katie. “Is she tired of autumn, before it is
begun?”
“I am never tired of anything,” said Aunt
Jane, “except my maid Ruth, and I should
not be tired of her, if it had pleased Heaven
to endow her with sufficient strength of mind
to sew on a button. Life is very rich to me.
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There is always something new in every season;
though to be sure I cannot think what
novelty there is just now, except a choice variety
of spiders. There is a theory that spiders
kill flies. But I never miss a fly, and
there does not seem to be any natural scourge
divinely appointed to kill spiders, except Ruth.
Even she does it so feebly, that I see them
come back and hang on their webs and make
faces at her. I suppose they are faces; I do
not understand their anatomy, but it must be
a very unpleasant one.”
“You are not quite satisfied with life, to-day,
dear,” said Kate; “I fear your book did
not end to your satisfaction.”
“It did end, though,” said the lady, “and
that is something. What is there in life
so difficult as to stop a book?” If I wrote
one, it would be as long as ten `Sir Charles
Grandisons,' and then I never should end it,
because I should die. And there would be
nobody left to read it, because each reader
would have been dead long before.”
“But the book amused you!” interrupted
Kate. “I know it did.”
“It was so absurd that I laughed till I
cried; and it makes no difference whether
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you cry laughing or cry crying; it is equally
bad when your glasses come off. Never mind.
Whom did you see on the Avenue?”
“O, we saw Philip on horseback. He rides
so beautifully; he seems one with his horse.”
“I am glad of it,” interposed her aunt.
“The riders are generally so inferior to
them.”
“We saw Mr. and Mrs. Lambert, too.
Emilia stopped and asked after you, and sent
you her love, auntie.”
“Love!” cried Aunt Jane. “She always
does that. She has sent me love enough to
rear a whole family on, — more than I ever
felt for anybody in all my days. But she does
not really love any one.”
“I hope she will love her husband,” said
Kate, rather seriously.
“Mark my words, Kate!” said her aunt.
“Nothing but unhappiness will ever come of
that marriage. How can two people be happy
who have absolutely nothing in common?”
“But no two people have just the same
tastes,” said Kate, “except Harry and myself.
It is not expected. It would be absurd for
two people to be divorced, because the one
preferred white bread and the other brown.”
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“They would be divorced very soon,” said
Aunt Jane, “for the one who ate brown bread
would not live long.”
“But it is possible that he might live, auntie,
in spite of your prediction. And perhaps
people may be happy, even if you and I do
not see how.”
“Nobody ever thinks I see anything,” said
Aunt Jane, in some dejection. “You think
I am nothing in the world but a sort of old
oyster, making amusement for people, and
having no more to do with real life than oysters
have.”
“No, dearest!” cried Kate. “You have a
great deal to do with all our lives. You are a
dear old insidious sapper-and-miner, looking
at first very inoffensive, and then working
your way into our affections, and spoiling us
with coaxing. How you behave about children,
for instance!”
“How?” said the other meekly. “As well
as I can.”
“But you pretend that you dislike them.”
“But I do dislike them. How can anybody
help it? Hear them swearing at this moment,
boys of five, paddling in the water
there! Talk about the murder of the
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innocents! There are so few innocents to be
murdered! If I only had a gun and could
shoot!”
“You may not like those particular boys,”
said Kate, “but you like good, well-behaved
children, very much.”
“It takes so many to take care of them!
People drive by here, with carriages so large
that two of the largest horses can hardly
draw them, and all full of those little beings.
They have a sort of roof, too, and seem to
expect to be out in all weathers.”
“If you had a family of children, perhaps
you would find such a travelling caravan very
convenient,” said Kate.
“If I had such a family, said her aunt, “I
would have a separate governess and guardian
for each, very moral persons. They
should come when each child was two, and
stay till it was twenty. The children should
all live apart, in order not to quarrel, and
should meet once or twice a day and bow to
each other. I think that each should learn a
different language, so as not to converse, and
then, perhaps, they would not get each other
into mischief.”
“I am sure, auntie,” said Kate, “you have
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[figure description] Page 181.[end figure description]
missed our small nephews and nieces ever
since their visit ended. How still the house
has been!”
“I do not know,” was the answer. “I hear
a great many noises about the house. Somebody
comes in late at night. Perhaps it is
Philip; but he comes very softly in, wipes his
feet very gently, like a clean thief, and goes
up stairs.”
“O auntie!” said Kate, “you know you
have got over all such fancies.”
“They are not fancies,” said Aunt Jane.
“Things do happen in houses! Did I not
look under the bed for a thief during fifteen
years, and find one at last? Why should I
not be allowed to hear something now?”
“But, dear Aunt Jane,” said Kate, “you
never told me this before.”
“No,” said she. “I was beginning to tell
you the other day, but Ruth was just bringing
in my handkerchiefs, and she had used so
much bluing they looked as if they had been
washed in heaven, so that it was too outrageous,
and I forgot everything else.”
“But do you really hear anything?”
“Yes,” said her aunt. “Ruth declares she
hears noises in those closets that I had
-- 182 --
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nailed up, you know; but that is nothing; of
course she does. Rats. What I hear at night
is the creaking of stairs, when I know that
nobody ought to be stirring. If you observe,
you will hear it too. At least, I should think
you would, only that somehow everything
always seems to stop, when it is necessary
to prove that I am foolish.”
The girls had no especial engagement that
evening, and so got into a great excitement on
the stairway over Aunt Jane's solicitudes.
They convinced themselves that they heard all
sorts of things, — footfalls on successive steps,
the creak of a plank, the brushing of an arm
against a wall, the jar of some suspended
object that was stirred in passing. Once
they heard something fall on the floor, and roll
from step to step; and yet they themselves
stood on the stairway, and nothing passed.
Then for some time there was silence, but
they would have persisted in their observations,
had not Philip come in from Mrs. Meredith's
in the midst of it, so that the whole
thing turned into a frolic, and they sat on the
stairs and told ghost stories half the night.
-- 183 -- p586-196
XVII. DISCOVERY.
[figure description] Page 183.[end figure description]
THE next evening Kate and Philip went
to a ball. As Hope was passing through
the hall late in the evening, she heard a sudden,
sharp cry somewhere in the upper
regions, that sounded, she thought, like a
woman's voice. She stopped to hear, but
there was silence. It seemed to come from
the direction of Malbone's room, which was
in the third story. Again came the cry, more
gently, ending in a sort of sobbing monologue.
Gliding rapidly up stairs in the dark, she
paused at Philip's deserted room, but the
door was locked, and there was profound
stillness. She then descended, and pausing
at the great landing, heard other steps descending
also. Retreating to the end of the
hall, she hastily lighted a candle, when the
steps ceased. With her accustomed nerve,
wishing to explore the thing thoroughly,
she put out the light and kept still. As she
expected, the footsteps presently recommenced,
-- 184 --
[figure description] Page 184.[end figure description]
descending stealthily, but drawing no nearer,
and seeming rather like sounds from an
adjoining house, heard through a party-wall.
This was impossible, as the house stood alone.
Flushed with excitement, she relighted the
hall candles, and, taking one of them, searched
the whole entry and stairway, going down even
to the large, old-fashioned cellar.
Looking about her in this unfamiliar region,
her eye fell on a door that seemed to open into
the wall; she had noticed a similar door on
the story above, — one of the closet doors that
had been nailed up by Aunt Jane's order. As
she looked, however, a chill breath blew in
from another direction, extinguishing her lamp.
This air came from the outer door of the cellar,
and she had just time to withdraw into a
corner before a man's steps approached, passing
close by her.
Even Hope's strong nerves had begun to
yield, and a cold shudder went through her.
Not daring to move, she pressed herself
against the wall, and her heart seemed to
stop as the unseen stranger passed. Instead
of his ascending where she had come down,
as she had expected, she heard him grope his
way toward the door she had seen in the wall.
-- 185 --
[figure description] Page 185.[end figure description]
There he seemed to find a stairway, and when
his steps were thus turned from her, she was
seized by a sudden impulse and followed him,
groping her way as she could. She remembered
that the girls had talked of secret stairways
in that house, though she had no conception
whither they could lead, unless to
some of the shut-up closets.
She steadily followed, treading cautiously
upon each creaking step. The stairway was
very narrow, and formed a regular spiral as in
a turret. The darkness and the curving motion
confused her brain, and it was impossible
to tell how high in the house she was, except
when once she put her hand upon what was
evidently a door, and moreover saw through
its cracks the lamp she had left burning in the
upper hall. This glimpse of reality reassured
her. She had begun to discover where she
was. The doors which Aunt Jane had closed
gave access, not to mere closets, but to a spiral
stairway, which evidently went from top to
bottom of the house, and was known to some
one else beside herself.
Relieved of that slight shudder at the super-natural
which sometimes affects the healthiest
nerves, Hope paused to consider. To alarm
-- 186 --
[figure description] Page 186.[end figure description]
the neighborhood was her first thought. A
slight murmuring from above dispelled it; she
must first reconnoitre a few steps farther. As
she ascended a little way, a gleam shone upon
her, and down the damp stairway came a fragrant
odor, as from some perfumed chamber.
Then a door was shut and reopened. Eager
beyond expression, she followed on. Another
step, and she stood at the door of Malbone's
apartment.
The room was brilliant with light; the
doors and windows were heavily draped.
Fruit and flowers and wine were on the
table. On the sofa lay Emilia in a gay ball-dress,
sunk in one of her motionless trances,
while Malbone, pale with terror, was deluging
her brows with the water he had just brought
from the well below.
Hope stopped a moment and leaned against
the door, as her eyes met Malbone's. Then
she made her way to a chair, and leaning on
the back of it, which she fingered convulsively,
looked with bewildered eyes and compressed
lips from the one to the other. Malbone tried
to speak, but failed; tried again, and brought
forth only a whisper that broke into clearer
speech as the words went on. “No use to
-- 187 --
[figure description] Page 187.[end figure description]
explain,” he said. “Lambert is in New York.
Mrs. Meredith is expecting her — to-night —
after the ball. What can we do?”
Hope covered her face as he spoke; she
could bear anything better than to have him
say “we,” as if no gulf had opened between
them. She sank slowly on her knees behind
her chair, keeping it as a sort of screen between
herself and these two people, — the
counterfeits, they seemed, of her lover and
her sister. If the roof in falling to crush
them had crushed her also, she could scarcely
have seemed more rigid or more powerless.
It passed, and the next moment she was on
her feet again, capable of action.
“She must be taken,” she said very clearly,
but in a lower tone than usual, “to my chamber.”
Then pointing to the candles, she said,
more huskily, “We must not be seen. Put
them out.” Every syllable seemed to exhaust
her. But as Philip obeyed her words, he saw
her move suddenly and stand by Emilia's side.
She put out both arms as if to lift the young
girl, and carry her away.
“You cannot,” said Philip, putting her gently
aside, while she shrank from his touch.
Then he took Emilia in his arms and bore her
to the door, Hope preceding.
-- 188 --
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Motioning him to pause a moment, she
turned the lock softly, and looked out into
the dark entry. All was still. She went out,
and he followed with his motionless burden.
They walked stealthily, like guilty things, yet
every slight motion seemed to ring in their
ears. It was chilly, and Hope shivered.
Through the great open window on the stairway
a white fog peered in at them, and the
distant fog-whistle came faintly through; it
seemed as if the very atmosphere were condensing
about them, to isolate the house in
which such deeds were done. The clock
struck twelve, and it seemed as if it struck
a thousand.
When they reached Hope's door, she turned
and put out her arms for Emilia, as for a
child. Every expression had now gone from
Hope's face but a sort of stony calmness,
which put her infinitely farther from Malbone
than had the momentary struggle. As he
gave the girlish form into arms that shook and
trembled beneath its weight, he caught a
glimpse in the pier-glass of their two white
faces, and then, looking down, saw the rose-tints
yet lingering on Emilia's cheek. She,
the source of all this woe, looked the only
-- 189 --
[figure description] Page 189.[end figure description]
representative of innocence between two guilty
things.
How white and pure and maidenly looked
Hope's little room, — such a home of peace, he
thought, till its door suddenly opened to admit
all this passion and despair! There was
a great sheaf of cardinal flowers on the table,
and their petals were drooping, as if reluctant
to look on him. Scheffer's Christus Consolator
was upon the walls, and the benign figure
seemed to spread wider its arms of mercy, to
take in a few sad hearts more.
Hope bore Emilia into the light and purity
and warmth, while Malbone was shut out into
the darkness and the chill. The only two
things to which he clung on earth, the two
women between whom his unsteady heart
had vibrated, and both whose lives had been
tortured by its vacillation, went away from
his sight together, the one victim bearing the
other victim in her arms. Never any more
while he lived would either of them be his
again; and had Dante known it for his last
glimpse of things immortal when the two
lovers floated away from him in their sad
embrace, he would have had no such sense
of utter banishment as had Malbone then.
-- 190 -- p586-203
XVIII. HOPE'S VIGIL.
[figure description] Page 190.[end figure description]
HAD Emilia chosen out of life's whole
armory of weapons the means of disarming
Hope, she could have found nothing
so effectual as nature had supplied in her unconsciousness.
Helplessness conquers. There
was a quality in Emilia which would have
always produced something very like antagonism
in Hope, had she not been her sister.
Had the ungoverned girl now been able to
utter one word of reproach, had her eyes
flashed one look of defiance, had her hand
made one triumphant or angry gesture, perhaps
all Hope's outraged womanhood would
have coldly nerved itself against her. But it
was another thing to see those soft eyes closed,
those delicate hands powerless, those pleading
lips sealed; to see her extended in graceful
helplessness, while all the concentrated drama
of emotion revolved around her unheeded, as
around Cordelia dead. In what realms was
that child's mind seeking comfort; through
-- 191 --
[figure description] Page 191.[end figure description]
what thin air of dreams did that restless heart
beat its pinions; in what other sphere did that
untamed nature wander, while shame and sorrow
waited for its awakening in this?
Hope knelt upon the floor, still too much
strained and bewildered for tears or even
prayer, a little way from Emilia. Once having
laid down the unconscious form, it seemed
for a moment as if she could no more touch it
than she could lay her hand amid flames. A
gap of miles, of centuries, of solar systems,
seemed to separate these two young girls,
alone within the same chamber, with the same
stern secret to keep, and so near that the hem
of their garments almost touched each other
on the soft carpet. Hope felt a terrible hardness
closing over her heart. What right had
this cruel creature, with her fatal witcheries,
to come between two persons who might have
been so wholly happy? What sorrow would
be saved, what shame, perhaps, be averted,
should those sweet beguiling eyes never open,
and that perfidious voice never deceive any
more? Why tend the life of one who would
leave the whole world happier, purer, freer,
if she were dead?
In a tumult of thought, Hope went and sat
-- 192 --
[figure description] Page 192.[end figure description]
half-unconsciously by the window. There was
nothing to be seen except the steady beacon
of the light-house and a pale-green glimmer,
like an earthly star, from an anchored vessel.
The night wind came softly in, soothing her
with a touch like a mother's, in its grateful
coolness. The air seemed full of half-vibrations,
sub-noises, that crowded it as completely
as do the insect sounds of midsummer;
yet she could only distinguish the ripple beneath
her feet, and the rote on the distant
beach, and the busy wash of waters against
every shore and islet of the bay. The mist
was thick around her, but she knew that
above it hung the sleepless stars, and the
fancy came over her that perhaps the whole
vast interval, from ocean up to sky, might be
densely filled with the disembodied souls of
her departed human kindred, waiting to see
how she would endure that path of grief in
which their steps had gone before. “It may
be from this influence,” she vaguely mused
within herself, “that the ocean derives its endless
song of sorrow. Perhaps we shall know
its meaning when we understand that of the
stars, and of our own sad lives.”
She rose again and went to the bedside. It
-- 193 --
[figure description] Page 193.[end figure description]
all seemed like a dream, and she was able to look
at Emilia's existence and at her own and at all
else, as if it were a great way off; as we watch
the stars and know that no speculations of ours
can reach those who there live or die untouched.
Here beside her lay one who was dead, yet
living, in her temporary trance, and to what
would she wake, when it should end? This
young creature had been sent into the
world so fresh, so beautiful, so richly gifted;
everything about her physical organization
was so delicate and lovely; she had seemed
like heliotrope, like a tube-rose in her purity
and her passion (who was it said, “No heart
is pure that is not passionate”?); and here
was the end! Nothing external could have
placed her where she was, no violence, no
outrage, no evil of another's doing, could
have reached her real life without her own
consent; and now what kind of existence,
what career, what possibility of happiness remained?
Why could not God in his mercy
take her, and give her to his holiest angels
for schooling, ere it was yet too late?
Hope went and sat by the window once
more. Her thoughts still clung heavily around
one thought, as the white fog clung round the
-- 194 --
[figure description] Page 194.[end figure description]
house. Where should she see any light? What
opening for extrication, unless, indeed, Emilia
should die? There could be no harm in that
thought, for she knew it was not to be, and
that the swoon would not last much longer.
Who could devise anything? No one. There
was nothing. Almost always in perplexities
there is some thread by resolutely holding to
which one escapes at last. Here there was
none. There could probably be no concealment,
certainly no explanation. In a few days
John Lambert would return, and then the
storm must break. He was probably a stern,
jealous man, whose very dulness, once aroused,
would be more formidable than if he had
possessed keener perceptions.
Still her thoughts did not dwell on Philip.
He was simply a part of that dull mass of pain
that beset her and made her feel, as she had
felt when drowning, that her heart had left her
breast and nothing but will remained. She
felt now, as then, the capacity to act with
more than her accustomed resolution, though
all that was within her seemed boiling up into
her brain. As for Philip, all seemed a mere
negation; there was a vacuum where his place
had been. At most the thought of him came
-- 195 --
[figure description] Page 195.[end figure description]
to her as some strange, vague thrill of added
torture, penetrating her soul and then passing;
just as ever and anon there came the
sound of the fog-whistle on Brenton's Reef,
miles away, piercing the dull air with its shrill
and desolate wail, then dying into silence.
What a hopeless cloud lay upon them all
forever, — upon Kate, upon Harry, upon their
whole house! Then there was John Lambert;
how could they keep it from him? how
could they tell him? Who could predict
what he would say? Would he take the
worst and coarsest view of his young wife's
mad action or the mildest? Would he be
strong or weak; and what would be weakness,
and what strength, in a position so
strange? Would he put Emilia from him,
send her out in the world desolate, her soul
stained but by one wrong passion, yet with
her reputation blighted as if there were no
good in her? Could he be asked to shield
and protect her, or what would become of her?
She was legally a wife, and could only be
separated from him through convicted shame.
Then, if separated, she could only marry
Philip. Hope nerved herself to think of that,
and it cost less effort than she expected.
-- 196 --
[figure description] Page 196.[end figure description]
There seemed a numbness on that side, instead
of pain. But granting that he loved
Emilia ever so deeply, was he a man to surrender
his life and his ease and his fair name,
in a hopeless effort to remove the ban that the
world would place on her. Hope knew he
would not; knew that even the simple-hearted
and straightforward Harry would be far more
capable of such heroism than the sentimental
Malbone. Here the pang suddenly struck
her; she was not so numb, after all!
As the leaves beside the window drooped
motionless in the dank air, so her mind
drooped into a settled depression. She pitied
herself, — that lowest ebb of melancholy self-consciousness.
She went back to Emilia, and,
seating herself, studied every line of the girl's
face, the soft texture of her hair, the veining of
her eyelids. They were so lovely, she felt a
sort of physical impulse to kiss them, as if
they belonged to some utter stranger, whom
she might be nursing in a hospital. Emilia
looked as innocent as when Hope had tended
her in the cradle. What is there, Hope
thought, in sleep, in trance, and in death, that
removes all harsh or disturbing impressions,
and leaves only the most delicate and purest
-- 197 --
[figure description] Page 197.[end figure description]
traits? Does the mind wander, and does
an angel keep its place? Or is there really
no sin but in thought, and are our sleeping
thoughts incapable of sin? Perhaps even
when we dream of doing wrong, the dream
comes in a shape so lovely and misleading
that we never recognize it for evil, and it
makes no stain. Are our lives ever so pure as
our dreams?
This thought somehow smote across her
conscience, always so strong, and stirred it
into a kind of spasm of introspection. “How
selfish have I, too, been!” she thought. “I
saw only what I wished to see, did only what
I preferred. Loving Philip” (for the sudden
self-reproach left her free to think of him), “I
could not see that I was separating him from
one whom he might perhaps have truly loved.
If he made me blind, may he not easily have
bewildered her, and have been himself bewildered?
How I tried to force myself upon
him, too! Ungenerous, unwomanly! What
am I, that I should judge another?”
She threw herself on her knees at the bedside.
Still Emilia slept, but now she stirred her
head in the slightest possible way, so that a
-- 198 --
[figure description] Page 198.[end figure description]
single tress of silken hair slipped from its
companions, and lay across her face. It was
a faint sign that the trance was waning; the
slight pressure disturbed her nerves, and her
lips trembled once or twice, as if to relieve
themselves of the soft annoyance. Hope
watched her in a vague, distant way, took
note of the minutest motion, yet as if some
vast weight hung upon her own limbs and
made all interference impossible. Still there
was a fascination of sympathy in dwelling on
that atom of discomfort, that tiny suffering,
which she alone could remove. The very
vastness of this tragedy that hung about the
house made it an inexpressible relief to her to
turn and concentrate her thoughts for a moment
on this slight distress, so easily ended.
Strange, by what slender threads our lives
are knitted to each other! Here was one
who had taken Hope's whole existence in
her hands, crushed it, and thrown it away.
Hope had soberly said to herself, just before,
that death would be better than life for her
young sister. Yet now it moved her beyond
endurance to see that fair form troubled, even
while unconscious, by a feather's weight of
pain; and all the lifelong habit of tenderness
resumed in a moment its sway.
-- 199 --
[figure description] Page 199.[end figure description]
She approached her fingers to the offending
tress, very slowly, half withholding them
at the very last, as if the touch would burn her.
She was almost surprised that it did not. She
looked to see if it did not hurt Emilia. But it
now seemed as if the slumbering girl enjoyed
the caressing contact of the smooth fingers,
and turned her head, almost imperceptibly, to
meet them. This was more than Hope could
bear. It was as if that slight motion were a
puncture to relieve her overburdened heart;
a thousand thoughts swept over her, — of their
father, of her sister's childhood, of her years
of absent expectation; she thought how young
the girl was, how fascinating, how passionate,
how tempted; all this swept across her in a
great wave of nervous reaction, and when
Emilia returned to consciousness, she was lying
in her sister's arms, her face bathed in
Hope's tears.
-- 200 -- p586-213
XIX. DE PROFUNDIS.
[figure description] Page 200.[end figure description]
THIS was the history of Emilia's concealed
visits to Malbone.
One week after her marriage, in a crisis of
agony, Emilia took up her pen, dipped it in
fire, and wrote thus to him: —
“Philip Malbone, why did nobody ever tell
me what marriage is where there is no love?
This man who calls himself my husband is no
worse, I suppose, than other men. It is only
for being what is called by that name that I
abhor him. Good God! what am I to do? It
was not for money that I married him, — that
you know very well; I cared no more for his
money than for himself. I thought it was the
only way to save Hope. She has been very
good to me, and perhaps I should love her, if
I could love anybody. Now I have done what
will only make more misery, for I cannot bear
it. Philip, I am alone in this wide world, except
for you. Tell me what to do. I will
haunt you till you die, unless you tell me.
Answer this, or I will write again.”
-- 201 --
[figure description] Page 201.[end figure description]
Terrified by this letter, absolutely powerless
to guide the life with which he had so desperately
entangled himself, Philip let one day pass
without answering, and that evening he found
Emilia at his door, she having glided unnoticed
up the main stairway. She was so excited, it
was equally dangerous to send her away or to
admit her, and he drew her in, darkening the
windows and locking the door. On the whole,
it was not so bad as he expected; at least,
there was less violence and more despair. She
covered her face with her hands, and writhed
in anguish, when she said that she had utterly
degraded herself by this loveless marriage.
She scarcely mentioned her husband. She
made no complaint of him, and even spoke of
him as generous. It seemed as if this made
it worse, and as if she would be happier if she
could expend herself in hating him. She
spoke of him rather as a mere witness to some
shame for which she herself was responsible;
bearing him no malice, but tortured by the
thought that he should exist.
Then she turned on Malbone. “Philip, why
did you ever interfere with my life? I should
have been very happy with Antoine if you
had let me marry him, for I never should have
-- 202 --
[figure description] Page 202.[end figure description]
known what it was to love you. Oh! I wish
he were here now, even he, — any one who
loved me truly, and whom I could love only a
little. I would go away with such a person
anywhere, and never trouble you and Hope
any more. What shall I do? Philip, you
might tell me what to do. Once you told me
always to come to you.”
“What can you do?” he asked gloomily, in
return.
“I cannot imagine,” she said, with a desolate
look, more pitiable than passion, on her
young face. “I wish to save Hope, and to
save my — to save Mr. Lambert. Philip, you
do not love me. I do not call it love. There
is no passion in your veins; it is only a sort
of sympathetic selfishness. Hope is infinitely
better than you are, and I believe she is more
capable of loving. I began by hating her,
but if she loves you as I think she does, she
has treated me more generously than ever one
woman treated another. For she could not
look at me and not know that I loved you. I
did love you. O Philip, tell me what to do!”
Such beauty in anguish, the thrill of the
possession of such love, the possibility of
soothing by tenderness the wild mood which
-- 203 --
[figure description] Page 203.[end figure description]
he could not meet by counsel, — it would have
taken a stronger or less sympathetic nature
than Malbone's to endure all this. It swept
him away; this revival of passion was irresistible.
When her pent-up feeling was once
uttered, she turned to his love as a fancied
salvation. It was a terrible remedy. She had
never looked more beautiful, and yet she
seemed to have grown old at once; her very
caresses appeared to burn. She lingered and
lingered, and still he kept her there; and
when it was no longer possible for her to go
without disturbing the house, he led her to a
secret spiral stairway, which went from attic
to cellar of that stately old mansion, and
which opened by one or more doors on each
landing, as his keen eye had found out. Descending
this, he went forth with her into the
dark and silent night. The mist hung around
the house; the wet leaves fluttered and fell
upon their cheeks; the water lapped desolately
against the pier. Philip found a carriage
and sent her back to Mrs. Meredith's, where
she was staying during the brief absence of
John Lambert.
These concealed meetings, once begun, became
an absorbing excitement. She came
-- 204 --
[figure description] Page 204.[end figure description]
several times, staying half an hour, an hour,
two hours. They were together long enough
for suffering, never long enough for soothing.
It was a poor substitute for happiness. Each
time she came, Malbone wished that she might
never go or never return. His warier nature
was feverish with solicitude and with self-reproach;
he liked the excitement of slight risks,
but this was far too intense, the vibrations too
extreme. She, on the other hand, rode triumphant
over waves of passion which cowed him.
He dared not exclude her; he dared not continue
to admit her; he dared not free himself;
he could not be happy. The privacy of the
concealed stairway saved them from outward
dangers, but not from inward fears. Their interviews
were first blissful, then anxious, then
sad, then stormy. It was at the end of such
a storm that Emilia had passed into one of
those deathly calms which belonged to her
physical temperament; and it was under these
circumstances that Hope had followed Philip
to the door.
-- 205 -- p586-218
XX. AUNT JANE TO THE RESCUE.
[figure description] Page 205.[end figure description]
THE thing that saves us from insanity
during great grief is that there is usually
something to do, and the mind composes
itself to the mechanical task of adjusting the
details. Hope dared not look forward an inch
into the future; that way madness lay. Fortunately,
it was plain what must come first, —
to keep the whole thing within their own walls,
and therefore to make some explanation to
Mrs. Meredith, whose servants had doubtless
been kept up all night awaiting Emilia. Profoundly
perplexed what to say or not to say to
her, Hope longed with her whole soul for an
adviser. Harry and Kate were both away, and
besides, she shrank from darkening their young
lives as hers had been darkened. She resolved
to seek counsel in the one person who most
thoroughly distrusted Emilia, — Aunt Jane.
This lady was in a particularly happy mood
that day. Emilia, who did all kinds of fine
needle-work exquisitely, had just embroidered
-- 206 --
[figure description] Page 206.[end figure description]
for Aunt Jane some pillow-cases. The original
suggestion came from Hope, but it never
cost Emilia anything to keep a secret, and she
had presented the gift very sweetly, as if it
were a thought of her own. Aunt Jane, who
with all her penetration as to facts was often
very guileless as to motives, was thoroughly
touched by the humility and the embroidery.
“All last night,” she said, “I kept waking
up, and thinking about Christian charity and
my pillow-cases.”
It was, therefore, a very favorable day for
Hope's consultation, though it was nearly
noon before her aunt was visible, perhaps because
it took so long to make up her bed with
the new adornments.
Hope said frankly to Aunt Jane that there
were some circumstances about which she
should rather not be questioned, but that
Emilia had come there the previous night
from the ball, had been seized with one of her
peculiar attacks, and had stayed all night.
Aunt Jane kept her eyes steadily fixed on
Hope's sad face, and, when the tale was ended,
drew her down and kissed her lips.
“Now tell me, dear,” she said; “what comes
first?”
-- 207 --
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“The first thing is,” said Hope, “to have
Emilia's absence explained to Mrs. Meredith
in some such way that she will think no more
of it, and not talk about it.”
“Certainly,” said Aunt Jane. “There is
but one way to do that. I will call on her
myself.”
“You, auntie?” said Hope.
“Yes, I,” said her aunt. “I have owed her
a call for five years. It is the only thing
that will excite her so much as to put all else
out of her head.”
“O auntie!” said Hope, greatly relieved,
“if you only would! But ought you really to
go out? It is almost raining.”
“I shall go,” said Aunt Jane, decisively, “if
it rains little boys!”
“But will not Mrs. Meredith wonder —?”
began Hope.
“That is one advantage,” interrupted her
aunt, “of being an absurd old woman. Nobody
ever wonders at anything I do, or else it
is that they never stop wondering.”
She sent Ruth erelong to order the horses.
Hope collected her various wrappers, and
Ruth, returning, got her mistress into a state
of preparation.
-- 208 --
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“If I might say one thing more,” Hope
whispered.
“Certainly,” said her aunt. “Ruth, go to
my chamber, and get me a pin.”
“What kind of a pin, ma'am?” asked that
meek handmaiden, from the doorway.
“What a question!” said her indignant
mistress. “Any kind. The common pin of
North America. Now, Hope?” as the door
closed.
“I think it better, auntie,” said Hope, “that
Philip should not stay here longer at present.
You can truly say that the house is full,
and —”
“I have just had a note from him,” said
Aunt Jane, severely. “He has gone to lodge
at the hotel. What next?”
“Aunt Jane,” said Hope, looking her full
in the face, “I have not the slightest idea
what to do next.”
(“The next thing for me,” thought her aunt,
“is to have a little plain speech with that misguided
child upstairs.”)
“I can see no way out,” pursued Hope.
“Darling!” said Aunt Jane, with a voice
full of womanly sweetness, “there is always a
way out, or else the world would have stopped
-- 209 --
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long ago. Perhaps it would have been better
if it had stopped, but you see it has not. All
we can do is, to live on and try our best.”
She bade Hope leave Emilia to her, and
furthermore stipulated that Hope should go to
her pupils as usual, that afternoon, as it was
their last lesson. The young girl shrank from
the effort, but the elder lady was inflexible.
She had her own purpose in it. Hope once
out of the way, Aunt Jane could deal with
Emilia.
No human being, when met face to face
with Aunt Jane, had ever failed to yield up to
her the whole truth she sought. Emilia was
on that day no exception. She was prostrate,
languid, humble, denied nothing, was ready to
concede every point but one. Never, while
she lived, would she dwell beneath John Lambert's
roof again. She had left it impulsively,
she admitted, scarce knowing what she did.
But she would never return there to live. She
would go once more and see that all was in
order for Mr. Lambert, both in the house
and on board the yacht, where they were to
have taken up their abode for a time. There
were new servants in the house, a new captain
on the yacht; she would trust Mr. Lambert's
-- 210 --
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comfort to none of them; she would do her
full duty. Duty! the more utterly she felt
herself to be gliding away from him forever,
the more pains she was ready to lavish in doing
these nothings well. About every insignificant
article he owned she seemed to feel
the most scrupulous and wife-like responsibility;
while she yet knew that all she had was to
him nothing, compared with the possession of
herself; and it was the thought of this last
ownership that drove her to despair.
Sweet and plaintive as the child's face was,
it had a glimmer of wildness and a hunted
look, that baffled Aunt Jane a little, and compelled
her to temporize. She consented that
Emilia should go to her own house, on condition
that she would not see Philip, — which
was readily and even eagerly promised, —
and that Hope should spend that night with
Emilia, which proposal was ardently accepted.
It occurred to Aunt Jane that nothing better
could happen than for John Lambert, on
returning, to find his wife at home; and to
secure this result, if possible, she telegraphed
to him to come at once.
Meantime Hope gave her inevitable musiclesson,
so absorbed in her own thoughts that it
-- 211 --
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was all as mechanical as the métronome. As
she came out upon the Avenue for the walk
home, she saw a group of people from a gardener's
house, who had collected beside a
muddy crossing, where a team of cart-horses
had refused to stir. Presently they sprang
forward with a great jerk, and a little Irish
child was thrown beneath the wheel. Hope
sprang forward to grasp the child, and the
wheel struck her also; but she escaped with
a dress torn and smeared, while the cart
passed over the little girl's arm, breaking it
in two places. She screamed and then grew
faint, as Hope lifted her. The mother received
the burden with a wail of anguish;
the other Irishwomen pressed around her
with the dense and suffocating sympathy of
their nation. Hope bade one and another
run for a physician, but nobody stirred.
There was no surgical aid within a mile or
more. Hope looked round in despair, then
glanced at her own disordered garments.
“As sure as you live!” shouted a well-known
voice from a carriage which had
stopped behind them. “If that is n't Hope
what's-her-name, wish I may never! Here's
a lark! Let me come there!” And the
speaker pushed through the crowd.
-- 212 --
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“Miss Ingleside,” said Hope, decisively,
“this child's arm is broken. There is nobody
to go for a physician. Except for the condition
I am in, I would ask you to take me there at
once in your carriage; but as it is —”
“As it is, I must ask you, hey?” said
Blanche, finishing the sentence. “Of course.
No mistake. Sans dire. Jones, junior, this
lady will join us. Don't look so scared, man.
Are you anxious about your cushions or your
reputation?”
The youth simpered and disclaimed.
“Jump in, then, Miss Maxwell. Never
mind the expense. It's only the family carriage; —
surname and arms of Jones. Lucky
there are no parents to the fore. Put my
shawl over you, so.”
“O Blanche!” said Hope, “what injustice—”
“I've done myself?” said the volatile damsel.
“Not a doubt of it. That's my style,
you know. But I have some sense; I know
who's who. Now, Jones, junior, make your
man handle the ribbons. I've always had a
grudge against that ordinance about fast driving,
and now's our chance.”
And the sacred “ordinance,” with all other
-- 213 --
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proprieties, was left in ruins that day. They
tore along the Avenue with unexplained and
most inexplicable speed, Hope being concealed
by riding backward, and by a large shawl, and
Blanche and her admirer receiving the full indignation
of every chaste and venerable eye.
Those who had tolerated all this girl's previous
improprieties were obliged to admit that the
line must be drawn somewhere. She at once
lost several good invitations and a matrimonial
offer, since Jones, junior, was swept away
by his parents to be wedded without delay to
a consumptive heiress who had long pined for
his whiskers; and Count Posen, in his Souvenirs,
was severer on Blanche's one good
deed than on the worst of her follies.
A few years after, when Blanche, then the
fearless wife of a regular-army officer, was
helping Hope in the hospitals at Norfolk, she
would stop to shout with delight over the reminiscence
of that stately Jones equipage in mad
career, amid the barking of dogs and the
groaning of dowagers. “After all, Hope,”
she would say, “the fastest thing I ever did
was under your orders.”
-- 214 -- p586-227
XXI. A STORM.
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THE members of the household were all
at the window about noon, next day,
watching the rise of a storm. A murky wing
of cloud, shaped like a hawk's, hung over the
low western hills across the bay. Then the
hawk became an eagle, and the eagle a gigantic
phantom, that hovered over half the visible
sky. Beneath it, a little scud of vapor, moved
by some cross-current of air, raced rapidly
against the wind, just above the horizon, like
smoke from a battle-field.
As the cloud ascended, the water grew rapidly
blacker, and in half an hour broke into
jets of white foam, all over its surface, with
an angry look. Meantime a white film of fog
spread down the bay from the northward.
The wind hauled from southwest to northwest,
so suddenly and strongly that all the anchored
boats seemed to have swung round instantaneously,
without visible process. The instant the
wind shifted, the rain broke forth, filling the
-- 215 --
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air in a moment with its volume, and cutting
so sharply that it seemed like hail, though no
hailstones reached the ground. At the same
time there rose upon the water a dense white
film, which seemed to grow together from a
hundred different directions, and was made
partly of rain, and partly of the blown edges
of the spray. There was but a glimpse of
this; for in a few moments it was impossible
to see two rods; but when the first gust was
over, the water showed itself again, the jets of
spray all beaten down, and regular waves, of
dull lead-color, breaking higher on the shore.
All the depth of blackness had left the sky,
and there remained only an obscure and
ominous gray, through which the lightning
flashed white, not red. Boats came driving
in from the mouth of the bay with a rag of
sail up; the men got them moored with difficulty,
and when they sculled ashore in the
skiffs, a dozen comrades stood ready to grasp
and haul them in. Others launched skiffs in
sheltered places, and pulled out bareheaded to
bail out their fishing-boats and keep them
from swamping at their moorings.
The shore was thronged with men in oilskin
clothes and by women with shawls over their
-- 216 --
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heads. Aunt Jane, who always felt responsible
for whatever went on in the elements, sat
in-doors with one lid closed, wincing at every
flash, and watching the universe with the air
of a coachman guiding six wild horses.
Just after the storm had passed its height,
two veritable wild horses were reined up at
the door, and Philip burst in, his usual self-composure
gone.
“Emilia is out sailing!” he exclaimed,—
“alone with Lambert's boatman, in this
gale. They say she was bound for Narragansett.”
“Impossible!” cried Hope, turning pale.
“I left her not three hours ago.” Then she
remembered that Emilia had spoken of going
on board the yacht, to superintend some arrangements,
but had said no more about it,
when she opposed it.
“Harry!” said Aunt Jane, quickly, from
her chair by the window, “see that fisherman.
He has just come ashore and is telling something.
Ask him.”
The fisherman had indeed seen Lambert's
boat, which was well known. Something
seemed to be the matter with the sail, but before
the storm struck her, it had been hauled
-- 217 --
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down. They must have taken in water enough,
as it was. He had himself been obliged to
bail out three times, running in from the reef.
“Was there any landing which they could
reach?” Harry asked.
There was none, — but the light-ship lay
right in their track, and if they had good luck,
they might get aboard of her.
“The boatman?” said Philip, anxiously, —
“Mr. Lambert's boatman; is he a good sailor?”
“Don't know,” was the reply. “Stranger
here. Dutchman, Frenchman, Portegee, or
some kind of a foreigner.”
“Seems to understand himself in a boat,”
said another.
“Mr. Malbone knows him,” said a third.
“The same that dove with the young woman
under the steamboat paddles.”
“Good grit,” said the first.
“That's so,” was the answer. “But grit
don't teach a man the channel.”
All agreed to this axiom; but as there was
so strong a probability that the voyagers had
reached the light-ship, there seemed less cause
for fear.
The next question was, whether it was
-- 218 --
[figure description] Page 218.[end figure description]
possible to follow them. All agreed that it would
be foolish for any boat to attempt it, till the
wind had blown itself out, which might be
within half an hour. After that, some predicted
a calm, some a fog, some a renewal of
the storm; there was the usual variety of
opinions. At any rate, there might perhaps
be an interval during which they could go out,
if the gentlemen did not mind a wet jacket.
Within the half-hour came indeed an interval
of calm, and a light shone behind the
clouds from the west. It faded soon into a
gray fog, with puffs of wind from the southwest
again. When the young men went out
with the boatmen, the water had grown more
quiet, save where angry little gusts ruffled it.
But these gusts made it necessary to carry a
double reef, and they made but little progress
against wind and tide.
A dark-gray fog, broken by frequent windflaws,
makes the ugliest of all days on the
water. A still, pale fog is soothing; it lulls
nature to a kind of repose. But a windy fog
with occasional sunbeams and sudden films of
metallic blue breaking the leaden water, —
this carries an impression of something weird
and treacherous in the universe, and suggests
caution.
-- 219 --
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As the boat floated on, every sight and
sound appeared strange. The music from the
fort came sudden and startling through the
vaporous eddies. A tall white schooner rose
instantaneously near them, like a light-house.
They could see the steam of the factory floating
low, seeking some outlet between cloud
and water. As they drifted past a wharf, the
great black piles of coal hung high and
gloomy; then a stray sunbeam brought out
their peacock colors; then came the fog again,
driving hurriedly by, as if impatient to go
somewhere and enraged at the obstacle. It
seemed to have a vast inorganic life of its
own, a volition and a whim. It drew itself
across the horizon like a curtain; then advanced
in trampling armies up the bay; then
marched in masses northward; then suddenly
grew thin, and showed great spaces of sunlight;
then drifted across the low islands, like
long tufts of wool; then rolled itself away
toward the horizon; then closed in again,
pitiless and gray.
Suddenly something vast towered amid the
mist above them. It was the French war-ship
returned to her anchorage once more, and
seeming in that dim atmosphere to be
-- 220 --
[figure description] Page 220.[end figure description]
something spectral and strange that had taken
form out of the elements. The muzzles of
great guns rose tier above tier, along her side;
great boats hung one above another, on
successive pairs of davits, at her stern. So
high was her hull, that the topmost boat and
the topmost gun appeared to be suspended in
middle air; and yet this was but the beginning
of her altitude. Above these were the
heavy masts, seen dimly through the mist;
between these were spread eight dark lines of
sailors' clothes, which, with the massive yards
above, looked like part of some ponderous
framework built to reach the sky. This prolongation
of the whole dark mass toward the
heavens had a portentous look to those who
gazed from below; and when the denser fog
sometimes furled itself away from the topgallant
masts, hitherto invisible, and showed
them rising loftier yet, and the tricolor at the
mizzen-mast-head looking down as if from the
zenith, then they all seemed to appertain to
something of more than human workmanship;
a hundred wild tales of phantom vessels came
up to the imagination, and it was as if that
one gigantic structure were expanding to fill
all space from sky to sea.
-- 221 --
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They were swept past it; the fog closed
in; it was necessary to land near the Fort,
and proceed on foot. They walked across
the rough peninsula, while the mist began to
disperse again, and they were buoyant with
expectation. As they toiled onward, the fog
suddenly met them at the turn of a lane
where it had awaited them, like an enemy.
As they passed into those gray and impalpable
arms, the whole world changed again.
They walked toward the sound of the sea.
As they approached it, the dull hue that lay
upon it resembled that of the leaden sky.
The two elements could hardly be distinguished
except as the white outlines of the
successive breakers were lifted through the
fog. The lines of surf appeared constantly to
multiply upon the beach, and yet, on counting
them, there were never any more. Sometimes,
in the distance, masses of foam rose up like a
wall where the horizon ought to be; and, as
the coming waves took form out of the unseen,
it seemed as if no phantom were too vast or
shapeless to come rolling in upon their dusky
shoulders.
Presently a frail gleam of something like
the ghost of dead sunshine made them look
-- 222 --
[figure description] Page 222.[end figure description]
toward the west. Above the dim roofs of
Castle Hill mansion-house, the sinking sun
showed luridly through two rifts of cloud, and
then the swift motion of the nearer vapor
veiled both sun and cloud, and banished
them into almost equal remoteness.
Leaving the beach on their right, and passing
the high rocks of the Pirate's Cave, they
presently descended to the water's edge once
more. The cliffs rose to a distorted height in
the dimness; sprays of withered grass nodded
along the edge, like Ossian's spectres. Light
seemed to be vanishing from the universe,
leaving them alone with the sea. And when
a solitary loon uttered his wild cry, and rising,
sped away into the distance, it was as if life
were following light into an equal annihilation.
That sense of vague terror, with which the
ocean sometimes controls the fancy, began to
lay its grasp on them. They remembered that
Emilia, in speaking once of her intense shrinking
from death, had said that the sea was the
only thing from which she would not fear to
meet it.
Fog exaggerates both for eye and ear; it is
always a sounding-board for the billows; and
in this case, as often happens, the roar did not
-- 223 --
[figure description] Page 223.[end figure description]
appear to proceed from the waves themselves,
but from some source in the unseen horizon,
as if the spectators were shut within a beleaguered
fortress, and this thundering noise
came from an impetuous enemy outside. Ever
and anon there was a distinct crash of heavier
sound, as if some special barricade had at
length been beaten in, and the garrison must
look to their inner defences.
The tide was unusually high, and scarcely
receded with the ebb, though the surf increased;
the waves came in with constant
rush and wail, and with an ominous rattle of
pebbles on the little beaches, beneath the
powerful suction of the undertow; and there
were more and more of those muffled throbs
along the shore which tell of coming danger
as plainly as minute-guns. With these came
mingled that yet more inexplicable humming
which one hears at intervals in such times,
like strains of music caught and tangled in
the currents of stormy air, — strains which
were perhaps the filmy thread on which tales
of sirens and mermaids were first strung, and
in which, at this time, they would fain recognize
the voice of Emilia.
-- 224 -- p586-237
XXII. OUT OF THE DEPTHS.
[figure description] Page 224.[end figure description]
AS the night closed in, the wind rose
steadily, still blowing from the southwest.
In Brenton's kitchen they found a
group round a great fire of driftwood; some
of these were fishermen who had with difficulty
made a landing on the beach, and
who confirmed the accounts already given.
The boat had been seen sailing for the Narragansett
shore, and when the squall came, the
boatman had lowered and reefed the sail, and
stood for the lightship. They must be on
board of her, if anywhere.
“They are safe there?” asked Philip, eagerly.
“Only place where they would be safe,
then,” said the spokesman.
“Unless the light-ship parts,” said an old
fellow.
“Parts!” said the other. “Sixty fathom
of two-inch chain, and old Joe talks about
parting.”
-- 225 --
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“Foolish, of course,” said Philip; “but it's
a dangerous shore.”
“That's so,” was the answer. “Never saw
so many lines of reef show outside, neither.”
“There's an old saying on this shore,” said
Joe:—
“When Price's Neck goes to Brenton's Reef,
Body and soul will come to grief.
But when Brenton's Reef comes to Price's Neck,
Soul and body are both a wreck.”
“What does it mean?” asked Harry.
“It only means,” said somebody, “that
when you see it white all the way out from
the Neck to the Reef, you can't take the
inside passage.”
“But what does the last half mean?” persisted
Harry.
“Don't know as I know,” said the veteran,
and relapsed into silence, in which all joined
him, while the wind howled and whistled outside,
and the barred windows shook.
Weary and restless with vain waiting, they
looked from the doorway at the weather.
The door went back with a slam, and the gust
swooped down on them with that special blast
that always seems to linger just outside on
such nights, ready for the first head that shows
-- 226 --
[figure description] Page 226.[end figure description]
itself. They closed the door upon the flickering
fire and the uncouth shadows within, and
went forth into the night. At first the solid
blackness seemed to lay a weight on their
foreheads. There was absolutely nothing to
be seen but the two lights of the light-ship,
glaring from the dark sea like a wolf's eyes
from a cavern. They looked nearer and
brighter than in ordinary nights, and appeared
to the excited senses of the young men to
dance strangely on the waves, and to be
always opposite to them, as they moved along
the shore with the wind almost at their backs.
“What did that old fellow mean?” said
Malbone in Harry's ear, as they came to a
protected place and could hear each other,
“by talking of Brenton's Reef coming to
Price's Neck.”
“Some sailor's doggerel,” said Harry, indifferently.
“Here is Price's Neck before us,
and yonder is Brenton's Reef.”
“Where?” said Philip, looking round bewildered.
The lights had gone, as if the wolf, weary
of watching, had suddenly closed his eyes,
and slumbered in his cave.
Harry trembled and shivered. In Heaven's
name, what could this disappearance mean?
-- 227 --
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Suddenly a sheet of lightning came, so
white and intense, it sent its light all the way
out to the horizon and exhibited far-off vessels,
that reeled and tossed and looked as if wandering
without a guide. But this was not so
startling as what it showed in the foreground.
There drifted heavily upon the waves, within
full view from the shore, moving parallel
to it, yet gradually approaching, an uncouth
shape that seemed a vessel and yet not a vessel;
two stunted masts projected above, and
below there could be read, in dark letters that
apparently swayed and trembled in the wan
lightning, as the thing moved on,
Brenton's Reef.
Philip, leaning against a rock, gazed into
the darkness where the apparition had been;
even Harry felt a thrill of half-superstitious
wonder, and listened half mechanically to a
rough sailor's voice at his ear:—
“God! old Joe was right. There's one
wreck that is bound to make many. The
light-ship has parted.”
“Drifting ashore,” said Harry, his accustomed
clearness of head coming back at a
flash. “Where will she strike?”
-- 228 --
[figure description] Page 228.[end figure description]
“Price's Neck,” said the sailor.
Harry turned to Philip and spoke to him,
shouting in his ear the explanation. Malbone's
lips moved mechanically, but he said nothing.
Passively, he let Harry take him by the arm,
and lead him on.
Following the sailor, they rounded a projecting
point, and found themselves a little
sheltered from the wind. Not knowing the
region, they stumbled about among the rocks,
and scarcely knew when they neared the surf,
except when a wave came swashing round
their very feet. Pausing at the end of a cove,
they stood beside their conductor, and their
eyes, now grown accustomed, could make out
vaguely the outlines of the waves.
The throat of the cove was so shoal and
narrow, and the mass of the waves so great,
that they reared their heads enormously, just
outside, and spending their strength there, left
a lower level within the cove. Yet sometimes
a series of great billows would come straight
on, heading directly for the entrance, and then
the surface of the water within was seen to
swell suddenly upward as if by a terrible inward
magic of its own; it rose and rose, as if
it would ingulf everything; then as rapidly
-- 229 --
[figure description] Page 229.[end figure description]
sank, and again presented a mere quiet vestibule
before the excluded waves.
They saw in glimpses, as the lightning
flashed, the shingly beach, covered with a
mass of creamy foam, all tremulous and fluctuating
in the wind; and this foam was constantly
torn away by the gale in great shreds,
that whirled by them as if the very fragments
of the ocean were fleeing from it in terror, to
take refuge in the less frightful element of
air.
Still the wild waves reared their heads, like
savage, crested animals, now white, now black,
looking in from the entrance of the cove.
And now there silently drifted upon them
something higher, vaster, darker than themselves, —
the doomed vessel. It was strange
how slowly and steadily she swept in, — for
her broken chain-cable dragged, as it afterwards
proved, and kept her stern-on to the
shore, — and they could sometimes hear amid
the tumult a groan that seemed to come from
the very heart of the earth, as she painfully
drew her keel over hidden reefs. Over five
of these (as was afterwards found) she had already
drifted, and she rose and fell more than
once on the high waves at the very mouth of
-- 230 --
[figure description] Page 230.[end figure description]
the cove, like a wild bird hovering ere it
pounces.
Then there came one of those great confluences
of waves described already, which, lifting
her bodily upward, higher and higher and
higher, suddenly rushed with her into the
basin, filling it like an opened dry-dock, crashing
and roaring round the vessel and upon the
rocks, then sweeping out again and leaving
her lodged, still stately and steady, at the centre
of the cove.
They could hear from the crew a mingled
sound, that came as a shout of excitement from
some and a shriek of despair from others.
The vivid lightning revealed for a moment
those on shipboard to those on shore; and
blinding as it was, it lasted long enough
to show figures gesticulating and pointing.
The old sailor, Mitchell, tried to build a fire
among the rocks nearest the vessel, but it
was impossible, because of the wind. This
was a disappointment, for the light would
have taken away half the danger, and more
than half the terror. Though the cove was
more quiet than the ocean, yet it was fearful
enough, even there. The vessel might hold
together till morning, but who could tell? It
-- 231 --
[figure description] Page 231.[end figure description]
was almost certain that those on board would
try to land, and there was nothing to do but
to await the effort. The men from the farm-house
had meanwhile come down with ropes.
It was simply impossible to judge with any
accuracy of the distance of the ship. One of
these new-comers, who declared that she was
lodged very near, went to a point of rocks,
and shouted to those on board to heave him a
rope. The tempest suppressed his voice, as
it had put out the fire. But perhaps the lightning
had showed him to the dark figures on
the stern; for when the next flash came, they
saw a rope flung, which fell short. The real
distance was more than a hundred yards.
Then there was a long interval of darkness.
The moment the next flash came they saw a
figure let down by a rope from the stern of the
vessel, while the hungry waves reared like
wolves to seize it. Everybody crowded down
to the nearest rocks, looking this way and that
for a head to appear. They pressed eagerly in
every direction where a bit of plank of a barrel-head
floated; they fancied faint cries here
and there, and went aimlessly to and fro. A
new effort, after half a dozen failures, sent a
blaze mounting up fitfully among the rocks,
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startling all with the sudden change its blessed
splendor made. Then a shrill shout from
one of the watchers summoned all to a cleft
in the cove, half shaded from the firelight,
where there came rolling in amidst the surf,
more dead than alive, the body of a man. It
was the young foreigner, John Lambert's boatman.
He bore still around him the rope that
was to save the rest.
How pale and eager their faces looked as
they bent above him! But the eagerness was
all gone from his, and only the pallor left.
While the fishermen got the tackle rigged,
such as it was, to complete the communication
with the vessel, the young men worked upon
the boatman, and soon had him restored to
consciousness. He was able to explain that
the ship had been severely strained, and that
all on board believed she would go to pieces
before morning. No one would risk being the
first to take the water, and he had at last volunteered,
as being the best swimmer, on condition
that Emilia should be next sent, when the
communication was established.
Two ropes were then hauled on board the
vessel, a larger and a smaller. By the flickering
firelight and the rarer flashes of lightning
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(the rain now falling in torrents) they saw a
hammock slung to the larger rope; a woman's
form was swathed in it; and the smaller rope
being made fast to this, they found by pulling
that she could be drawn towards the shore.
Those on board steadied the hammock as it
was lowered from the ship, but the waves
seemed maddened by this effort to escape
their might, and they leaped up at her again
and again. The rope drooped beneath her
weight, and all that could be done from shore
was to haul her in as fast as possible, to abbreviate
the period of buffeting and suffocation.
As she neared the rocks she could be kept
more safe from the water; faster and faster
she was drawn in; sometimes there came
some hitch and stoppage, but by steady patience
it was overcome.
She was so near the rocks that hands
were already stretched to grasp her, when
there came one of the great surging waves
that sometimes filled the basin. It gave a
terrible lurch to the stranded vessel hitherto
so erect; the larger rope snapped instantly;
the guiding rope was twitched from the hands
that held it; and the canvas that held Emilia
was caught and swept away like a shred of
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foam, and lost amid the whiteness of the
seething froth below. Fifteen minutes after,
the hammock came ashore empty, the lashings
having parted.
The cold daybreak was just opening, though
the wind still blew keenly, when they found
the body of Emilia. It was swathed in a roll
of sea-weed, lying in the edge of the surf, on a
broad, flat rock near where the young boatman
had come ashore. The face was not disfigured;
the clothing was only torn a little, and tangled
closely round her; but the life was gone.
It was Philip who first saw her; and he stood
beside her for a moment motionless, stunned
into an aspect of tranquillity. This, then, was
the end. All his ready sympathy, his wooing
tenderness, his winning compliances, his self-indulgent
softness, his perilous amiability, his
reluctance to give pain or to see sorrow, — all
had ended in this. For once, he must force
even his accommodating and evasive nature
to meet the plain, blank truth. Now all his
characteristics appeared changed by the encounter;
it was Harry who was ready, thoughtful,
attentive, — while Philip, who usually had
all these traits, was paralyzed among his
dreams. Could he have fancied such a scene
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beforehand, he would have vowed that no hand
but his should touch the breathless form of
Emilia. As it was, he instinctively made way
for the quick gathering of the others, as if
almost any one else had a better right to be
there.
The storm had blown itself out by sunrise;
the wind had shifted, beating down the waves;
it seemed as if everything in nature were exhausted.
The very tide had ebbed away. The
light-ship rested between the rocks, helpless,
still at the mercy of the returning waves, and
yet still upright and with that stately look of
unconscious pleading which all shipwrecked
vessels wear. It is wonderfully like the look I
have seen in the face of some dead soldier, on
whom war had done its worst. Every line of
a ship is so built for motion, every part, while
afloat, seems so full of life and so answering to
the human life it bears, that this paralysis of
shipwreck touches the imagination as if the
motionless thing had once been animated by a
soul.
And not far from the vessel, in a chamber of
the seaside farm-house, lay the tenderer and
fairer wreck of Emilia. Her storms and her
passions were ended. The censure of the world,
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the anguish of friends, the clinging arms of
love, were nothing now to her. Again the soft
shelter of unconsciousness had clasped her in;
but this time the trance was longer and the
faintness was unto death.
From the moment of her drifting ashore, it
was the young boatman who had assumed the
right to care for her and to direct everything.
Philip seemed stunned; Harry was his usual
clear-headed and efficient self; but to his
honest eyes much revealed itself in a little
while; and when Hope arrived in the early
morning, he said to her, “This boatman, who
once saved your life, is Emilia's Swiss lover,
Antoine Marval.”
“More than lover,” said the young Swiss,
overhearing. “She was my wife before God,
when you took her from me. In my country,
a betrothal is as sacred as a marriage. Then
came that man, he filled her heart with
illusions, and took her away in my absence.
When my brother was here in the
corvette, he found her for me. Then I
came for her; I saved her sister; then I
saw the name on the card and would not give
my own. I became her servant. She saw me
in the yacht, only once; she knew me; she
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was afraid. Then she said, `Perhaps I still
love you, — a little; I do not know; I am in
despair; take me from this home I hate.' We
sailed that day in the small boat for Narragansett, —
I know not where. She hardly
looked up or spoke; but for me, I cared for
nothing since she was with me. When the
storm came, she was frightened, and said,
`It is a retribution.' I said, `You shall never
go back.' She never did. Here she is. You
cannot take her from me.”
Once on board the light-ship, she had been
assigned the captain's state-room, while Antoine
watched at the door. She seemed to
shrink from him whenever he went to speak
to her, he owned, but she answered kindly and
gently, begging to be left alone. When at
last the vessel parted her moorings, he persuaded
Emilia to come on deck and be lashed
to the mast, where she sat without complaint.
Who can fathom the thoughts of that bewildered
child, as she sat amid the spray and
the howling of the blast, while the doomed
vessel drifted on with her to the shore? Did
all the error and sorrow of her life pass distinctly
before her? Or did the roar of the
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surf lull her into quiet, like the unconscious
kindness of wild creatures that toss and bewilder
their prey into unconsciousness ere they
harm it? None can tell. Death answers no
questions; it only makes them needless.
The morning brought to the scene John
Lambert, just arrived by land from New
York.
The passion of John Lambert for his wife
was of that kind which ennobles while it lasts,
but which rarely outlasts marriage. A man
of such uncongenial mould will love an enchanting
woman with a mad, absorbing passion,
where self-sacrifice is so mingled with
selfishness that the two emotions seem one;
he will hungrily yearn to possess her, to call
her by his own name, to hold her in his arms,
to kill any one else who claims her. But when
she is once his wife, and his arms hold a body
without a soul, — no soul at least for him, —
then her image is almost inevitably profaned,
and the passion which began too high for
earth ends far too low for heaven. Let now
death change that form to marble, and instantly
it resumes its virgin holiness; though
the presence of life did not sanctify, its departure
does. It is only the true lover to
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[figure description] Page 239.[end figure description]
whom the breathing form is as sacred as the
breathless.
That ideality of nature which love had developed
in this man, and which had already
drooped a little during his brief period of marriage,
was born again by the side of death.
While Philip wandered off silent and lonely
with his grief, John Lambert knelt by the
beautiful remains, talking inarticulately, his
eyes streaming with unchecked tears. Again
was Emilia, in her marble paleness, the calm
centre of a tragedy she herself had caused.
The wild, ungoverned child was the image of
peace; it was the stolid and prosperous man
who was in the storm. It was not till Hope
came that there was any change. Then his
prostrate nature sought hers, as the needle
leaps to the iron; the first touch of her hand,
the sight of her kiss upon Emilia's forehead,
made him strong. It was the thorough subjection
of a worldly man to the higher organization
of a noble woman, and thenceforth
it never varied. In later years, after he had
foolishly sought, as men will, to win her to
a nearer tie, there was no moment when she
had not full control over his time, his energies,
and his wealth.
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After it was all ended, Hope told him everything
that had happened; but in that wild
moment of his despair she told him nothing.
Only she and Harry knew the story of the
young Swiss; and now that Emilia was
gone, her early lover had no wish to speak of
her to any but these two, or to linger long
where she had been doubly lost to him, by
marriage and by death. The world, with all
its prying curiosity, usually misses the key to
the very incidents about which it asks most
questions; and of the many who gossiped or
mourned concerning Emilia, none knew the
tragic complication which her death alone
could have solved. The breaking of Hope's
engagement to Philip was attributed to every
cause but the true one. And when the storm
of the great Rebellion broke over the land, its
vast calamity absorbed all minor griefs.
-- 241 -- p586-254
XXIII. REQUIESCAT.
[figure description] Page 241.[end figure description]
THANK God! it is not within the power
of one man's errors to blight the promise
of a life like that of Hope. It is but a feeble
destiny that is wrecked by passion, when it
should be ennobled. Aunt Jane and Kate
watched Hope closely during her years of
probation, for although she fancied herself to
be keeping her own counsel, yet her career lay
in broad light for them. She was like yonder
sailboat, which floats conspicuous by night
amid the path of moonbeams, and which yet
seems to its own voyagers to be remote and
unseen upon a waste of waves.
Why should I linger over the details of her
life, after the width of ocean lay between her
and Malbone, and a manhood of self-denying
usefulness had begun to show that even he
could learn something by life's retributions?
We know what she was, and it is of secondary
importance where she went or what she did.
Kindle the light of the light-house, and it has
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[figure description] Page 242.[end figure description]
nothing to do, except to shine. There is for
it no wrong direction. There is no need to
ask, “How? Over which especial track of
distant water must my light go forth, to find
the wandering vessel to be guided in?” It
simply shines. Somewhere there is a ship
that needs it, or if not, the light does its duty.
So did Hope.
We must leave her here. Yet I cannot
bear to think of her as passing through earthly
life without tasting its deepest bliss, without
the last pure ecstasy of human love, without
the kisses of her own children on her lips,
their waxen fingers on her bosom.
And yet again, is this life so long? May it
not be better to wait until its little day is done,
and the summer night of old age has yielded
to a new morning, before attaining that acme
of joy? Are there enough successive grades
of bliss for all eternity, if so much be consummated
here? Must all novels end with an
earthly marriage, and nothing be left for
heaven?
Perhaps, for such as Hope, this life is given
to show what happiness might be, and they
await some other sphere for its fulfilment.
The greater part of the human race live out
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[figure description] Page 243.[end figure description]
their mortal years without attaining more than
a far-off glimpse of the very highest joy.
Were this life all, its very happiness were
sadness. If, as I doubt not, there be another
sphere, then that which is unfulfilled in this
must yet find completion, nothing omitted, nothing
denied. And though a thousand oracles
should pronounce this thought an idle dream,
neither Hope nor I would believe them.
It was a radiant morning of last February
when I walked across the low hills to the
scene of the wreck. Leaving the road before
reaching the Fort, I struck across the wild
moss-country, full of boulders and footpaths
and stunted cedars and sullen ponds. I
crossed the height of land, where the ruined
lookout stands like the remains of a Druidical
temple, and then went down toward the ocean.
Banks and ridges of snow lay here and there
among the fields, and the white lines of distant
capes seemed but drifts running seaward. The
ocean was gloriously alive, — the blackest blue,
with white caps on every wave; the shore was
all snowy, and the gulls were flying back and
forth in crowds; you could not tell whether
they were the white waves coming ashore,
or bits of snow going to sea. A single
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fragment of ship-timber, black with time and
weeds, and crusty with barnacles, heaved to
and fro in the edge of the surf, and two fishermen's
children, a boy and girl, tilted upon it
as it moved, clung with the semblance of terror
to each other, and played at shipwreck.
The rocks were dark with moisture, steaming
in the sun. Great sheets of ice, white
masks of departing winter, clung to every
projecting cliff, or slid with crash and shiver
into the surge. Icicles dropped their slow
and reverberating tears upon the rock where
Emilia once lay breathless; and it seemed as
if their cold, chaste drops were sent to cleanse
from her memory each scarlet stain, and leave
it virginal and pure.
THE END.
