IT was a peculiarity of Winston Aylett that he was never discomposed in seeming, however embarrassing or distressing might be his position. In his childhood he was one to whom, to use the common phrase, dirt would not stick. His face was clean and fair, his hands smooth, and his hair in order after rough and tumble experiences that sent his companions home begrimed, ragged, and unkempt frights. To-night, he had ridden a dozen miles in the teeth of the storm, and made no pause before appearing before his wife and sister, except to lay off his hat and overcoat in the hall. But had he expected to encounter a roomful of ladies, his costume could not have been more unexceptionable.
His linen was pure and fresh, even to the narrow line of wristband edging his coat sleeve; his clearly cut patrician features were tranquil in every line and tint; his step was the light, yet deliberate stride of an athlete without passion or bravado. Conscious power, inexorable will, and thorough self-command were stamped upon him from crown to foot, and his salutation to the small family party accompanied a smile as mirthless and cold as were his eyes.
Mrs. Aylett advanced a step, not more, and returned the bow that comprehended all present, with a pleased, not rapturous welcome.
“We were beginning to fear lest you might be wet,” she said, emulating his polite equanimity. Genuine tact is always chameleon-like in quality. “It rains quite fast, does it not?”
“The storm is increasing, but I experienced no inconvenience from it, thank you.”
He sat down in his favorite arm-chair, and spread his fingers before the fire.
“I am happy to see you so very much better”—to Herbert. “There were many kind inquiries for you at the court-house to-day. Dr. Ritchie wanted to know if you had ever taken nux vomica for these neuralgic turns. I invited him to come in with me and prescribe for you, but he said he must push on home, so we parted at the outer gate.”
So affable as almost to put others at their ease in his company, he chatted until supper was announced; regretted civilly Herbert's inability to go to the table, and gave his sister his arm into the dining-room, Mrs. Aylett following in their wake. If he did not eat heartily, he praised, in gentlemanly moderation, the viands selected by his consort for his delectation after his wet ride, and pleaded a late dinner as the reason of his present abstinence. Then they adjourned to the apartment where they had left Mr. Dorrance, and the host produced his cigar-case.
“Mabel says that smoke never offends your olfactories, or affects your head unpleasantly, when you are suffering from this nervous affection,” he said to Herbert.
“On the contrary, it often acts as a sedative,” was the reply.
Winston lighted a cigar with an allumette from a bronze taper-stand—a Christmas gift from his wife, which she kept supplied with fanciful spiles twisted and fringed into a variety of shapes; drew several long breaths to be certain that the fire had taken hold of the heart of the Havana, tossed the pretty paper into the embers, and resumed his seat in the chimney corner.
“A sedative is a good thing for people who allow their nerves to get out of gear,” he remarked, dryly and leisurely, puffing contentedly in the middle and at the end of the sentence. “But he who does this subverts the order of the ruler and the ruled. I supposed I had nerves once, but it is an age since they have dared molest me. I know that I had my impulses when I was younger.”
He stopped to fillip the ash forming upon the ignited end of his cigar, performing the operation with nicety, using the extreme tip of his middle-finger nail over the salver attached for the purpose to the bronze smoking-set.
“I obeyed one, above a dozen years ago. I learned only to-day that it was rash and unwise, and to how much evil it may lead.”
“Not a very active evil, if you have just discovered it to be such.”
The speaker was his sister. Herbert was motionless upon his couch. Mrs. Aylett, in the lounging-chair at the opposite side of the hearth from her husband, was cutting the leaves of a new magazine he had brought from the post-office, and did not seem to hear his remark.
“You reason upon the assumption that ignorance is bliss,” said Mr. Aylett. “Allow me to express the opinion that the adage embodying that idea is the refuge of cowards and fools. No matter how grievous a bankrupt a man may be financially in spirit, he is craven or a blockhead to shrink the investigation of his accounts. Which allusion to bankruptcy brings me to the recital of a choicely offensive bit of scandal I heard to-day. It is seldom that I give heed to the like, but the delicious rottenness revealed by this tale enforced my hearing, and fixed the details in my mind. I could not but think, as I rode home, of the accessories which would add effectiveness, to-night, to my second-hand narrative. I had the whole scene, which is now before me, in my mind's eye—the warm firelight and the shaded lamp brightening all within, while the rain pattered without; the interesting invalid over there gradually stirring into interest as the story progressed; you, Mabel, calmly and critically attentive; and my Lady Aylett, too proud to look the desire she really feels to handle the lovely carrion.”
“Your figures are not provocative of insatiable appetite,” returned his wife, with inimitable sang-froid, staying her paper knife that she might examine an engraving.
“Your appetite needs further excitants, then? So did mine until I began to suspect that the history might be authentic, and not a figment of the raconteur's imagination. The hero's name at first disposed me to set down the entire relation as a fiction. It is romantic enough to perfume a three-volume novel—Julius Lennox!”
Mabel's instinctive thought was for her husband, but, in turning to him she could not but notice that Mrs. Aylett sat motionless, the paper-cutter between two leaves, and her left hand pressed hard upon the upper, but without attempting to sever them.
Herbert twisted his head upon the pillow until he faced the back of the sofa, and a convulsion went through him, hardly quelled by the clasp of Mabel's hand upon his.
“Julius Lennox!” reiterated Mr. Aylett, between the fragrant puffs, “A lieutenant in the navy—the good-looking, but, as the sequel proved, not over-steady, spouse of a lady who was the daughter of another naval officer of similar rank. The latter was compelled to leave the service on account of incipient idiocy, and retired, upon half-pay, to an unfashionable quarter of a certain great city, where his wife, a smart Yankee, opened a boarding-house for law and medical students, and contrived not only to keep the souls and bodies of her family together, but to marry off her two still single daughters—the one to a barrister, the other to a physician. The lovely Louise Lennox—a pretty alliteration, is it not?—remained meanwhile under the paternal roof, her husband's ship being absent most of the time, and the handsome Julius having unlimited privileges in the line condemned by “Black-eyed Susan” in her parting interview with her sailor lover—finding a mistress in every port. It is woman's nature and wisdom to seek consolation for such afflictions as the deprivation of the beloved one's society, and the almost certainty that he is basking his faithless self in the sunlight of another's eyes. Our heroine, being at once ardent and philosophical, put the lex talionis into force by falling in love with one of her mother's lodgers, a sprig of the legal profession. The favored youth—so says my edition of the romance—remained preternaturally unconscious of the sentiment he had inspired, attributing her manifestations of partiality to platonic regard, until she opened his modest eyes by proposing an elopement. He had completed his professional studies, taken out a license to practise law, was about to quit her and the city, and the no-longer-adored Julius was coming home—a wreck in health and purse—upon a six months' leave of absence. It must be owned the Lady Louise had some excuse for a measure that seemed to have amazed and horrified her cicisbeo. Recoiling from the proposition and herself with the virtuous indignation that is ever aroused in the manly bosom by similar advances, he packed up his trunk, double-locked it and his heart, paid his bill, and decamped from the dangerous precincts.
“Ignoble conclusion to a tender affair; but not so devoid of tragicality as would seem. Infuriated at the desertion of this modern Joseph, Louise, the lorn, avenged the slight offered her charms by declaring to her youngest brother, the only one who resided in the same city with herself, that Joseph had made dishonorable proposals to her—a proceeding which demonstrates that the feminine character has withstood the proverbially changing effects of time from age to age. My narrative is but a later and a Gentile version of the Jewish novelette to which I have referred. The role of Potiphar was cast for the unsophisticated brother, who, being unable to immure the unimpressible Joseph in the Tombs, attempted the only means of redress that remained to him, to wit: Personal chastisement.
“And here,” continued the narrator, yet more slowly, “I find myself perplexed by the discrepancy between the statement I have had to-day and one of this section of the story furnished me several years since. In the latter the indignant fraternal relative flogged the would-be betrayer within a quarter of an inch of his life. The other account reverses the position of the parties, and makes Joseph the incorruptible also the invincible. However this may have been, the adventure seems to have quenched the loving Louise's brilliancy for a season. We hear no more of her until after her father's decease, when she re-enters the lists of Cupid in another State, as the blushing and still beautiful virgin-betrothed of a man of birth and means, who woos and weds her under her maiden cognomen—the entire family, including the valiant brother who figured as whippee or whipper, in the castigation exploit—being accomplices in the righteous fraud. I might, did I not fear being prolix, tell of sundry side-issues growing out of the main stalk of this plot, such as the ingenious manoeuvres by which the promising couple of conspirators averted, upon the eve of the sister's bridal, the threatened expose of their machinations to entrap the wealthy lover. Suffice it to say that the duped husband (by brevet) lived for a decade and a half in the placid enjoyment of the ignorance which my sagacious sister here is disposed to confound with rational bliss—nor is he quite sure, to this day, whether spouse No. 1 of the partner of his bosom still lives, or by clearance in what court of infamy or justice she managed to shuffle off her real name, and win a right to resume the title of spinster.”
He lighted a fresh cigar, and for the space of perhaps a minute, a dead and ominous silence prevailed. Mabel, pallid and faint at heart, could not take her eyes from his countenance, with its cruel smile, frozen, shallow eyes, and the deep white dints coming and going in his nostrils.
He had judged without partiality. He would condemn without mercy. He would punish without remorse.
Herbert still faced the back of the lounge, but he had slipped his hand from the relaxing hold of hers, and pressed it over his eyes. She could not seek to possess herself of it again. Winston was not the only dupe of the nefarious fraud, the betrayal of which had overtaken the guilty pair thus late in their career of duplicity. Yet, however severely she had suffered in heart from their falsehood and her brother's intolerance, no stain would rest upon her name, while, terminate as the affair might, the disgraceful revelation would shipwreck her brother's happiness for life, if not bring upon the old homestead a storm of scandal that would leave no more trace of the honorable reputation heretofore borne by its owners than remained of the smiling plenty of the cities of the plain after the fiery wrath of the Lord had overthrown them.
Mrs. Aylett resumed the suspended operation of cutting the leaves of her new monthly; fluttered them to be certain that none were overlooked; laid down the periodical; brushed the scattered bits of paper from her silken skirt, and retaining the paper-knife—a costly toy of mother-of-pearl and silver—changed her position so as to look her husband directly in the eye.
“I believe I can give you the information you lack,” she said, in curiously constrained accents, the concentration of some feeling to which she could or would not grant other vent. “Clara Louise Lennox obtained a divorce from her first husband on the grounds of drunkenness, failure to maintain her, infidelity, and personal ill-usage. He came home from sea, as you have said, the battered ruin of a MAN, fallen beyond hope of redemption. There was no law, written or moral, which obliged her, when once freed from it, to carry about with her and thrust upon the notice of others the loathsome body of death typified by his name and her matronly title. She commenced life anew at her father's death, contrary, let me say to the advice of all her friends, if I except the mother, who could refuse nothing to her favorite daughter. The scheme was boldly conceived. You have admitted that it was successfully carried out. In New York the family were not known beyond the circle with which they disdained to associate when the lodging-house business was abandoned. There were a thousand chances to one that in her new abode Miss Dorrance would be identified by some busybody with the divorced Mrs. Lennox. She risked her fortunes upon the one chance, and won. I do not expect you to believe that the impostor was moved by any other consideration in contracting her second marriage than the wish to seek the more exalted sphere of society and influence which Fate had hitherto denied her. You would sneer were I to hint, however remotely, at a regard for her high-born suitor the dashing, but dissipated officer had never awakened—”
Mr. Aylett lifted his hand, smiling more evilly than before.
“Excuse the interruption! but after your statement of the fact that such sentimental asseverations would be futile, you waste time in recapitulating the loves of the lady aforementioned, and we in hearing them. I think I express the opinion of the audience—fit, but few—when I say that we require no other evidence than that afforded by the story I have told of Mrs. Lennox's susceptibility and capacity for affection. We are willing to take for granted that the latter was illimitable.”
“As you like!" idly tapping the nails of her left hand with the knife. “Is there anything else pertaining to this history into which you would like to inquire?”
It was a sight to curdle the blood about one's heart, this duel between husband and wife, with double-edged blades, wreathed with flowers. Mr. Aylett's attitude of lazy indifference was not exceeded by Clara's proud languor. He laughed a little at the last question.
“I have speculated somewhat—having nothing else in particular to engage my mind on my way home—upon the point I named just now, and upon one other akin to it. All that the novel needs to round it off neatly is an encounter between the real and the quasi consorts. I cannot specify them by name, in consequence of the uncertainty I have mentioned. One was a bona-fide husband—the other a bogus article, let New York divorce laws decide what they will, provided always that the fallen Julius had not bidden farewell to this lower earth before his loyal Louise plighted her faith to her Southern gallant. Death is the Alexander of the universe. There is no retying the knots he has cut.”
From the pertinacity with which he returned to the question one could discern his actual anxiety to have it settled. Mabel understood that the only salve of possible application to his outraged pride and love was the discovery that Clara had been really a widow when he wedded her. The divorce and subsequent deception were sins of heinous dye against his ideas of respectability and unspotted honor, but he would never forgive the woman who had had two living husbands, freed from the former though she was by a legal fiction.
No one saw this more clearly than did she whose fate trembled upon the next words she should utter. With all her hardihood, she hesitated to reply. Luxury, wealth, and station were on one side; degradation and poverty on the other. The solitary hope of reinstatement in the affection, if not the esteem, of him she loved truly as it was in her to love anything beside herself, was arrayed against the certainty of alienation and the tearful odds of ignominious banishment.
Her answer, under the pressure of the warring emotions, was a semitone lower, and less distinctly enunciated than those that had gone before it.
“The denouement you propose for your romance is impracticable. Julius Lennox died before the date of the second marriage.”
Herbert drew himself to a sitting posture by clutching the back of the lounge. His red eyes and tumbled hair made him look more like a mad than a sick man.
“In the name of Heaven,” he demanded hoarsely, “have we not had enough lies, every one of which has been a blunder, and a fatal one? I told you, years ago, that the scene of this evening was a mere question of time; that, without a miracle, an edifice founded upon iniquity and cemented by falsehood must crush you before you could lay the top-stone. You would not be warned—you held on your way without hesitation or compunction, and now you would add to sin fatuity. Do you suppose that after what your husband has learned of your untruthfulness he will accept your assertion on any subject without inquiry? And, how many in your own family and out of it—although these may not know you by the name you now bear—are cognizant of the fact that Julius Lennox was alive for almost fifteen months after you became Mrs. Aylett?”
Mabel's arm was about his neck, her hand upon his mouth.
“No more! no more! if you love me!” she whispered in an agony. “Should he guess all, he would murder her!”
“You are prepared to certify that he is dead NOW, are you, Mr. Dorrance?” queried Winston, suspicious of this by-play.
“I am!” sulkily.
“It is a pity!” was the ambiguous rejoinder.
Something clicked upon the hearth. It was the fragments of the toy stiletto, broken by an uncontrollable twitch of the small fingers that held it.
Then Mrs. Aylett arose, pale as a ghost, but unquailing in eye or mien.
“May I know your lordship's pleasure respecting your cast-off minion?”
“In the morning, yes!” glancing up disdainfully. “Meantime, let me wish you 'good-night' and happy dreams.”
“NO, no! my dear!” said Mrs. Sutton, earnestly. “I am shocked and astonished that you should ever have labored under such a delusion. Frederic told me the story, and a dreadful one it was, the day old Mrs. Tazewell was buried. Wasn't it wonderful that he never knew whom Winston had married until he saw her leaning upon his arm in the graveyard? He recognized Mr. Dorrance in the house, but supposed him to be a visitor at Ridgeley and a relative of Mrs. Aylett, having heard that her maiden name was Dorrance. As to his being your husband, it did not at first occur to him, so bewildered was he by your meeting and the thoughts awakened by it. But at sight of HER the truth rushed over him, nearly depriving him of his wits. He soon got out of me all that I knew, and by putting this and that together, we made out the mystery. I was so grieved and indignant and horrified that I was for sending him forthwith to Winston, that he might clear himself of the shocking charges they had preferred against him, by exposing the motives of his accusers. But he was stubborn and independent. 'It can do no good now,' he said. 'Fifteen years ago this discovery would have been my temporal salvation. And Dorrance is Mabel's husband. I cannot touch him without wounding her.' I could not reconcile this mode of reasoning with my conscience. If wrong had been done, it ought to be righted. I did not sleep a wink all night. I wept over my noble, generous, slandered boy, and over you, my darling! but my chief thought was anger at the shameless depravity, the cold-blooded cruelty of the brazen-faced adventuress who sat in your angel mother's place. For aught Frederic or I knew, her real husband was still alive. He had never heard of the divorce, you see, and the circumstance of her marrying Winston under her maiden name looked black.
“Well! I pondered upon the horrible affair until I could hold my peace no longer. Frederic and Florence went home with Mary Trent next morning, and knowing that Winston must pass the upper gate on his way to court, I put on my bonnet soon after breakfast, and strolled in that direction. By and by he rode up, stopped his horse, and began to talk so sociably that before I quite knew what I was doing, I was in the middle of my story. I wonder now how I did it, but I was excited, and he listened so patiently, questioned so quietly, that I did not realize, for several hours afterward, what a blaze I must have kindled in his heart and home, whether he believed me or not. The next thing I heard was not, as I expected, that he and his wife had quarrelled, or that he was going to challenge Frederic for having belied him, but that poor Dorrance was very ill with some affection of the brain. It was not until a year later—just after his death—that people began to talk about the strange carryings-on at Ridgeley; how Mr. and Mrs. Aylett occupied separate apartments, and never sat, or walked, or rode together, or spoke to one another, even at table, unless there were visitors present. Nobody could imagine what caused the estrangement, and for the sake of the family honor I guarded my tongue. She must be a wretched woman, if all of this be true. She is breaking fast under it, in spite of her pride and skill in concealment. I ought not to pity her when I remember how wicked she has been; but there is a look in her eye when she is not laughing or talking that gives me the heart-ache.”
“She is very unhappy!” replied Mabel, sighing. “And so, I doubt not, is Winston, although he will not own it, and affects to ignore the fact of her failing health and spirits. It is one of these miserably delicate family complications with which the nearest of kin cannot meddle. They are very kind to me, and I think my visits have been a comfort to Clara. The solitude of the great house is a terrible trial to one so fond of company. For days together sometimes she does not exchange a word with anybody except the servants. It is a dreary, wretched evening of an ambitious life. I ventured to tell Winston, last week, that this would probably be my last visit to Ridgeley, since I was to be married next month.
“To Mr. Chilton, I suppose?” he said.
I answered, “Yes!”
“You must be almost forty,” he next remarked. “You have worn passably well, but you are no longer young.”
“I am thirty-seven!” said I. — “Well!” he answered. “You are certainly old enough to know your own business best.”
“That was all that passed. But I was glad to remember, as I looked at his whitening hair and bowed shoulder, that Frederic had not—as I was foolish enough to suppose for a while—told him the story that had blighted his life. Not that I could have blamed him had he done this. He had endured so much obloquy, suffered so keenly and so long, that almost any retaliatory measure would have been pardonable.”
Herbert Dorrance's widow was, as had been said, on a farewell visit to her native State, and after spending a week at Ridgeley was concluding a pleasanter sojourn of the same length at William Sutton's. In another month her home in Philadelphia was to be the refuge of her aunt's declining years—a prospect that delighted her as much as it afflicted those among whom this most benevolent and lovable of match-makers had dwelt during Mabel's first marriage.
The marriage it was now her constant purpose to forget—not a difficult task in the happiness that diffused an Indian summer glow over her maturity of years and heart. After Herbert's death she had continued to reside in Albany, devoting herself—so soon as she recovered from the fatigue of mind and body consequent upon her severe and protracted duties as nurse—to the scarcely less painful work of attending his mother, who had contracted the seeds of consumption in the bleak sea-air of Boston. Grateful for an abode in the house of one who performed a daughter's part to her when her own children were content to commit her to the care of hirelings, the old lady lingered six months, and died, blessing her benefactress and engaging, in singleness of belief in the affection his wife had borne him, “to tell Herbert how good she had been to his mother.”
None of the Dorrances could wag a tongue against their sister-in-law, when, at the expiration of her year of widowhood, she wrote to them, to announce her “re-engagement” to Frederic Chilton. She had been a faithful wife to their brother in sickness and imbecility; a ministering angel to their parent, and there was now no tie to bind her to their interest. They had a way of taking care of themselves, and it was not surprising if she had learned it.
They behaved charmingly—this pair of elderly lovers—said the young Suttons when Mr. Chilton arrived to escort his affianced back to Albany on the day succeeding the conversation from which I have taken the foregoing extracts, while Aunt Rachel's deaf old face was one beam of gratification.
“All my matches turn out well in the long run!” she boasted, with modest exultation. “I don't undertake the management of them, unless I am very sure that they are already projected in Heaven. And when they are, my loves, a legion of evil spirits or, what is just as bad, of wicked men and women, cannot hinder everything from coming right at last.”
While she was relating, in the same sanguinely pious spirit, the tales that most entrance young girls, and at which their seniors smile in cynicism, or in tender recollection, as their own lives have contradicted or verified her theory of love's teachings and love's omnipotence, Frederic and Mabel, forgetting time and care, separation and sorrow, in the calm delight of reunion, were strolling upon the piazza in the starlight of a perfect June evening.
They stopped talking by tacit consent, by and by, to listen to Amy Sutton, a girl of eighteen, the vocalist of the flock, who was testing her voice and proficiency in reading music at sight by trying one after another of a volume of old songs which belonged to her mother.
This was the verse that enchained the promenaders' attention:
“But still thy name, thy blessed name,My lonely bosom fills;Like an echo that hath lost itselfAmong the distant hills.That still, with melancholy note,Keeps faintly lingering on,When the joyous sound that woke it firstIs gone—forever gone!”
“It is seventeen years since we heard it together, dearest!” said Frederic, bending to kiss the tear-laden eyes. “And I can say to you now, what I did not, while poor Rosa lived, own to myself—that, try to hush it though I did, in all that time the lost echo was never still.”
Her answer was prompt, and the sweeter for the blent sigh and smile which were her tribute to the Past, and greeting to the Future:
“An echo no longer, but a continuous strain of of heart music!”