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 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 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 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.
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 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 self-made 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 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 or 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 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 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 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 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 couldn’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 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 wouldn’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 isn’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 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 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?”
“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.
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 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.”
“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 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, 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 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 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.
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 than 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.”
“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.
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 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 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.
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 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 manouvre.
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 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 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.
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, deep-chested little thing, seemed as amphibious as himself. She could already swim alone, but 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 seabird 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 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 nursery 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 pier, unobserved by her brother. A young man, leaping from the dock, 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 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 sea-serpent 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.