CHAPTER VI.
The scene which met the gaze when an hour later the young men were ushered into the long drawing-room of the Vance house was one well-calculated to remove all gloomy, pessimistic reasoning.Warmth, gaiety, pretty women, luxury,—all sent the blood leaping through the veins in delightful anticipation.
Their entrance was greeted by a shout of welcome.
“Oh, Aubrey! I am so glad you are come,” cried Molly from the far end of the room. “Fancy tomorrow being Christmas! Shall we be ready for all that company tomorrow night and the ball-room, dining room and hall yet to be trimmed? Is it possible to be ready?”
“Not if we stand dawdling in idle talk.” This from “Adonis,” who was stretched full length on the sitting-room sofa, with a cigarette between his lips, his hands under his handsome head, surrounded by a bevy of pretty, chattering girls, prominent among whom was Cora Scott, who aided and abetted Charlie in every piece of mischief.
Molly curled her lip but deigned no reply.
Bert Smith, from a corner of the room where he was about ascending a step-ladder, flung a book heavily at Adonis’s lazy figure.
“Don’t confuse your verbs,” exclaimed Aubrey. “How can you stand when you are lying down, and were you ever known to do anything else but dawdle, Adonis—eh?”
“I give it up,” said Charlie, sleepily, kicking the book off the sofa.
“Is this an amateur grocery shop, may I ask, Miss Vance?” continued Aubrey as he and Briggs made their way to their hostess through an avalanche of parcels and baskets strewn on the tables and the floor.
Molly laughed as she greeted them. “No wonder you are surprised. I am superintending the arrangement of my poor people’s gifts,” she explained. “They must all be sent out tonight. I don’t know what I should have done without all these good people to help me. But there arepilesto be done yet. There is the tree, the charades, etc., etc.,” she continued, in a plaintive little voice.
“More particularly cetra, cetra,” said Aubrey from Bert’s corner where he had gone to help along the good works of placing holly wreaths.
“Oh, you, Aubrey—stop being a magpie.” Aubrey and Molly were very matter of fact lovers.
“Molly,” again broke in Charlie, “suppose the box from Pierson’s has never come, won’t you be up a tree?” and the speaker opened his handsome eyes wide, and shook off his cigarette-ash.
Molly maintained a dignified silence toward her brother. The firelight danced and dwelt upon her lovingly. She was so pretty, so fair, so slender, so graceful. Now in her gray plush tea-gown, with her hair piled picturesquely on the top of her small head, and fixed there with a big tortoise-shell pin, it would have been difficult to find a more delightful object for the gaze to rest upon.
“We shall have to fall back upon the wardrobes,” she said at length. “You are a horrid wet-blanket, Charlie! I am sure I——”
Her remarks were cut short as the door opened, and with laughter and shouting a bevy of young people who had been at work in another part of the house rushed in. “It is come; it’s all right; don’t worry, Molly!” they sang in chorus.
“Do be quiet all of you; one can hardly hear oneself speak!”
The box from the costumer’s had arrived; the great costume party was saved; in short, excitement and bustle were in full swing at Vance Hall as it had been at Christmas-time since the young people could remember.
Adonis lifted himself from the sofa and proposed to open the box of dresses at once, and try them on.
“Charlie, you are a brick!—the very thing!”
“Oh! yes, yes; let us try them on!”
Molly broke through the eager voices:“And we have not done the ball-room yet!” she said reproachfully.
“Oh! bother the ball-room!” declared Adonis, now thoroughly aroused. “We have all night. We can’t do better than to don our finery.”
Molly sat down with an air of resigned patience. “I promisedMr.Pierson,” she observed quietly, “that the box should not be touched until he was here to superintend matters.”
“Oh, Pierson be blowed!” elegantly observed her brother. But Reuel Briggs suddenly dropped his work, walked over, and sided with Molly.
“You are quite right, Miss Molly; and you Charlie and Aubrey and the rest of you men, if you want to open the box tonight you must first decorate the ball-room. Business before pleasure.”
“Saved!—saved! See my brave, true knight defends his lady fair.” Molly danced, practising the step she was about to astonish the company with on Christmas-night. “I think I am what the Scotch call ‘fey,’” she laughed. “I don’t know why I feel so awfully jolly tonight. I could positively fly from sheer excitement and delight.”
“Don’t you know why?” observed Cora. “I will tell you. It is because this is your last Christmas as Molly Vance; next year——”
“Ah, do not!” interrupted Molly, quickly. “Who knows what a year may bring forth. Is it not so,Dr.Briggs?” she turned appealingly to Reuel.
“Grief follows joy as clouds the sunlight. ‘Woe! woe! each heart must bleed, must break,’” was his secret thought as he bowed gravely. But on his face was a look of startled perplexity, for suddenly as she spoke to him it appeared that a dark veil settled like a pall over the laughing face at his side. He shivered.
“What’s the matter, Briggs?” called out Adonis. They had reached the ball-room and were standing over the piles of holly and evergreen, ready for an onslaught on the walls.
“Don’t be surprised if Briggs acts strangely,” continued Charlie. “It is in order for him to whoop it up in the spirit line.”
“Why, Charlie! What do you mean?” questioned Molly with an anxious glance at Reuel.
“Anything interesting, Charlie?” called out a jolly girl across the room.
“Briggs is our ‘show’ man. Haven’t you heard, girls, what a celebrity is with you tonight? Briggs is a philosopher—mesmerism is his specialty. Say, old man, give the company a specimen of your infernal art, can’t you? He goes the whole hog, girls; can even raise the dead.”
“Let up, Charlie,” said Aubrey in a low tone. “It’s no joking matter.”
There were screams and exclamations from the girls. With reckless gaiety Adonis continued,
“What is to be the outcome of the great furore you have created, Briggs?”
“Nothing of moment, I hope,” smiled Reuel, good-naturedly. “I have been simply an instrument; I leave results to the good angels who direct events. What does Longfellow say about the arrow and the song?
‘Long, long afterwards, in an oakI found the arrow still unbroke;And the song, from beginning to end,I found in the heart of a friend.’
May it be so with my feeble efforts.”
“But circumstances alter cases. In this case, the ‘arrow’ is a girl and a devilish handsome one, too; and the ‘air’ is the whole scientific world. Your philosophy and mysticism gave way before Beauty. Argument is a stubborn man’s castle, but the heart is still unconvinced.”
“‘I mixed those children up, and not a creature knew it,’” hummed Bert Smith. “Your ideas are mixed, Don; stick to the ladies, you understand girls and horseflesh; philosophy isn’t in your line.”
“Oh, sure!” said Adonis unruffled by his friend’s words.
“Charlie Vance,” said Molly severely, “if we have any moreswearingfrom you to-night, you leave the room until you learn to practice good manners. I’m surprised at your language!”
“Just the same, Briggs is a fraud. I shall keep my eye on him. It’s a case of beauty and the beast. Oh,” he continued in malicious glee, “wouldn’t you girls turn green with envy, every man jack of you, if you could see the beauty!”
Thereupon the girls fell to pelting him with holly wreaths and evergreen festoons, much to the enjoyment ofMr.Vance, who had entered unperceived in the general melee.
“What is it all about,Dr.Briggs?” asked Molly in a low voice.
“It is the case of a patient who was in a mesmeric sleep and I was fortunate enough to awaken her. She is a waif; and it will be months before she will be well and strong, poor girl.”
“Do you make a study of mesmerism, Doctor?” askedMr.Vance from his arm-chair by the glowing fire.
“Yes sir; and a wonderful science it is.”
BeforeMr.Vance could continue, Livingston said: “If you folks will be still for about ten minutes, I’ll tell you what happened in my father’s house when I was a very small boy; I can just remember it.”
“If it’s a ghost story, make it strong, Aubrey, so that not a girl will sleep tonight. Won’t the dears look pretty blinking and yawning tomorrow night? We’ll hear ’em, fellows, in the small hours of the morning, ‘Molly, Molly! I’m so frightened. I do believe someone is in my room; may I come in with you, dear?’”
“Charlie, stop your nonsense,” laughed his father, and Adonis obediently subsided.
“My father wasDr.Aubrey Livingston too,” began Aubrey, “and he owned a large plantation of slaves. My father was deeply interested in the science of medicine, and I believe made some valuable discoveries along the line of mesmeric phenomena, for some two or three of his books are referred to even at this advanced stage of discovery, as marvellous in some of their data.
“Among the slaves was a girl who was my mother’s waiting maid, and I have seen my father throw her into a trance-state many times when I was so small that I had no conception of what he was doing.
“Many a time I have known him to call her into the parlor to perform tricks of mind-reading for the amusement of visitors, and many wonderful things were done by her as the record given in his books shows.
“One day there was a great dinner party given at our place, and the êlite of the county were bidden. It was about two years before the civil war, and our people were not expecting war; thinking that all unpleasantness must end in their favor, they gave little heed to the ominous rumble of public opinion that was arising at the North, but went on their way in all their pride of position and wealth without a care for the future.
“Child as I was I was impressed by the beauty and wit of the women and the chivalric bearing of the men gathered about my father’s hospitable board on that memorable day. When the feasting and mirth began to lag, someone called for Mira—the maid—and my father sent for her to come and amuse the guests.
“My father made the necessary passes and from a serious, rather sad Negress, very mild with everyone, Mira changed to a gay, noisy, restless woman, full of irony and sharp jesting. In this case this peculiar metamorphosis always occurred. Nothing could be more curious than to see her and hear her. ‘Tell the company what you see, Mira,’ commanded my father.
“You will not like it, captain; but if Imust, I must. All the women will be widows and the men shall sleep in early graves. They come from the north, from the east, from the west, they sweep to the gulf through a trail of blood. Your houses shall burn, your fields be laid waste, and a down-trodden race shall rule in your land. For you, captain, a prison cell and a pauper’s grave.”
“The dinner-party broke up in a panic, and from that time my father could not abide the girl. He finally sold her just a few months before the secession of the Confederate States, and that was the last we ever knew of her.”
“And did the prophecy come true about your father?” askedMr.Vance.
“Too true, sir; my father died while held as a prisoner of war, in Boston Harbor. And every woman at the table was left a widow. There is only too much truth in science of mesmeric phenomena. The world is a wonderful place.”
“Wonderful!” declared his hearers.
“I am thinking of that poor, pretty creature lying ill in that gloomy hospital without a friend. Men are selfish! I tell you what, folks, tomorrow after lunch we’ll make a Christmas visit to the patients, and carry them fruit and flowers. As for your beautiful patient,Dr.Briggs, she shall not be friendless any longer, she shall come to us at Vance Hall.”
“Molly!” broke simultaneously from Aubrey and Charlie.
“Oh, I mean it. There is plenty of room in this great house, and here she shall remain until she is restored to health.”
Expostulation was in vain. The petted heiress was determined, and whenMr.Vance was appealed to he laughed and said, as he patted her hand:
“The queen must have her own.”
At length the costumer’s box was opened amidst jest, song and laughter. The characters were distributed by the wilful Molly. Thus attired, to the music of Tannhauser’s march, played by one of the girls on the piano, the gay crowd marched and counter-marched about the spacious room.
In the early morning hours, Aubrey Livingston slept and dreamed of Dianthe Lusk, and these words haunted his sleep and lingered with him when he woke:
“She had the glory of heaven in her voice, and in her face the fatal beauty of man’s terrible sins.”
Aubrey Livingston knew that he was as hopelessly lost as was Adam when he sold his heavenly birthright for a woman’s smile.