CHAPTER XVII.COSTLY GRAPES.
When Dan left his father’s house after his rejection by Miss Marston, he was really wretched for the first time in his life; yet the experience did not soften him as fine natures are softened by unhappy love. Between his set teeth he called her hard names, and cursed himself for giving her the opportunity to reject his offer. He passed Susie during this walk, who, being surprised, looked up into his face with the old light in her eyes. He met her eyes as we meet a stranger’s, without a sign of recognition; whereat the poor girl’s limbs trembled, and putting down her veil after passing him, she walked on blinded by her tears.
In his frame of mind, Dan looked upon all women as his enemies, and especially Susie, but for whom he might have won the queenly Miss Marston. But for the recentness of his rebuff, he would have spoken kindly enough to Susie, for he was capable of pity, and he had considerable affection in his nature, though it was of the bearish kind, wholly divested of that sensitive, tender element which, when a woman has once known it, makes valueless all other love of men. It is not found in common men, however, who are mostly capable of violent demonstration, without any of that high sentiment which seeks only to learn the real desire of the loved one, andthen studies to gratify it, finding keen delight in that, and that alone. It is true, also, that few women are capable of inspiring such a sentiment, and so the world knows little of the highest phase of the passion of love. Susie had never known any love but Dan’s, and though it had occurred to her that there might be kisses, for example, not so much like the pounce of a hawk upon a pigeon, as his were, still she had loved him with all her heart, and it was terrible, even when she knew he had ceased to love her, to think that he could pass her in the street without a sign of recognition. But Susie had outlived that experience, and with the certainty that he was lost to her forever, and with time and the accession of new thoughts and cares, and especially with the interest Clara had succeeded in awakening in regular daily study, her grief lessened. There were, first hours, and then whole days, when there were no heart-aches on his account. Over the thought of this she would invariably rejoice, as over a great triumph, until some treacherous retrospection of happier days quickened the old tenderness into life—renewed agonies that she thought were quieted forever, and revealed her situation as dreadful beyond mortal endurance.
After Miss Marston left Oakdale, Dan went home once or twice, but it was like a strange place to him. His father, to be sure, treated him much the same, and never alluded to Susie by any accident. Mrs. Forest pitied him more than ever, and Clara was at least polite to him on all occasions. He could see and feel, however, that his conduct was detestable in her eyes, and as for Leila and Linnie, he considered them of slight importance. One day he discovered that Clara knew of his offeringhimself to Miss Marston, and of the galling manner with which he had been refused, and this made him furious. Miss Marston, then, had despised him too much to keep his humiliation a secret, as any honorable woman would do under ordinary circumstances.
Miss Marston would indeed have been the last person to reveal such a thing, but the day before her departure, in a long talk with Clara, she expressed the desire that Clara would make it certain to Susie that Dan was nothing to her. “You know,” she said, “how a person in her abandoned condition would naturally feel toward one she supposed the cause of her being abandoned. Do convince her that there has never been the slightest encouragement on my part—no intimacy whatever between me and your brother, no thought of correspondence, or anything of the kind;” and then she told Clara of the last meeting with Dan, and expressed unqualified disapproval of him altogether; at the same time sending kind messages to Susie, and a present of a microscope for her botanical studies.
“There is one thing I have wished to ask you, Miss Marston,” said Clara, “but I have never dared to. Will you tell me just your true impressions of Albert?” Miss Marston did not reply satisfactorily, and Clara, putting her arm around her rather timidly, for the teacher that expressed itself in every word and manner, still continued to awe Clara, as it had done in Stonybrook, urged a reply. She had often noticed Miss Marston studying Albert. The two were very polite to each other, but it was easy to see that there was little true sympathy between them. Thus urged, Miss Marston answered: “I have studied him carefully, because he has your happiness in his hands.I confess I fear greatly that you are not just the kind of wife he should select.” Clara was grieved, not understanding Miss Marston, and she said quickly, “I have often wondered that he should think so highly of me.”
“No, no. It is not a question of your worthiness. You are worthy, I think, of any one—certainly of Dr. Delano; but there is a self-sufficiency, well concealed by his culture, that will some time be very apt to run counter to your ideas of justice and devotion. I only say I fear, understand. I may be wrong; but I would urge you to avoid the first misunderstanding. It would be hard, I think, for him to examine himself with merciless justice. You have that power, which I see you inherit from your father, who is a wonderfully superior man.”
“Liberally translated,” said Clara, smiling, “you think Albert a tyrant. You do not understand him fully, I think, but I am glad of your frank opinion. I shall be careful to be good and just to him, and I think I shall never have cause to admire him less than I do now;” and Clara went on revealing, little by little, to Miss Marston a sentiment so near adoration that it almost appalled her, and convinced her still further that such an exalted passion could never find full response, nor be even comprehended by Albert Delano; but she said no more. The next day she left Oakdale. Her trunk had been sent to the station, which was but a short distance, and she and Clara were to walk. They passed Mrs. Buzzell’s cottage, and Miss Marston gratified Clara greatly by calling on Susie, and being really kind and friendly to her, a proceeding that quite astonished Mrs. Forest when she heard of it.
As the weeks passed Mrs. Buzzell bravely stemmed thecurrent of popular disapprobation at her act of “countenancing vice;” for the consciousness of doing right was enhanced by the good qualities she was constantly discovering in Susie. Mrs. Buzzell’s temper, never very sweet, had not improved by years of loneliness, and when criticised by her female friends, she gave them back “as good as they sent,” to use her own words; and so it came to pass that the piously-disposed ladies of the congregation to which Mrs. Buzzell belonged, and which had barely escaped receiving Susie as a member, had not the opportunity to patronize Susie, and to extend charity to her in that condescending way too well known to many an unfortunate. The continuance of such patronage depends upon the utter humility of the recipient. She must confess herself a vile sinner, be willing to take thankfully the position of the lowest scrub, and express in every act that her patronizers are above her as the stars above the earth. Let the victim dare to show any ambition to regain her self-respect, any dissatisfaction because the daughters of her patronizers treat her with contempt, while they smile graciously upon the author of her degradation, and the patronage ceases at once.
“This is the way society protects itself,” said Mrs. Buzzell to Mrs. Kendrick, the banker’s wife, one of the would-be patronizers; “but is there not something wrong in the system that blasts and destroys the woman, while it winks at the sin of the man? I have come to see that in most cases, as in this, for example, her fault is much less than his. Man is taught self-dependence from the cradle; woman to depend upon man; and when she does so to the utmost limit, trusting every hope of happiness in his honor, this is a common result. We havecalled the doctor a radical, and graciously excused his eccentricities because he is so good a physician and so kind a man; but face to face with such facts, I see he is nearer right than we are.”
“Your judgment is misled by your sympathies, Mrs. Buzzell,” said the banker’s lady. “Do you not see that if unmarried mothers and their children are to be respected, there is no safety for legal wives and legitimate children? If society comes to recognize the position of mistress as respectable, to be a wife will be a very questionable honor.”
“Well, I sometimes think it is,” said Mrs. Buzzell, turning over in her mind this new and practical view of the case, and forgetting, in a kind of dreamy retrospection, that a moment before she had intended to smite Mrs. Kendrick “hip and thigh.”
“They think we lose our youth when we begin to fade a little,” said Mrs. Kendrick, “when in fact we are then more sensitive than ever to the better part of love; and having a baby makes a very baby of a woman in this respect. Do what we will, though, we cannot keep the very element in a man’s love without which we don’t care for his love at all; and children hardly prove the consolation we expect, except, indeed, when they are babies. When they grow older they go from us, they wound us, and seem to spend half their lives fighting against our desires. After all, it is better to keep our thoughts beyond this world. I find, myself, very little pleasure in it.”
It was very seldom that Mrs. Kendrick gave any expression to the dark under-current of her life. She passed for a very happy woman, and Mrs. Forest considered her position every way enviable. Her husbandwas rich, as all husbands should be in her opinion, as a duty they owe to society, and he was never known to be eccentric in anything. Mrs. Forest would have found him perfect. As a young man he had been enthusiastic, loved art and poetry, and talked of high purposes in life. He had even written very fair verses himself, and his wife, before marriage and some time after, had adored him; but he had in time so changed the diet of his soul, that whereas it once seemed wholly to feed upon grand aspirations, and upon the beautiful in all things, it now gorged itself upon bonds and stocks, and assimilated vast quantities of the nutriment. His romantic wife became practical too, but she was bitter over the loss of her illusions, and turned the whole current of her life into social ambition. She had the finest establishment in the county, and she seemed to study day and night to show her husband how dependent she was upon society—how little upon him—for her sum of happiness. For years they had ceased to wound each other’s vanity, as married people do after the romance is outlived and the conjugal yoke begins to gall them. It was not worth the trouble. Society held them up as shining examples of conjugal felicity. They always spoke of each other before the world in a tone of reserve, as if the nature of their mutual relations was too sacred to be questioned or discussed. And yet, with all this outside homage and interior luxury, with all her fine carriages and horses, elegant toilettes, splendid gardens and green-houses, Mrs. Kendrick really found life a burden, as thousands of women do in her position, not knowing that their trouble is the want of a wider sphere of action.
Mr. Kendrick must have been enormously rich. Itwas the wonder of all the country round that so much money could be squandered without the least effect upon the supply. Wise heads declared that Kendrick’s farms and grounds were badly managed, and it was well known that, notwithstanding the extent and cost of keeping his gardens and green-houses, flowers had to be ordered from professional florists on every occasion of a grand reception. Kendrick himself tried to take interest in his winter-gardens. In one there was a large black Hamburg grape-vine, bearing one magnificent bunch of fruit. He had watched this from day to day, but he knew nothing of the art of cultivation under glass, and was made to feel himself a very second-rate object when in the presence of the head-gardener, who was a pompous and important functionary. During the last winter Mr. Kendrick, in paying the coal bill, took the trouble to glance over it. The winter was not yet ended, and there were seventy-five tons of coal consumed for the hot-houses! On this occasion Mr. Kendrick ventured to go to the head-gardener and suggest mildly his astonishment at the consumption of coal. The functionary pointed reproachfully to that bunch of black Hamburgs, and Mr. Kendrick was silent.
On the occasion of Mrs. Kendrick’s call, she asked Mrs. Buzzell, as she rose to go, if she could do anything to help her in the responsibility she had assumed. “I want your sympathy of course,” replied Mrs. Buzzell. “It is not pleasant to feel that you are condemned for doing what you know to be your duty.”
“I certainly do not condemn you,” said Mrs. Kendrick; “but I could never do myself what you are doing; and Ithink you would see your duty in a different light if you were the mother of a marriageable daughter.”
“What then are we to do, as Christians, in cases like this?”
“Oh, I suppose there ought to be a respectable institution for them, where they could find protection and work to do, and some provision made for the education of their children. I would give something towards the establishment of such an institution; but I could not afford to defend openly a girl like this, as you are doing.”
“But don’t you see, that the religion of Christ plainly teaches us to forgive the erring, and so help them to a higher life.”
“My dear Mrs. Buzzell, the Christian religion, as interpreted to-day, adapts itself to the exigencies of society. That religion, as taught by Christ and his apostles, would be as much out of place in our present social system as a monk would be in a modern ball-room.”
When Dr. Forest called, a day or two after, Mrs. Buzzell told him of Mrs. Kendrick’s speech. “She is more of a philosopher than I thought,” he said.
“But don’t you think that a very shocking way to look at religion, doctor?”
“Ah! my dear friend; it should never shock us to hear a truth. The only real Christians, according to the original type, to be found to-day, are among certain orders of the Catholic church, who literally ‘take no heed of the morrow,’ never have ‘scrip in their purse,’ or a second suit of clothes. They literally crucify the flesh, and study to be just like Christ. Mrs. Kendrick is perfectly right. You see, in helping and befriending one like Susie, whom modern society despises and neglects,you are a very old-fashioned kind of Christian, though not necessarily of the primitive type.”
“Well, if I can only be a Christian in thetruesense, whatever that may be, it is all I ask for myself,” said Mrs. Buzzell, earnestly.
“And by that you mean pure in all your thoughts, and upright in all your dealings, and nothing else.”
“Certainly I do.”
“Well, that is what I call true morality. You call it by a different name. We don’t differ so much. For bigot and infidel, we stand very comfortably near together, I should say,” said the doctor, smiling. Mrs. Buzzell saw she had admitted too much by that “nothing else,” but she did not feel like arguing, and so turned the subject.