Kitabı oku: «Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, December 1878», sayfa 13

CHAPTER XVIII

I had gone with Georgina to a picnic one day at her request, meeting her at the house of Mrs. Woodruff, with whom she was staying for a fortnight, at the Point. The picnic meant merely a drive for miles back into the country and a lunch in the woods prepared by a French cook, but it was a delightful road through shadows of tall forest trees, the glare of sunlight alternating with green copsewood coolness. They were cutting the grass and clover in the fields, and the air was fresh with the scent of new-mown hay: half the land on either side of us was covered with ripening grain, and the light breeze that played perpetually over it gave us endless shimmerings and glimmerings of wonderful light almost as beautiful as the tints that play over the sea.

I had every need to find the beauty of the summer gracious to me that day. It was but another of many days when every throb of my feeling for Georgy Lenox became an anguish hard to bear. She was opposite me as we rode through the fair country, but she neither looked at nor spoke to me. I was much lionized, however, by Mrs. Woodruff, a pretty, faded, coquettish woman, who had been balancing herself on the very edge of proprieties for years, but who still, thanks to a certain weariness she compelled in men, was yet safe enough in her position as a matron. Georgy's companion was a titled foreigner just then a favorite at the Point, but of whom I need not speak.

"Did you ask me to come that I might hear you talk with the count?" I asked her when once that day I had a chance to address her.

"But the count would talk to me," she returned, laughing. "Do you suppose I care for him? I think him the most odious man I know, with his waxed moustache, his small green eyes, his wicked mouth and teeth. But Mrs. Woodruff is dying for him, and half the women here hate me in their hearts because he pays me attention. I like you infinitely better, Floyd."

"Then come away and sit upon the rocks with me."

"Oh, I cannot afford to do those romantic, compromising things. You see that, as we are both staying at The Headlands, where everybody's curiosity is centred this summer, we are much observed, much commented upon."

"It seems to me you are not at all afraid of compromising yourself with other men."

"Now you are cross and jealous. Perhaps if you betrayed a little less interest in me you might make me less afraid of concession. And you must not watch me so: the count himself spoke about your eyes ready to burn me with their melancholy fire."

"Hang the count!"

"With all my heart! I am tired of his hanging about me, however. Now go away: at the dance to-night I will talk to you all you wish."

There were plenty of beautiful girls at the picnic, and not a few of them sat outside the circle quite neglected or wandered away like school-girls in couples, picking ferns and gathering pale wood-blossoms; but since I could not speak to Georgina at my ease, there seemed to me neither meaning nor occupation for the slowly-passing hours. I have sometimes wondered how those women feel to whom society brings no homage, no real social intercourse, who sit outside the groups formed around their more brilliant sisters and behold their easy triumphs. They seem patient and good-natured, but must they not wonder in their hearts why one woman's face and figure are a magnet compelling every man to come within the circle of her attraction, while others, not less fair and sweet, seem depolarized?

Georgy had many successful days, and this was but one of them. She understood allurement now not as an accident, but as a science, and she practised it cleverly. She had already heard bold language from the count, so held him in check as he sat beside her, giving him at times, however, "a side glance and look down," and to his trained habits of observation showed constantly that she was perfectly aware of his presence even if she seemed to ignore him. She was openly flirting with Frank Woolsey (a cousin of mine), but since she knew him for a veteran whose admiration only counted to lookers-on, she consoled herself by other little diversions, and scarcely a man there but felt his pulses tingle as she sent him a bright word or a careless smile.

Thorpe was there, but dull, moody, distrait, and he joined me and poured into my ears his disgust at this form of entertainment. He had eaten ants in his salad, he affirmed, his wine was corked, his pâté spoiled.

"What are we here for?" he asked. "I see no reason in it. I suppose Miss Lenox is enjoying herself, and she thinks the men about her are in a seventh heaven. What do even the cleverest women know about the men they meet? Woolsey hates her like poison; the count is on the lookout for a belle héritière and is yawning over his loss of time; and I doubt if one of that group except Talbot would marry her. I don't think many of us are pleased with that sort of thing. We don't want too fierce a light to beat about the woman we are dreaming of. She has no love or respect for sweetness and womanly virtue for their own sake—no faith in their value to her, further than that the semblance of them may attract admirers."

"You're out of humor, Thorpe," said I: "don't vent it on her."

"I am out of humor," he exclaimed, "devilishly out of humor! For God's sake, Randolph, tell me if you think I have any chance with Miss Floyd."

"Look here, Thorpe," I returned under my breath: "I have no business to make any suppositions concerning that young lady, but I will say just this much. Do you see that bird in the air hovering above that oak tree?"

He followed my look upward toward the unfathomable blue. "I do," he returned.

"I think there is just as much chance of that bird's coming down at your call and nestling in your bosom as there is of your winning the young lady you allude to."

He looked crestfallen for a moment: then his thorough coxcombry resumed its sway. "You see," said he, with a consummate air of reserve, "you know nothing about the affair at all, Randolph."

"You'd much better drop the subject, Thorpe," I remarked: "I assure you it's much safer let alone."

I contrived to live through the long hours of the day. At sunset we drove back to the Point, I giving up my seat in Mrs. Woodruff's barouche to a lady and joining Frank Woolsey and Thorpe in a dog-cart. We none of us spoke, but smoked incessantly, our eyes upturned to the sky, which was lovely, mystical, wonderful, with the pale after-glow thrilling it with the most beautiful hues. Before we had reached the town a strange yellow moonlight had crept over the landscape, making the trees gloom together in solemn masses, while the sea glimmered in a thousand lines of trembling light away, away into remote horizons. We all enjoyed the drive, although none of us spoke until we got down from the cart at the steps of the hotel.

"That was the best part of the day," observed my cousin Frank. "What good times we fellows might have if there were no women to disturb us!"

Thorpe growled some inarticulate assent or dissent, as the case might be, and went up to his room, while Frank and I had our cigars out on the piazza.

A dance at Mrs. Woodruff's was to follow the picnic, and thither we resorted about ten o'clock and found the chairs placed for a German. Georgy Lenox was there, radiant in a ravishing toilette, waiting for Frank to lead the cotillon with her. She nodded to me pleasantly as she took her seat. I was angry with myself for my disappointment, doubly angry with her for causing it. It cost me my self-respect to be so utterly at her mercy. What did I gain by following her into this gay coterie but pang upon pang of humiliation and pain? Why did I come, indeed? It was not the first time she had broken her promises to me. Yet what could I expect of her? Bright, gay, dazzling creature that she was, warm and eager in her love of vigorous life, could she sit down with me in a corner and talk while the rest of the world palpitated and glowed and whirled around her to the music of the waltz, which stirred even my crippled limbs with a wild wish for voluptuous swaying motion in rhythm with the melodious melancholy strain? No, I could not blame her: I was merely out of my place. Let me go home and remember what a gulf of disparity separated me from my fellows.

So I walked out of the house through the grounds into the street, and along the road home to The Headlands. It was a long walk for me, yet I overcame the distance quickly, and long before eleven o'clock gained the house, entered quietly and sat down beside my mother on her sofa, unseen by Mr. Floyd and Helen, who were in the next room.

I was half mad with baffled desire, blind anger and fatigue that night, and the sound of Helen's voice as she sang some song like a lullaby was like a blessing. My mother did not speak to me; only smiled gently in my face and kissed me on my forehead. Her tenderness touched my heart, and my head drooped to her shoulder, then to her lap, and I lay there like a boy comforted by his mother's touch, just as I was. A kind of peaceful stupor came over me. Helen went on singing some quiet German piece of which her father was fond, with many verses and a sweet, moving story. Her voice was delicious in its way, with a noble and simple style, and a pathetic charm in some of its cadences I never heard surpassed. Mr. Floyd never tired of hearing her. After a time the ballad came to an end.

"Floyd has come, papa," I heard her say.

"Why, no! Has he? so early?"

"Go on singing, Helen," whispered my mother. "Floyd has gone to sleep."

She sang something soft, cooing, monotonous, a strain a mother might sing as she hushed her baby at her breast: then she came out, followed by her father, and both sat down beside us. I, half shyly, half through dread of talking, went on counterfeiting sleep.

"Poor boy!" exclaimed Mr. Floyd. "He has evidently walked back from the Point. He was tired out with his dissipations, or Miss Georgina was coquetting with other men or ate too much to suit him. If I were in love to extremity of passion with Miss Lenox, or rather with her brilliant flesh-tints and her hands and feet, I should recover the moment I saw her at table. She is the frankest gourmande I ever saw, and will be stout in five years."

"Now, papa, Georgy's hands and feet are nothing so particular."

"Helen's are smaller and much better shaped," said my mother jealously.

"Now, Mary, how little you understand the points of a woman! Helen has hands that I kiss"—and he kissed them—"the most beautiful hands in the world; and she has feet whose very shoe-tie I adore; but, nevertheless, there is nothing aggressive about her insteps and ankles. She considers her feet made to walk with, not to captivate men with."

"I should hope not," said Lady Disdain, with plenty of her chief attribute in her voice. "I prefer that nobody should know I have any feet."

"That is just it. Now, Miss Lenox never comes in or goes out of a room but every man there knows the color of her stockings."

"I am ashamed of you, papa!—Scold him, Mrs. Randolph. I think him quite horrid."

"Since, my mouse, you don't want to be admired for your feet and hands, what points of your beauty may we venture to obtrude our notice upon?"

"Oh, you may love me for whatever you like. But I don't want other people ever to think of me in that way at all."

"Your intellect is a safe point, perhaps."

"I do not want anybody to love me at all, papa, except yourself."

"Not even Floyd?"

"Floyd would never be silly," Helen said indignantly. "Floyd likes me because we are old friends: he knew grandpa and you, papa, and all that."

"You are easily satisfied if you are contented with affection on the score of your aged relatives."

"How soundly he sleeps!" murmured Helen; and I knew that she bent close to me as she spoke, for I could feel the warmth of her young cheeks. Half to frighten her, half because I wanted to see how she looked as she regarded me, I suddenly opened my eyes.

"You weren't asleep at all!" she exclaimed, laughing and quite unembarrassed. "But I think you were wicked to hoax us so. Did you hear everything we said?"

"Indeed, Helen," I said, "I was fast asleep, I do believe, until you confessed your affection for me. You did not expect me to sleep through that?"

She stared at me blankly, then looked at the others with dilating eyes. "Did I say anything about that?" she asked, growing pale even to her lips and tears gathering in her eyes.

"Why, no, you foolish child!" said her father, drawing her upon his knee: "he is only teasing you. As if anybody had any affection for one of the Seven Sleepers!—Well, Floyd, how happened you to come back so soon? The carriage was going for you at midnight.—Here, Mills, Mr. Randolph has already returned, and the coachman may go to bed."

"The day was pretty long," I returned. "I had had enough of it, and so set out and walked back. I was well tired out when I came in, and that put me to sleep."

"It was a shame for you to walk so far," exclaimed Helen imperiously: "you are not strong enough for such an effort. There are eight horses in the stables, every one of them pawing in his stall, longing for a gallop, and for you to be obliged to walk four miles! Don't do such a dreadful thing again, Floyd."

I sprang up and limped about, feeling impatient and cross. "In spite of my poor leg," I returned, "I am a fair walker. Don't set me down as a helpless cripple, Helen."

I was bitter and wrathful still, or I trust I was too magnanimous to have wounded her so.

"Floyd!" exclaimed my mother in a tone of reproof; but I did not turn, and went down the long suite of parlors and stood at the great window which overlooked the sea. It was all open to the summer night, and the lace curtains waved to and fro in the breeze. Solemnly came up the rhythmic flow of the waves as they beat against the rocks. I pushed aside the draperies and looked out at the wide expanse of waters lying, it seemed, almost at my feet, for everything else but the great silver plain of sea was in shadow. Above, the moon had it all her own way to-night: the constellations shone pale, and seemed weary of the firmament which at other times they span and compass with their myriad splendors. Mars moved in a stately way straight along above the southern horizon to his couch in the west: even his red light was dim.

But what stillness and peace seemed possible beneath this throbbing sea? I sighed as I listened to the sound of the waves and gazed at the great golden pathway of the moon across the silver waters. I knew that some one had followed me and stood timidly behind me: I guessed it was Helen, but did not know until a slim satin hand stole into mine, for surely it was not my mother's hand. Hers was warm and firm in its pressure: the touch of this was soft and cool like a rose-leaf. I held the hand close, but did not turn.

"Floyd!" she whispered timidly, "dear Floyd!"

"I hear you, Helen," I returned wearily.

"Are you angry with me? Do not be angry."

"I am only angry with myself: I am not behaving well to-night."

She came in front of me and looked up in my face. "I don't want you to think," she said in a little faint trembling voice, "that—that I—that I—" She quite broke down.

"I really don't know what you mean, Helen."

"Floyd," she cried passionately, "I think I would die before I would wilfully hurt your feelings!"

"Why, my poor little girl," said I, quite touched at the sight of her quivering face and the sound of her impassioned voice, "you did not hurt my feelings for an instant. What I said was in answer to my own thoughts. I like to say such things to myself at times, and remember that I do not possess the advantages of other men. Besides, facts are facts: I am lame. I cannot dance, and although I can walk, it is with a limping gait: I should be a poor fellow in a foot-race. I don't suppose that my being a cripple will forfeit me anything in the kingdom of heaven, but, nevertheless, it obliges me to forego a good many pleasures here on earth."

"You are not a cripple!" she burst out impetuously. "You have every advantage! What is it that you cannot dance? I despise men who whirl about like puppets: I have never seen them waltzing but they must make themselves ridiculous. I am glad you cannot dance: you are on the level of too much dignity and noble behavior to condescend to such petty things. And surely you do not want to run a foot-race!" she added with an intensity of disdain which made me laugh, high-wrought and painful although my mood was. Then her lip trembled, and I saw tears in her eyes as she went on. "If you were a cripple," she pursued in a low, eager voice, "really a helpless cripple, everybody would love you just the same. Why, Floyd, what do you think it is to me that, as you say, you do not possess the advantages of other men? Have you forgotten how it all came about? I was a little girl then, but there is nothing that happened yesterday clearer to my memory than that terrible morning when I cost you so dear. I know how I felt—as if forsaken by the world. I wondered if God looked down and saw me, alone, in danger, blind and dizzy and trembling, so that again and again I seemed to be slipping away from everything that held me. I could not have stayed one minute more had I not heard your voice. You were so strong, so kind, Floyd! When you reached me your hands were bleeding, your face scratched and torn, your breath came in great pants, but you looked at me and smiled. And then you carried me to the top and put me in safety, and I let you go down, down, down!" She was quite speechless, and leaned her cheek against my hand, which she still held, and wet it freely with her tears.

"If you mind your lameness," she said brokenly, with intervals of sobs—"if you feel that Fate is cruel to you—that there is any reason why you cannot be perfectly happy—then I wish," she exclaimed with energy, "that I had never been born to do you this great injury. I love my life, I love papa, I love your mother and you, and it seems to me as if I were going to be a very happy woman; but still, if you carry any regret for that day in your heart, I wish I had died when I was so sick before you came: I wish I lay up there on the hill with the grass growing over me."

What was anybody to do with this overwrought, fanciful child? She was so wonderfully pretty too, with her great dark, melancholy eyes, her flushed, tear-stained cheeks, her rich rare lips! "Oh, Helen," I murmured, holding her close to me, "I don't want you to go under the green grass: I'm very glad you are alive. I would have broken all my bones in your service that day and welcome, so that you might be well and unhurt. Come, now, cheer up: I am going to be a pleasanter fellow than I have been of late. Dry your eyes, dear. Your father will be laughing at you. Come, let us go and take a stroll in the moonlight: it is quite wicked not to indulge in a little romance on a sweet midsummer night like this."

When I had gone to my room that night, and sat, still bitter, still discontented, looking off through my open window toward the Point, and wondering who was looking in Georgy Lenox's starry eyes just then—thinking, with a feeling about my forehead like a band of burning iron, that some man's arm was sure to be about her waist, her face upturned to his, her floating golden hair across his shoulder as they danced,—while, I say, such fancies held a firm clutch over my brain and senses, devouring me with the throes of an insane jealousy, my mother came in and sat down beside me.

"My dear boy," she said, putting her hand on my shoulder, "I am going to give you a caution. You must remember that Helen, with all her frankness and impetuosity, is still no child. Don't win her heart unthinkingly."

I felt the blood rush to my face, and I think I had never in all my life experienced such embarrassment.

"I'm not such a coxcomb, mother, as to believe any girl could fall in love with me—Helen above all others."

She smiled, with a little inward amusement in her smile. "You must remember," she said again softly, "that Helen is not a child, and you surely would not make her suffer."

"Why, mother," I gasped, "we are just like brother and sister: our intimacy is the habit of years."

"Good-night, my son," my mother said, and went away still smiling: "I have perfect faith in your magnanimity."

I remembered with a flash of guilty self-consciousness one or two little circumstances about our talk by the window two hours before which I have not set down here. It had seemed an easy task to soothe the child. If there had been any absurdity like that my mother hinted at, would she—could I— No, never! She was a careless child, with fits of coldness, imperious tenderness and generosity. Not a woman at all. The idea was quite distasteful to me that Helen was a grown-up woman with whom I must be on my guard.

However, Helen's manner to me next day and at all times was calculated to assure any man that she was a wilful, self-sustained young creature of extraordinary beauty and grace, who was devoted to her father, and to him alone. I saw Thorpe one evening pick up, by stealth, the petals of a crimson rose which had dropped from the stalk that still nestled in the black ribbon at her throat, and I laughed at him for his pains as he laid them carefully away in his pocket-book.

"Miss Floyd," said I, "here is another rose. Don't honor that poor skeleton of a vanished flower."

She saw the accident which had befallen her rose, and took mine from me and replaced her ornament with a fresh blossom. "Give me the poor stem," said I as she was about to throw it away.

"What is that for?" she asked, staring at me as I placed it in my buttonhole. "What do you want of the poor old thing?"

And, mistrusting some mischief beneath my sentimental behavior, she was quite tart with me the entire evening, and would not speak to Thorpe at all, but sat demurely between my mother and Mr. Floyd, her eyes nailed on some embroidery, and behaving altogether like a spoiled child of twelve years old.

Georgy Lenox had returned from her visit at Mrs. Woodruff's, and seemed a little quiet and weary of late. I was not so much at her service as before, but had begun to console myself by teaching in song what, like other young poets, I had experienced in suffering. I thank Heaven that no eyes but my own ever beheld the tragedy I wrote that summer: still, I am a little tender-hearted over it yet, and believe that it was, after all, not so bad as it might have been. At any rate, it enabled me to find some relief from my passionate unrest in occupation, and even my own high-sounding phrases may have taught me some scanty heroism. After all, if one fights one's own battle bravely, does it make so much matter about other things? Our battles to-day, like the rest of those fought since creation, show poor cause if regarded from any other standpoint save the necessity of fighting them. Most of our fiercest struggles for life have no adequate reason: it is not so necessary for us to live as we think it is. That we do not get what we want, or that we sink beneath our load of trouble, signifies little in the aggregate of the world's history. But, all the same, our cries of despair go up to Heaven, and there seems no need in the universe so absolute, so final, as that we ourselves should live and be happy.

It is hard for a man of middle age, with a cool brain and tranquillized passions, to retrace the history of his youth. There is much that he must smile over—much, too, which is irksome for him to dwell upon. Many experiences which in their freshness seemed holy and sacred, in after years, stripped of their disguise of false sentiment and the aureole with which they were invested by youthful imagination, become absolutely loathsome—just as when we see tamely by daylight the tawdry stage which last night made a world for us full of all the paraphernalia of high romanticism—silver and velvet robes, plumed hats, dim woodland vistas and the echo of a distant high note, youthful beauty, rope-ladders, balconies, daggers, poison, and passionate love-strains. This skeleton framework of the illusion, these well-worn contrivances, tarnished gold lace and mock splendors, disenchant us sadly, and what we took for

 
Horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:
Blow, bugle: answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying,
 

is now discovered to be a cheap-trumpet imitation of the enchanted notes we dreamed of hearing.

After Miss Lenox returned from the Point she was, as I have said, a little pensive: this little shadow upon the splendor of her beauty lent a subtlety and charm to her manner. If there had been a fault in her loveliness before, it was that it remained always equal: the same light seemed always to play over face and hair, the liquid clearness of her eyes was always undimmed, and there was a trifle of over-robustness about the rounded contours of her figure. In spite of all her beauty, it had at times been hard for me to realize that she was a woman to give herself thoroughly to love. I had already had many dreams of her, yet never one where I thought she could have given me the infinite softness of a caressing touch or feel the motherly quality which lies at the bottom of every true woman's love for man. Now the splendor of her eyes was veiled, her smile was half melancholy, her voice less clear and ringing.

When a man loves a woman, and her mood changes and softens, he reads but one meaning in her tenderness; and it was not long before I had begun fully to believe that there was hope for me. There seemed to be no one to meddle in my wooing. True, Judge Talbot came constantly to the house to see Miss Lenox, and lacked none of the signs by which we read a man's errand in his demeanor; but I did not fear any rivalry from him. Youth, at any rate, is something in itself, independent of other advantages: no wonder it vaunts itself and believes in its own power. That Georgy would think for an instant of giving herself to this man did not seriously occur to me. His face was like the face of thousands of successful men whom we see daily in the great marts of the world. His forehead was broad but low, his eyes inclined to smallness and set closely together, his brows shaggy and overhanging: his cheeks were heavy, and the fleshy formation of his mouth and chin denoted both cruelty and sensuality. He was a wealthy man: such men are always rich. He had the reputation of holding an iron grip over everything he claimed, and never letting it go. He had been married in early life, and now had sons and daughters past the age of the girl upon whom he was eagerly pressing his suit.

He came to dinner now and then, and over his wine he was noisy, boisterous and bragging. He had been in Congress with Mr. Floyd years before, and, though of different parties, they had innumerable recollections in common, and, much as I disliked Mr. Talbot, I recognized his cleverness in anecdote and the clearness and conciseness of his narratives. I could endure him among men, but with women he was odious, and, for some reasons occult and inexplicable to any man, plumed himself upon his success with them. He understood himself too well, and relied too entirely upon his natural abilities, to make any effort to hide his gross ignorance upon all subjects requiring either literary or mental culture. He had been eminently successful without any such acquirements in every field he entered, and consequently considered them non-essentials in a man's career—very good to have, like the cream and confectionery at dessert, tickling the palates of women and children, but eschewed by sensible men. He had travelled twice over Europe, seeing everything with the voracious curiosity of a strong man eager to get his money's worth: after his experience of cities rich in high historic charm, works of art where the rapture and exaltation of long-vanished lives have been exultingly fixed in wonderful colors or imperishable marbles, he had carried away merely a hubbub of recollections of places where the best wines were found and his miseries at being reduced in certain cases to the position of a deaf-mute through his inability to grapple with the difficulties of foreign tongues.

No, it did not in those days occur to me that I had a rival in Mr. Talbot. Helen and I used to laugh at his crass ignorance, and mystify him now and then by our allusions. Miss Lenox was never vivacious at table, and used to listen languidly to all of us, turning to me now and then and regarding me with a sort of pleased curiosity when she thought I overmatched her heavy admirer.

As I have said, I had turned to composition as an amusement, an occupation, and perhaps a refuge from feelings which were rapidly becoming an ever-present pain. I recall one day when I had sat for hours at my desk writing busily, utterly wrapped up in my fancies—so engrossed, indeed, that when I had finished my work I looked with astonishment at my watch and discovered that it was long past two o'clock. I rose and went to the window, pushed aside the curtains and threw open the blinds, and gazed out. I overlooked the garden, which was deserted except by the bees and humming-birds busy among the flowers. The mid-day heat had passed, and a breeze rustled the leaves and moaned in the pine trees. It was a fair world, and I felt what one often experiences in coming back to reality after high emotion—a sort of strangeness in the beauty of tree and grass and sea and wood.

While I stood there some one advanced along the garden-path, looked up, saw me and beckoned. It was but a moment's effort to join her, and almost before I had realized what I was doing I was beside Miss Lenox in the garden.

"Come and sit down in the arbor," she said softly.

"No," I returned, remembering that I had sworn to myself not to yield to her caprices, "I am going for a walk."

She regarded me pensively. "May I go?" she asked.