University of Virginia Library

13. CHAPTER XIII.
REIN, GRAHAME, AND LAFORET.

“And now,” said Mr. Barstow, as with
his niece and their guests they sat in the
dimly-lighted drawing-room, while the music
of the songs without words Mrs. Charlton
had been playing died dreamily away—“and,
now, June, this little girl and I want to know
when you are coming to take care of us. You
made no answer to my letter asking you to
spend the fall and winter here.”

“I thought to tell you better when we met
how much pleasure I should take in accepting
the invitation, and now I find it impossible
to tell you,” said Mrs. Charlton, looking significantly
toward Beatrice, and then upward
into her host's face.

“You like her then?” asked he in a pleased
tone.

“So much. I am afraid I shall love her,”
sighed Mrs. Charlton, idly striking minor
chords with her left hand, while the right lay,
a white, glittering wonder, upon her lap.

“Why do you say afraid? I hope you will
love her, and she you,” replied Mr. Barstow
bluntly.

“No, oh! no. I wish never to love, never to
hate, never to care for any created thing. The
only joy is calm,” murmured Juanita; and
honest Israel Barstow looked puzzled and disturbed.

“You got that from Chappelleford, but it is a
cold, dismal sort of philosophy—not fit for a
woman at all events,” said he. “Why, to my
mind, a woman ought to be all love and enthusiasm,
more so than any man; we go to
them for just that sort of thing.”

“And find it generally, I don't doubt. There,
at all events.”

And Mrs. Charlton again looked admiringly
at Beatrice, who was listenin with a face of
animated interest to Mr. Chappelleford's description
of Eastern scenery.

“Yes, Beatrice is enthusiastic enough, and
loving enough too, poor child,” said Mr. Barstow
with a sigh; and Mrs. Charlton, although
she wondered, did not ask him what
he meant.

“Then you will come and stay with us?”
said the merchant presently; and Juanita,
with a gracious smile, replied:

“Thank you very much. It will give me
the greatest pleasure to do so.”

“That's right. You had better remain to-night,
and I will send for your traps.”

“Thank you. But you have little idea
of the commotion of a feminine change of residence,”
replied Mrs. Charlton with a languid
smile. “I have oceans of preparations to
make; but if you will kindly send for me to-morrow
about noon, I will try to be ready.”

“Certainly; the carriage shall go for you at
twelve o'clock, and I will amuse Trix myself
until then. I don't want her to get homesick,
you know.”

“Certainly not;” and Mrs. Charlton, sweeping
her drowsy eyes once more upon Beatrice,
decided that she had prospered ill in some
love affair, and that Mr. Barstow had brought
her home with him to break up the train of
painful association.

“And asked me here as dame du compagnie,”
thought she. “Well, I shall earn my daily
plover, if not in the sweat of my brow, in the
strain of my endurance, and I like carriages
better than horse-cars.”

So the nextday, Mrs. Charlton and Mrs. Charlton's
luggage arrived in Midas-avenue, and
when Mr. Barstow came home to dinner, he
found two beautiful, well-dressed, and well-bred
women ready to receive and entertain
him, and to make for him a home in his
hitherto somewhat dreary palace.

“This is the pleasantest thing I have seen
to-day. This is what a man likes to look
forward to while he is bustling about on
'change, or bullying other men in his or their
counting-rooms,” said he, throwing himself
luxuriously into an arm-chair after dinner,
and contemplating the two young women—
seated, the one at her needle-work, the other
at the piano.

“And now, my dears,” pursued he, “I have
been all day settling affairs at the office, so
that I might be spared for a while, and to-morrow,
if you say so, we will turn our backs
upon the town, and go the sea-shore, the
mountains, the prairies, or even across the
water, if you will be satisfied with a peep and
good-by, for I cannot leave home for more
than a month or six weeks. What do you
say?”

“Which does Miss Wansted prefer of all
these delightful visions?” asked Mrs. Charlton,
smiling at Beatrice.

“Oh! the sea by all means, if I am to
choose; but which do you and my uncle like
best?”

“I wouldn't give a copper to choose. They
are all new to me; for since I left Milvor, I
have lived here in the city, boy and man, until
I fell strange anywhere else. I have never
cared to take a play-time before, since I had
the means of giving myself one,” said Mr.
Barstow honestly; and Mrs. Charlton added
with a smile:

“It is the meeting of extremes, for I have
travelled so much, and seen so many varieties
of scenery, that I do not care at all which way
I turn when I leave home.”

“Then it shall be to the sea-shore, and we
will go to-morrow, if you say so.”

“I shall be ready, uncle,” said Beatrice,
with feverish eagerness; and Juanita quietly
decided:

“It is a fresh wound, and stings keenly.
Poor fool! By and by, she can lay her
finger upon the scar and smile at its memories.”

A few days later found Mr. Barstow and his
“family,” as he liked to call the beautiful
women under his charge, established at
one of the loveliest points upon the New-England
coast, and entering with avidity into
the life about them. The place was crowded,
and both Mrs. Charlton and Mr. Barstow

found many acquaintances—she among the
gayest, and he among the soberest of the
crowd.

Beatrice knew no one, and cared to know
no one—contenting herself with nature, and
continually stealing away to sit upon the
rocks by the shore, or weary herself to exhaustion
in mountain scrambles, and woodland
walks.

“This will not do; she might as well have
stayed in Milvor,” said Uncle Israel confidentially
to Juanita one day, when his wilful niece
had quietly disappeared from a projected bowling
party. “June, we must keep her among people,
make her merry, teach her to flirt as these
other girls do—any thing to take up her mind.
The truth is, you see, the poor child has met
with a disappointment; I don't know much
about it myself, and I never should speak of
it to her; but she needs to change the scene
inside her mind, as well as outside her body.
Now, you can do that, if any one can, I am
sure.”

“Yes, I can do that,” said Mrs. Charlton,
with one of her smiles of languid power. And
that evening she introduced Rein, the artist;
Grahame, the author; and Laforét, the invincible
of the salons, to her charge, having
previously dropped a quiet word into the ear
of each.

“Have you ever dreamed of such a head for
a study?” asked she of Rein; and while he
looked, she murmured to Grahame:

“There is a story there. See if you can
find it out.” And to Laforét:

“She is to come out this winter, and will
make a sensation. I will introduce you before
the world finds her out.”

So these three men, the nucleus of “society”
at Dream Harbor, devoted themselves, each in
his own interest, to the rising star, and left her
no longer a hope of solitude or quiet. Did
she wander to the sea-shore or the mountains?
Rein quietly attended her, and begged leave
to sketch her as a sea-nymph, a dryad, an urchin,
a saint, as every possible form of beauty
and inspiration. Did she listlessly dream
away the long summer hours, her thoughts
wandering, she knew not where? Grahame
was beside her, softly leading the talk to personal
experiences, to sympathy, to the forgotten
dreams, the impossible visions of youth.
Or did she seek refuge in the crowd, who so
ready as Laforét to ask her to dance, to propose
croquet, with himself as her partner, to
idle at her side, and affect an intimacy Beatrice
hardly took the trouble to deny.

“Why do these people haunt me so? I do
not want them or try to make myself agreeable
to them,” asked she of Mrs. Charlton once
when she had perforce spent the whole day in
company with Messieurs Rein, Grahame,
Laforét, and their friends.

“Because, my dear, these persons are society,
and society claims you as a fresh young
victim, and sends out its high priests to capture
you. Haven't you a taste for martyrdom?
If not, you had better cultivate one, since it is
your fate.”

“Does society mean martyrdom, then?”
asked the novice.

“As long as you persist in egotism,” replied
the teacher. “Go with the stream, and you
will swim easily and pleasantly; set your face
against it, and attempt some new method of
overcoming the inevitable, and you will be in
every one's way, and every one in yours, and
will finally be overwhelmed and drowned.”

“But with what stream am I to swim?”
asked Beatrice wearily. “I do not care for
Mr. Rein's ideas of art—they seem to me conventional
and hackneyed. Mr. Grahame's
favorite literature is too sentimental for my
taste, and Mr. Laforét's gossip is a weariness
to the flesh. Am I to force myself to sympathize
with my antipathies?”

Mrs. Charlton raised a warning hand.

“To answer the end of your question first,
my dear, let me warn you against that style
of thing: antitheses, syllogisms, argument,
metaphysics, are all topics defendre to a débutante.
They are the weapons of maturity,
of waning beauty, and it is as unfair and unbecoming
for your use as rouge or pearl-powder,
antimony or belladonna.”

“Who uses antimony and belladoma?”
asked Beatrice, yielding to a small side-current
of feminine curiosity.

“Secrets of the prison-house,” gayly replied
Juanita. “I won't even tell you their
uses; but again I warn you against the deep
waters which are as yet bad style for you.
Freshness, naïveté, universal interest in all
persons, all pursuits not too heavy for you,
all topics of the day—this is your rôle. You
have a taste for repartee—indulge it sparingly
and mildly. The reputation of a satirist, or
even of a wit, is as fatal to a young beauty as
that of a bas bleu. All this will come in time;
but meanwhile accept Rein's teachings in art,

Grahame's in literature, and Laforét's in society.
They are all fools, but they are the
world's mouthpieces, and their jargon is its
Shibboleth. Learn it, for it as necessary as
French in the circle you are entering.”

“Thank you,” said Beatrice sadly. “Perhaps
I had better have stayed at Milvor.”

“Not at all, dear. You would have died
there—perished of—”

“What?” inquired the girl, flushing like
the morning.

“Of egotism,” coolly replied Juanita. “You
were quite too important to yourself there—to
other persons also, no doubt; but to yourself
fatally. In the world, we soon learn that our
own experience is every one's experience, that
our original ideas are hackneyed, and our life-hurts
are other people's callous scars. It is a
good school.”

“You indulge in the philosophies you deny
me,” said Beatrice, smiling bitterly.

“My dear, I am thirty-three years old, and
at sixteen I had seen more of the world than
you at twenty. Do not revenge yourself by
disliking me, for I like you better than any
one I have met in a dozen years.”

“Do you? Thank you,” hesitated Beatrice.
“I do not dislike you indeed, but I
dislike your theories and your world more
than I can tell.”

“You will come to adopt both as your own,
my poor child. Good-night.”

“Good-night. I am so sorry to seem ungrateful,”
said the girl; but her new friend
only smiled a little, and went without reply.