 | The amber gods, and other stories |  |
I.
PROBABLY you never saw such a superb
creature, — if that word, creature, does not
endow her with too much life: a Semiramis,
without the profligacy, — an Isis, without the
worship, — a Sphinx, yes, a Sphinx, with her desert, who
long ago despaired of having one come to read her riddle,
strong, calm, patient perhaps. In this respect she seemed
to own no redundant life, just enough to eke along existence,
— not living, but waiting.
I say, all this would have been one's impression; and
one's impression would have been incorrect.
I really cannot state her age; and having attained to
years of discretion, it is not of such consequence as it is
often supposed to be, whether one be twenty or sixty.
You would have been confident, that, living to count her
hundreds, she would only have bloomed with more immortal
freshness; but such a thought would not have occurred
to you at all, if you had not already felt that she
was no longer young, — she possessed so perfectly that
certain self-reliance, self-understanding, aplomb, into which
little folk crystallize at an early age, but which is not to
be found with those whose identities are cast in a larger
experience.
That Mrs. Laudersdale was the technical magnificent
woman, I need not reiterate. I wish I knew some name
gorgeous enough in sound and association for that given
her at christening; but I don't. It is my opinion that
she was born Mrs. Laudersdale, that her coral-and-bell
was marked Mrs. Laudersdale, and that her name stands
golden-lettered on the recording angel's leaf simply as
Mrs. Laudersdale. It is naturally to be inferred, then,
that there was a Mr. Laudersdale. There was. But
not by any means a person of consequence, you assume?
Why, yes, of some, — to one individual at least. Mrs.
Laudersdale was so weak as to regard him with complacency;
she loved — adored her husband. Let me have
the justice to say that no one suspected her of it. Of
course, then, Mr. Roger Raleigh had no business to fall in
love with her.
Well, — but he did.
At the time when Mrs. Laudersdale had become somewhat
more than a reigning beauty, and held her sceptre
with such apparent indifference that she seemed about
abandoning it forever, she no longer dazzled with unventured
combinations of colors and materials in dress. She
wore most frequently, at this epoch, black velvet that suppled
about her well-asserted contours; and the very trail
of her skirt was unlike another woman's, for it coiled and
bristled after her with a life and motion of its own, like a
serpent. Her hair, of too dead a black for gloss or glister,
was always adorned with a nasturtium-vine, whose
vivid flames seemed like some personal emanation, and
whose odor, acrid and single, dispersed a character about
her; and the only ornaments she condescended to assume
intricate in workmanship. It is evident she was a
poet in costume, and had at last en règle acquired a manner.
But thirteen years ago she apparelled herself otherwise,
and thirteen years ago it was that Mr. Roger Raleigh
fell in love with her. This is how it was.
Among the many lakes in New Hampshire, there is one
of extreme beauty, — a broad, shadowy water, some nine
miles in length, with steep, thickly wooded banks, and
here and there, as if moored on its calm surface, an island
fit for the Bower of Bliss. At one spot along its shore
was, and still is, an old country-house, formerly used as a
hotel, but whose patrons, always pleasure-seekers from the
neighboring towns, had been drawn away by the erection
of a more modern and satisfactory place of entertainment
at the other extremity of the lake, and it had now been
for many years closed. There were no dwellings of any
kind in its vicinity, so that it reigned over a solitude of a
half-dozen miles in every direction. Once in a while the
gay visitors in the more prosperous regions stretched their
sails and skimmed along till they saw its white porticos
and piazzas gleaming faintly up among the trees; once
in a while a belated traveller tied his horse at the gate,
and sought admittance in vain, at the empty house, of the
shadows who may have kept it. It was not pleasant to
see so goodly a mansion falling to ruin for want of fit occupancy,
truly; and just as the walls had grown gray with
rain and time, the chimneys choked and the casements
shrunken, a merry company of friends and families, from
another portion of the country, consolidated themselves
into a society for the pursuit of happiness, rented the old
place, put in carpenters and masons and glaziers, and,
when the last tenants vacated the premises, took possession
not theirs; the matron and her servants alone received
such guests; the long summer-days were to come and
go with them as joyously as with Bacchus and his
crew.
Behold the party domesticated a fortnight at the Bawn,
as it was afterward dubbed. Mr. Laudersdale had returned
to New York that morning, and his wife had not
been met since. Now, at about five o'clock, her white
robe floated past the door, and she was seen moving up
and down the long piazza and humming a faint little tune
to herself. Just then a flock of young women, married
and single, fluttered through door and windows to join
her; and just then Mrs. Laudersdale stepped down from
the end of the piazza and floated up the garden-path and
into the woods that skirted the lake-shore and stretched
far back and away. Thus abandoned, the others turned
their attention to the expanse before and below them; and
one or two made their way down to the brink, unhooked a
boat, ventured in, and, lifting the single pair of oars, were
soon laboring gayly out and creating havoc on the placid
waters.
As Mrs. Laudersdale continued to walk, the path which
she followed slowly descended to the pebbly rim, rich in
open spaces, slopes of verdure just gilding in the declining
sun, and coverts of cool, deep shadow. As she advanced
leisurely, involved in pleasant fancy, something
caught her eye, an unusual object, certainly, lying in a
duskier recess; she drew nearer and hung a moment
above it. Some fallen statue among rank Roman growth,
some marble semblance of a young god, overlaced with a
vine and plunged in tall ferns and beaded grasses? And
she, bending there, — was it Diana and Endymion over
and Roger Raleigh. Only while one might have
counted sixty did she linger to take the real beauty of the
scene: the youth, adopted as it were, to Nature's heart
by the clustering growth that sprang up rebounding under
the careless weight that crushed it; an attitude of complete
and unconscious grace, — one arm thrown out beneath
the head, the other listlessly fallen down his side,
while the hand still detained the straw hat; the profile,
by no means classic, but in strong relief, the dark hair
blowing in the gentle wind, the flush of sleep that went
and came almost perceptibly with the breath, and the
sunbeam that slanting round suddenly suffused the whole.
“Pretty boy!” thought Mrs. Laudersdale. Beautiful
picture!” and she flitted on. But Roger Raleigh was
not a boy, although sleep, that gives back, to all, stray
glimpses of their primal nature, endowed him peculiarly
with a look of childlike innocence unknown to his waking
hours.
Startled, perhaps, by the intruding step, for it was no
light one, a squirrel leaped from the bough to the grass,
and, leaping, woke the sleeper. He himself now unperceived,
saw a vision in return, — this woman, young and
rare, this queenly, perfect thing, floating on and vanishing
among the trees. Whence had she come, and who was
she? And hereupon he remembered the old Bawn and
its occupants. Had she seen him? Unlikely; but yet,
unimportant as it was, it remained an interesting and
open question in his mind. Bringing down the hair so
ruffled in the idle breeze, he crowded his hat over it with
a determined air, half ran, half tumbled, down the bank,
sprang into his boat, and, shaking out a sail, went flirting
over the lake as fast as the wind could carry him. Leaving
Raleigh skimmed along the skin of ripples, and, in order
to avoid a sound of shrill voices, skirted the angle of an
island, and found himself deceived by the echo and in the
midst of them.
Mrs. McLean, Miss Helen Heath, and Miss Mary
Purcell, who had embarked with a single pair of oars,
were now shipwrecked on the waters wide, as Helen
said; for one of their means of progress, she declared,
had been snatched by the roaring waves and was floating
in the trough of the sea, just beyond their reach. None
of the number being acquainted with the process of sculling,
they considered it imperative to secure the truant
tool, unless they wished to perish floating about unseen;
and having weighed the expediency of rigging Helen into
a jury-mast, they were now using their endeavors to regain
the oar, — Mary Purcell whirling them about like a
maelström with the remaining one, and Mrs. McLean
with her two hands grasping Helen's garments, while the
latter half stood in the boat and half lay recumbent on the
lake, tipping, slipping, dipping, till her head resembled a
mermaid's; while they all three filled the air with more
exclaim, shrieking, and laughter than could have been
effected by a large-lunged mob.
“Bedlam let loose,” thought the intruder, “or all the
Naiads up for a frolic?” And as he shot by, a hush fell
upon the noisy group, — Helen pausing and erecting herself
from her ablutions, Mary's frantic efforts sending them
as a broadside upon the Arrow and nearly capsizing it, and
Mrs. McLean, ceasing merriment, staring from both her
eyes, and saying nothing. Mr. Raleigh seized the oar in
passing, and directly afterward had placed it in Helen's
hands. Receiving it with a profusion of thanks, she
a few seconds, Mr. Raleigh observed that the exhausted
rowers had made scarcely a yard's distance. He had no
inclination for gallantry, his eyes and thoughts were full
of his late vision in the woods, he wished to reach home
and dream; but in a moment he was again beside them,
had taken their painter with a bow and an easy sentence,
but neither with empressement nor heightened color, and,
changing his course, was lending them a portion of the
Arrow's swiftness in flight towards the Bawn. It seemed
as if the old place sent its ghosts out to him this afternoon.
Bearing close upon the flat landing-rock, and hooking the
painter therein, he sheered off, lifting his hat, and was
gone.
“Roger! Roger Raleigh!” cried Mrs. McLean, from
the shore, “come back!”
Obeying her with an air of puzzled surprise, the person
so unceremoniously addressed was immediately beside
her again.
“A cool proceeding, sir!” said she, extending both her
hands. “How long would you know your Cousin Kate
to be here, and refuse to spare her an hour?”
“Upon my honor,” said her cousin, bending very low
over the hands, “I but this moment learn her presence
in my neighborhood.”
“Ah, sir! and what becomes of my note sealed with
sky-blue wax and despatched to you ten days ago?”
“It is true such a note lies on my table at this moment,
and it is still sealed with sky-blue wax.”
“And still unread?”
“You will not force me to confess such delinquency?”
“And still unread?”
“Ten thousand pardons! Shall I go home and read
evident, as he raised it.
“No. But is that the way to serve a lady's communications?
Fie, for a gallant! I must take you in hand.
These are your New Hampshire customs?”
“`O Kate, nice customs curtsy to nice kings!'”
“So I 've heard, when curtsying was in fashion; but
that is out of date, together with a good many other nice
things, — caring for one's friends, for instance. Why
don't you ask how all your uncles and aunts are, sir?”
“How are all my uncles and aunts, Miss?”
“Oh, don't you know? I thought you did n't. There 's
another billet, enclosing a bit of pasteboard, lying on your
table now unopened too, I 'll warrant. Don't you read
any of your letters?”
“Alphabetical or epistolary?”
“Answer properly, yes or no.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I know no one that has authority to write to me, as
half a reason.”
“Thank you, for one, sir. And what becomes of your
Uncle Reuben?”
“Not included in the category.”
“Then you 're not aware that I 've changed my estate?
You don't know my name now, do you?”
But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom.'”
“Nonsense! What an exasperating boy! Just the
same as ever! Well, it explains itself. Here comes a
recent property unto me appertaining. McLean! My
husband, Mr. John McLean, — my cousin, Mr. Roger
Raleigh.”
The new-comer was one of those “sterling men” always
to be relied on, generally to be respected, and safely
and appropriately leading society and subscription-lists.
He was not very imaginative, and he understood at a
glance as much of the other as he ever would understand.
And the other, feeling instantly that only coin of the
king's stamp would pass current here, turned his own
counter royal side up, and met his host with genuine
cordiality. Shortly afterward, Mrs. McLean withdrew
for an improvement in her toilet, and soon returning,
found them comparing notes as to the condition of the
country, tender bonds of the Union, and relative merits
of rival candidates, for all which neither of them cared a
straw.
“How do you find me, sir?” she asked of her cousin.
“Radiant, rosy, and rarely arrayed.”
“I see that your affections are to be won, and I proceed
accordingly, by making myself charming, in the first
place. And now, will you be cheered, but not inebriated,
here under the trees, in company with dainty cheese-cakes
compounded by these hands, and jelly of Helen Heath's
moulding, and automatic trifles that caught an ordaining
glimpse of Mrs. Laudersdale's eye and rushed madly together
to become almond-pasty?”
“With a method in their madness, I hope.”
“Yes, all the almonds not on one side.”
“In company with cheese-cakes, jelly, and pasty, simply,
— I should have claret and crackers at home, Capua
willing. Will it pay?”
“You shall have Port here, when Mrs. Laudersdale
comes.”
“Not old enough to be crusty yet, Kate,” said her husband.
“Very good, for you, John!”
“Mrs. Laudersdale is your housekeeper?” asked her
cousin.
“Mrs. Laudersdale? That is rich! But I should
never dare to tell her. Our housekeeper? Our cynosure!
She is our argent-lidded Persian Girl, — our serene,
imperial Eleänore; —
The Samian Here rises, and she speaks
A Memnon smitten with the morning sun.'”
“Oh, indeed! And this is a conventicle of young matrimonial
victims to practise cookery in seclusion, upon
which I have blundered?”
“If the fancy pleases you, yes. There they are.”
And hereon followed a series of necessary introductions.
Mr. Roger Raleigh sat with both arms leaning on the
table before him, and wondering which of the ladies, half
whose names he had not heard, was the Samian Here, —
if any of them were, — and if, — and if, — and here Mr.
Roger Raleigh's reflections went wandering back to the
lake-side path and its vision. Not inopportunely at this
moment, a white garment, which, it is unnecessary to say,
he had long ago seen advancing, fluttered down the opposite
path, and she herself approached.
“Ah! Al fresco?” said the pleasantest voice in the
world.
“And is n't it charming?” asked Mrs. McLean. “Imagine
us with tables spread outside the door in Fifth Avenue,
in Chestnut Street, or on the Common!”
“Even then the arabesque would be wanting,” said
she, trailing a long branch of the wild grape-vine, with
its pale and delicately fragrant blooms, along the snowy
board. “Are the cheese-cakes a success, Mrs. McLean?
at last heard from your cousin,” she added, in an undertone.
“Yes; let me pre — Roger!”
Quickly frustrating any such presentation, Mr. Roger
Raleigh half turned, and, bowing, said, —
“I believe I have had the pleasure of meeting Mrs.
Laudersdale before.”
Her haughtiness would have frozen any one else. She
bent with the least possible inclination, and sat down upon
a stump that immediately became a throne. He resumed
his former position, and drummed lightly on the table,
while waiting to be served. In less complete repose than
she had previously seen him, Mrs. Laudersdale now examined
anew the individual before her.
Not by any means tall she found him, but having the
square shoulders and broad chest which give, in so much
greater a degree than mere height, an impression of
strength, — a frame agile and compact, with that easy
carriage of the head and that rapid movement so deceptively
increasing the stature. The face, too, was
probably what, if not informed by a singularly clean
and fine soul, would, in the lapse of years, become
gross, — the skin of a clear olive, which had slightly
flushed as he addressed herself, but not when speaking
to other strangers, — kept beardless, and rather square in
contour; the mouth not small, but keenly cut, like marble,
and always quivering before he spoke, as if the lightning
of his thought ran thither naturally to seek spontaneous
expression; teeth white; chin cleft; nose of the unclassified
order, rather long, the curve opposite to aquiline,
and saved from sharpness by nostrils that dilated with a
pulse of their own, as those of very proud and sensitive
dark hair, long and fine; heavy brows that overhung
deep-set eyes of lightest hazel, but endowed by shadow
with a power that no eye of gypsy-black ever swayed for
an instant. His whole countenance reminded you of
nothing so much as of the young heroes of the French
Revolution, for whom irregular features and sallow cheeks
were transmutted into brilliant and singular beauty. It
wore an inwrapped air, and, with all its mobility, was a
mask. He very seldom raised the lids, and his pallor,
though owning more of the golden touch of the sun, was
as dazzling as Mrs. Laudersdale's own.
Mrs. Laudersdale scarcely observed, — she felt; and
probably she saw nothing but the general impression of
what I have been telling you.
“Tea, Roger?” asked Mrs. McLean.
“Green, I thank you, and strong.”
Rising to receive it, he continued his course till it naturally
brought him before Mrs. Laudersdale. Pausing
deliberately and sipping the pungent tonic, he at last
looked up, and said, —
“Well, you are offended?”
“Then you were awake when I stayed to look at you?”
she asked, in reply; for curiosity is a solvent.
“Then you did stay and look at me? That is exactly
what I wished to know. How did I look, Belphœbe?”
“Out of his eyes, tell him,” said Helen Heath, in
passing.
“They were not open,” responded Mrs. Laudersdale.
“And I cannot tell how you saw me.”
“I saw you as Virgil saw his mother, — I mean Æneas,
— as the goddesses are always known, you remember, in
departure.”
Mrs. Laudersdale felt a weight on her lids beneath his
glance, and rose to approach the table.
“Allow me,” said Mr. Raleigh, taking her plate and
bringing it back directly with a wafery slice of bread and
a quaking tumulus of fragrant jelly.
Mrs. Laudersdale laughed, though perhaps scarcely
pleased with him.
“How did you know my tastes so well?” she asked.
“Since they are not mine,” he replied. “Of course
you eat jelly, because it is no trouble; you choose your
bread thin for the same reason; likewise you would find
a glass of that suave, rich cream delicious. Among all
motions, you prefer smooth sailing; and I 'll venture to
say that you sleep in down all summer.”
Mrs. Laudersdale looked up in slow and still astonishment;
but Mr. Raleigh was already pouring out the glass
of cream.
“I 've no doubt you would like to have me sweeten it,”
said he, offering it to her; “but I will not humor such ascetic
tendencies. I never approved of flagellation.”
And as he spoke, he was gone to break ground for a
flirtation with Helen Heath.
Helen Heath appeared to be one of those gay, not-to-be-heart-broken
damsels who can drink forever of this
dangerous and exhilarating cup without showing symptoms
of intoxication. Young men who have nothing
worse to do with their time gravitate naturally and unawares
toward them for amusement, and spin out the
thread till they reach its end without expectation, without
surprise, without regret, without occasion for remorse.
Mr. Raleigh could not have been more unfortunate than
he was in meeting her, since it gave him reason and excuse
henceforth for visiting the Bawn at all seasons.
The table was at last removed, the dew began to fall,
Mrs. Laudersdale shivered and withdrew toward the
house.
“Incessu patet dea,” Mr. Raleigh remembered.
Somewhat later, he started from his seat, bade them all
good-night, ran gayly down the bank, and shoved off from
shore. And shortly after, Mrs. Laudersdale, looking from
her window, saw, for an instant, a single firefly hovering
over the dark lake. It was Mr. Roger Raleigh's distant
lantern, as, stretched at ease, he turned the slow leaves of
a Froissart, and suffered the Arrow to drift as it would
across the night.
The next morning Mrs. Laudersdale descended, as
usual, to the breakfast-table, at an hour when all the rest
had concluded their repast. Miss Helen Heath alone
remained, trifling with the tea-cups, and singing little
exercises.
“Quite an acquisition, Mrs. Laudersdale!” said she.
“What?” said the other, languidly, leaning one arm
on the table and looking about for any appetizing edible.
“What is an acquisition?”
“You mean who. Mr. Raleigh, of course. But is n't
it the queerest thing in the world, up here in this savage
district, to light upon a gentleman?”
“Is this a savage district? And is Mr. Raleigh a
gentleman?”
“Is he? I never saw his match.”
“Nor I.”
“What! don't you find him so? a thorough gentleman?”
“I don't know what a thorough gentleman is, I dare
say,” assented Mrs. Laudersdale, indifferently, with no
spirit for repartee, breaking an egg and putting it down,
gradually raising the siege, yawning, and leaning back in
her chair.
“You poor thing!” said Helen. “You are starving
to death. What shall I get for you? I have influence in
the kitchens. Does marmalade, to spread your muffins,
present any attractions? or shall I beg for rusks? or
what do you say to doughnuts? there are doughnuts in
this closet; crullers and milk are nice for breakfast.”
And in a few minutes Helen had rifled a shelf of sufficient
temptations to overcome Mrs. Laudersdale's abstinence.
“After all,” said she then, “you did n't answer my
question.”
“What question?”
“If it were n't odd to meet Mr. Raleigh here.”
“I don't know,” said Mrs. Laudersdale.
“Dear! Mary Purcell takes as much interest. She
said he was impertinent, made her talk too much, and
made fun of her.”
“Very likely.”
“You are as aggravating as he! If you had anything
to do except to look divinely, we 'd quarrel. I thought I
had a nice bit of entertaining news for you.”
“Is that your trouble? I should be sorry to oppress
you with it longer. Pray, tell it.”
“Will it entertain you?”
“It won't bore you.”
“I don't know that I will tell it on such terms. However,
I — must talk. Well, then. I have not been
dreaming by daylight, but up and improving my opportunities.
Partly from himself, and partly from Kate, and
partly from the matron here, I have made the following
cities, and crossed some parallels of latitude, to exile himself
in this wilderness of ice and snow, — that 's what you
and I vote it, whether the trees are green and the sun
shines, or not; and I don't see what bewitched mother to
adopt such a suicidal plan as coming here to be buried
alive. He, that is, Mr. Raleigh, to join my ends, has
lived here for five years; and as he came when he was
twenty, he is consequently about my age now, — I
should n't wonder if a trifle older than you. He came
here because an immense estate was bequeathed him on
the condition that he should occupy this corner of it
during one half of every year from his twenty-first to his
thirty-first. He has chosen to occupy it during the entire
year, running down now and then to have a little music
or see a little painting. Sometimes a parcel of his
friends, — he never was at college, has n't any chums, and
has educated himself by all manner of out-of-the-way
dodges, — sometimes these friends, odd specimens, old
music-masters, rambling artists, seedy tutors, fencers,
boxers, hunters, clowns, all light down together, and then
the neighborhood rings with this precious covey; the rest
of the year, may-be, he don't see an individual. One
result of this isolation is, that freaks which would be very
strange escapades in other people with him are mere
commonplaces. Sometimes he goes over to the city
there, and roams round like a lost soul seeking for its
body; sometimes he goes up a hundred miles or two,
takes a guide and handles the mountains; and, except in
the accidents at such times, he has n't seen a woman since
he came.”
“That accounts,” said Mrs. Laudersdale.
“Yes. But just think what a life!”
“He would n't stay, if he did n't like,” replied Mrs.
Laudersdale, to whom the words poverty and riches conveyed
not the least idea.
“I don't know. He has an uncle, of whom he is very
fond, in India,” continued Helen, — “an unfortunate kind
of man, with whom everything goes wrong, and who is
always taking fevers; and once or twice Mr. Raleigh has
started to go and take care of him, and lose the whole
estate by the means. He intends to endow him, I believe,
by and by, after the thing is at his disposal. This uncle
kept him at school, when he was an orphan in different
circumstances, at a Jesuit institution; and he and Miss
Kent were always quarrelling over him, and she thought
she had tied up her property nicely out of old Reuben
Raleigh's way. It will be nuts, if he ever accepts his
nephew's proposed present. The best of it all is, that, if
he breaks the condition, — there 's no accounting for the
caprices of wills, — part of it goes to a needy institution,
and part of it inalienably to Mrs. McLean, who —”
“Is an institution, too.”
“Who is not needy. There, is n't that a pretty little
conte?”
“Very,” said Mrs. Laudersdale, having listened with
increasing interest. “But, Helen, you 'll be a gossip, if
you go on and prosper.”
“Why, my dear child! He 'll be over here every day,
now; and do you suppose I 'm going to flirt with any
one, when I don't know his antecedents? There he is
now!”
And as Mrs. Laudersdale turned, she saw Mr. Raleigh
standing composedly in the doorway and surveying them.
She bade him good-morning, coolly enough, while Helen
began searching the grounds of the teacups, rather uncertain
ears.
“Turning teacups, Gypsy Helen, and telling fates, all
to no audience, and with no cross on your palm?” asked
the guest.
“So you ignore Mrs. Laudersdale?”
“Not at all; you were n't looking at her cup, — if she
has one. Will you have the morning paper?” he asked
of that lady, who, receiving it, leisurely unfolded and
glanced over its extent.
“Where 's my Cousin Kate?” then demanded Mr.
Raleigh of Helen, having regarded this performance.
“Gone shopping in town.”
“Her vocation. For the day?”
“No, — it is time for their return now. When you
hear wheels —”
“I hear them”; and he strolled to the window. “You
should have said, when I heard tongues; Medes and
Elamites and the dwellers in Mesopotamia were less
cheerful. A very pretty team. So she took her conjugal
appurtenance with her?”
“And left her cousinly impertinence behind her,” retorted
a gay voice from his elbow.
“Ah, Kate! are you there? It 's not a moment since
I saw you `coming from the town.' A pretty hostess,
you! I arrive on your invitation to pass the day —”
“But I did n't expect you before the sun.”
“To pass the day, and find you absent and the breakfast-table
not clared away.”
“My dear Roger, we have not quite taken our habits
yet. As soon as the country air shall have wakened and
made over Helen and Mrs. Laudersdale, you will find us
ready for company at daybreak.”
“What a passion for `company'! I shall not be surprised
some day to receive cards for your death-bed.”
“Friends and relatives invited to attend? No, Roger,
you must n't be naughty. You shall receive cards for my
dinner-party before we go, if you won't come without; for
we have innumerable friends in town already.”
“Happy woman!”
“What 's that? A newspaper? A newspaper! How
McLean will chuckle!” And she seized the sheet which
Mrs. Laudersdale had abandoned in sweeping from the
room.
“Is there a Mr. Laudersdale? Where is he?” asked
Mr. Raleigh, as he leaned against the window.
“Who?” asked his cousin, deep in a paragraph.
“Mr. Laudersdale. Where is he?”
“Oh! between his four planks, I suppose,” she replied,
thinking of the Sound-boat's berth, which probably contained
the gentleman designated.
“Between his four planks,” repeated Mr. Raleigh, in a
musing tone, something shocked by her apparent levity,
entirely misinterpreting her, and to this little accident
owing nearly thirteen years' unhappiness.
“She must have married early,” he continued.
“Oh, fabulously early,” replied Mrs. McLean, between
the lines she read. “She is Creole, I believe. She is
perfect. The women are as infatuated about her as the
men. Here 's Helen Heath been dawdling round the
table all the morning for the sake of chatting to her
while she breakfasts. I don't know why, I 'm sure; the
woman 's charming, but she 's too lazy even to talk.
McLean! Another flurry in France.”
And after shaking hands with Mr. Raleigh, that worthy
seized the proffered paper and vanished behind it, leaving
she seemed by no means in haste to assume, preferring to
remain and vex her husband with a thousand little teasing
arts. Meanwhile Mr. Raleigh proceeded to take that office
upon himself, by crossing the hall, exploring the parlors,
examining the manuscript commonplace-volumes, and
finally by sketching on a leaf of his pocket-book Mrs.
Laudersdale, at the other end of the piazza, half-swinging
in the vines through which broad sunbeams poured, while
Helen Heath was singing and several other ladies were
busying themselves with books and needlework in her
vicinity.
“Ah, Mr. Raleigh!” said Helen Heath, as he put up
the pocket-book and drew near, — “Mrs. Laudersdale
and I have been wondering how you amuse yourself
up here; and I make my discovery. You study animated
nature; that is to say, you draw Mrs. Laudersdale
and me.”
“Mistaken, Miss Helen. I draw only Mrs. Laudersdale;
and do you call that animated nature?”
“I wish you would draw Mrs. Laudersdale out.”
At this point Mrs. Laudersdale fell out; but, without
otherwise stirring from his position than by moving an
apparently careless arm, Mr. Raleigh caught and restored
her to her balance, as lightly as if he had brushed a floating
gossamer from the air to his finger. For the first
time, perhaps, in her life, a carnation blossomed an instant
in her cheek, then all was as before, — only two of the
party felt on that instant that in some mysterious manner
their relations with each other were entirely changed.
“But what is it that you do with yourself?” persisted
Helen. “Tell us, that we may do likewise.”
“Will you come and see?” he asked, — his eyes, however,
from the lake to the brooks, and hang among the alders,
and angle, dreaming, all day long? Or will you rise at
dead of night and go out on the lake with me and watch
field after field of white lilies flash open as the sun touches
them with his spear? Or will you lie during still noons
up among the farmers' fields where myriad bandrol corn-poppies
flaunt over your head, and stain your finger-tips
with the red berries that hang like globes of light in the
palace-gardens of mites and midges, soaking yourself in
hot sunshine and south-winds and heavy aromatic earth-scents?”
“Come!” said Mrs. Laudersdale, rising earnestly, like
one in an eager dream.
“It is plain that you are in training for a poet,” said
Helen Heath, laughing, to Mr. Raleigh. “Well, when
will you take us? Are the lilies in bloom? Shall we go
to-morrow morning?”
“I don't know that I shall take you at all, Miss Helen;
— river-lilies might suit you best; but these queens of
the lakes, the great, calm pond-lilies, creatures of quiet
and white radiance, — I have seen only one head that
possessed enough of the genuine East-Indian repose to be
crowned with them.”
“You like repose,” said Mrs. Laudersdale. “But what
is it?”
“Repose is strength, — life that develops from within,
and feels itself, and has no need of effort. Repose is
inherent security.”
“Goodness!” exclaimed Helen. “Article first in a
new dictionary, — encyclopædia, I should say. You worship,
but you don't possess your god, for you look at this
moment like a shaft in the bow; and here comes an
archer to give it flight.”
“Where are you going, Kate?” said her cousin.
“To pick strawberries in the garden. Want to come?”
The three could do no better than accept her invitation.
The good ladies might stare as they could after Mrs. Laudersdale,
and wonder what sudden sprite had possessed
her, since for neither man nor woman of the numerous
party had she hitherto condescended to lift an unwonted
eyelid; what they would have said to have seen her
plunged in a strawberry-bed, gathering handfuls and raining
them drop by drop into Helen Heath's mouth, to silence
her while she herself might talk, — her own fingers
tipped with more sanguine shade than their native rose,
her eyes full of the noon sparkle, and her lips parted with
laughter, — we cannot say. Roger Raleigh forgot to
move, to speak, to think, as he watched her. But in
the midst of this brilliant and novel gayety of hers,
there was still a dignity to make one feel that she had
by no means abandoned her regal purple, but merely
adorned it with profuse golden flourishes.
At dinner that day, Helen begged to know if there
were not a great many routes in the vicinity practicable
only on horseback, and thought she had attained her end
when Mr. Raleigh put his horses and his escort at the
service of herself and Mrs. Laudersdale during their stay.
“During our stay!” said Mrs. Laudersdale. “That
reminds me that we are to go away!”
“Pleasantly, certainly. When snows fall and storms
pipe, the Bawn is an ice-house,” said he.
After noon, the remainder of the day was interspersed
with light thunder-showers, rendering tea on the grass
again impossible; they passed the steaming cups, therefore,
as they sat on the piazza curtained with dripping
woodbine. The glitter of the drops in the sunset light, a
eyes, and some unconscious excitement fanned a faint
color to and fro on her cheek. At last the moon rose; the
whole party, regardless of wet slippers, sauntered with
Mr. Raleigh to the shore, where the little Arrow hung
balancing on her restraining cord. Mrs. Laudersdale
stepped in, Mr. Raleigh followed, took up an oar, and
pushed out, both standing, and drifting slowly for a few
rods' distance; then Mr. Raleigh made the shore again,
assisted her out, and shot impatiently away alone. The
waters shone like white fire in the wake he cut, great
shadows fell through them where island and wood intercepted
the broad ascending light, and Mrs. Laudersdale's
gay laugh rung across them as the space grew, — a sweet,
rich laugh, that all the spirits of the depths caught and
played with like a rare beam that transiently illumined
their shadowy silent haunts.
The next day, and the next, and so for a fortnight, Mr.
Roger Raleigh presented himself with the breakfast-urn
at the Bawn, tarried during sunshine, slipped home by
starlight across the lake. Every day Mrs. Laudersdale
was more brilliant, and flashed with a cheery merriment
like harmless summer-lightnings. One night, as he
pushed away from the bank, he said, —
“Au revoir for five hours.”
“For five hours?” said Mrs. Laudersdale.
“For five hours.”
“At half past three in the night?”
“In the morning.”
“And what brings you here at dead of dark?”
“The lilies and the dawn.”
“Indeed! And whom do you expect to find?”
“You and Miss Helen.”
“Well, summer and freedom are here; I am ready for
all fates, all deeds of valor, vigils among the rest. We
will await you at half past three in the morning. Helen,
we must sleep at high-pressure, soundly, crowding all we
can on the square inch of time. Au revoir.”
A shadow stood on the piazza, in the semi-darkness, at
the appointed hour; two other shadows flitted forward to
meet it, and silently down the bank, into the boat, and out
upon the lonely glimmering reaches of the water. Nobody
spoke; the midnight capture of no fort was ever
effected with more phantom-like noiselessness than now
went to surprise the Vestals of the Lake; only as two
hands touched for an instant, a strange thrill, like fire,
quivered through each and tore them apart more swiftly
than two winds might cross each other's course. Helen
Heath was drowsy and half-nodding in the bow, nodding
with the more ease that it was still so dark and that Mr.
Raleigh's back was toward her. Mrs. Laudersdale reclined
in the stern. Mr. Raleigh once in a while sent
them far along with a strong stroke, then only an occasional
plash broke the charm of perfect stillness. Ever
and anon they passed under the lee of some island, and
the heavy air grew full of idle night-sweetness; the
waning moon with all its sad and alien power hung low,
— dun, malign, and distant, a coppery blotch on the rich
darkness of heaven. They floated slowly, still; now and
then she dipped a hand into the cool current; now and
then he drew in his oars, and, bending forward, dipped
his hand with hers. The stars retreated in a pallid veil
that dimmed their beams, faint lights streamed up the
sky, — the dark yet clear and delicious. They paused
motionless in the shelter of a steep rock; over them a
wild vine hung and swayed its long wreaths in the water,
and twisted, and tufts of ribbon-grass fell forward and
streamed in the indolent ripple; beneath them the lake,
lucid as some dark crystal, sheeted with olive transparence
a bottom of yellow sand; here a bream poised on
slowly waving fins, as if dreaming of motion, or a perch
flashed its red fin from one hollow to another. The
shadow lifted a degree, the eye penetrated to farther regions;
a bird piped warily, then freely, a second and third
answered, a fourth took up the tale, blue-jay and thrush,
cat-bird and bobolink; wings began to dart about them,
the world to rustle overhead, near and far the dark prime
grew instinct with sound, the shores and heavens blew
out gales of melody, the air broke up in music. He
lifted his oars silently; she caught the sweet-brier, and,
lightly shaking it, a rain of dew-drops dashed with deepest
perfume sprinkled them; they moved on. A thin mist
breathed from the lake, steamed round the boat, and lay
like a white coverlet upon the water; a light wind sprang
up and blew it in long rags and ribbons, lifted, and torn,
and streaming, out of sight. All the air was pearly, the
sky opaline, the water now crisply emblazoned with a
dark and splendid jewelry, — the paved work of a sapphire;
a rosy fleece sailed across their heads, some furnace
glowed in the east behind the trees, long beams fell
resplendently through and lay beside vast shadows, the
giant firs stood black and intense against a red and risen
sun; they trailed with one oar through a pad of buds all-unaware
of change, stole from the overhanging thickets
through a high-walled pass, where, on the open lake, the
broad, silent, yellow light crept from bloom to bloom and
awoke them with a touch. How perfectly they put off
sleep! with what a queenly calm displayed their spotless
scent! He twined his finger round a slippery serpent-stem,
turned the crimson underside of the floating pavilion,
and brought up a waxen wonder from its throne to
hang like a star in the black braids on her temple. An
hour's harvesting among the nymphs, in this rich atmosphere
of another world, and with a loaded boat they
turned to shore again.
“Smothered in sweets!” exclaimed Mr. Raleigh, as he
sprang out, and woke Helen Heath, where, slipped down
upon the floor of the boat, her head fallen on her arms,
she had lain half asleep. They were the first words
spoken during the morning, and in such situations silence
is dangerous.
When the rest of the family descended to breakfast,
they found the pictures framed in wreaths of lilies, great
floats of them in hall and parlor, and the table laden with
flat dishes where with coiled stems they crowded, a white,
magnificent throng. Mr. Raleigh still lingered, and,
while Mrs. Laudersdale and Helen renewed their toilets,
had busied himself in weaving a crown of these and
another of poppy-leaves, hanging the one on Mrs. Laudersdale's
head, as she entered refreshed, snowy, and fragrant
herself, and the sleep-giving things on Helen's, —
the latter avenging herself by surveying her companion's
adornment, and, as she adjusted the bloom-gray leaves of
her own, inquiring if olives grew pickled.
Nothing could be more airy and blithe than were Mrs.
Lauderdale's spirits all that morning, — bubbles dancing
on a brook, nor foam-sparkle of rosy Champagne. She
related their adventures with graphic swiftness, and improvised
dangers and escapes with such a reckless disregard
of truth that Mr. Raleigh was forced to come to the
have encountered in the Enchanted Forest.
The red dawn brought its rain, and before they rose
from table the sunshine withdrew and large drops began
to patter in good earnest. Mr. Raleigh, who had generally
suffered others to entertain him, now, as Mrs.
McLean ushered the whole company into the sewing-room,
seemed spurred by gayety and brilliance, and to
bring into employ all those secrets through which he had
ever annihilated time. For a while devoting himself to
the elder dames, he won the heart of one by a laborious
invention of a million varicolored angles to a square barley-corn
of worsted-work, involved Mrs. McLean's crocheting
in an inextricable labyrinth as he endeavored to
afford her some requisite conchological assistance, and
turned with three strokes a very absurd drawing of Mrs.
Laudersdale's into a splendid caricature. Having made
himself thus generally useful, he now proceeded to make
himself generally agreeable; went with all necessary
gravity through a series of complicate dancing-steps with
Miss Heath; begged Miss Purcell, who was longing to
cry over her novel, to allow him to read for her, since he
saw that she was trying her eyes, and therewith made
fiasco of a page of delicious dolor; and being challenged
to chess by a third, declared that was child's play, and
dominos was the game for science, — whereon, having
seated a circle at that absorbing sport, he deserted for a
meerschaum and the gentlemen, and in company with
Captain Purcell, Mr. McLean, and the rest, rolled up
from the hall, below, wreaths of smoke, bursts of laughter,
and finally chimes of those concordant voices with which
gentlemen talk politics, and, even when agreeing infamously,
become vociferant and high-colored.
It was after lunch that Mrs. Laudersdale, having grown
weary of the needle-women's thread of discourse, left the
sewing-room and proceeded toward her own apartment.
Just as she crossed the head of the staircase, the hall-door
was flung open, admitting a gleeful blast of the boisterous
gale, and an object that, puffing and blowing like a sad-hued
dolphin, and shaking like a Newfoundland, appeared
at first to be the famous South West Wind, Esq., in proper
person, — whose once sumptuous array clung to his form,
and whose face and hands, shining as coal, rolled off the
rain like a bronze.
“Bless my heart, Capua!” cried Mr. Raleigh, removing
the stem from his lips; “how came you here?”
“Lors, Massa, it 's only me,” said Capua.
“So I see,” replied his master, restoring the pipe to its
former position. “How did you come?”
“'Bout swimmed, I 'spect,” answered Capua, grounding
a chuckle on a reef of ivory. “'T a'n't no fish-story,
dat!”
“Well, what brings you?”
“Naughty Nan, — she had n't been out —”
“Do you mean to say, you rascal! that you 've taken
Nan out on such a day? and round the lake, too, I 'll
warrant?” asked Mr. Raleigh, with some excitement.
“Jes' dat; an' round de lake, ob course; we could n'
come acrost.”
“You 've ruined her, then —”
“Bress you, Massa, she won't ketch no cold, — she!
Smokes like a beaver now; came like streak o' lightnin'.”
“You may as well swim her back, — and where we
can all see the sport, too.”
“But —”
“No buts about it, Capua,” insisted his master, with
mock gravity, the stem between his teeth.
“'Spect I 'd better rub her down, now I'se here, an'
wait 'll it holds up a bit, Mass' Roger?” urged Capua,
coaxingly.
“Do as you 're bid!” ejaculated his master; which,
evidently, from long habit, meant, Do as you please.
Mrs. Laudersdale and Helen Heath had crept down the
stairs during this dialogue, and now stood interested spectators
of the scene. Mrs. McLean came running down
behind them.
“Forgotten me, Capua?” said she.
“Lors, Miss Kate!” he replied, scraping his foot and
pulling off his hat, — “Cap never f'gets his friends, though
you 've growed. How d' ye do, Miss Kate?”
“Nicely, thank you. And how 's your wife?”
“My wife? Well, she 's 'bout beat out. Massa Roger
'n I, we buried her; finer funeral dan Massa Roger's
own mother, Miss Kate, dat was!”
“Poor fellow! I 'm so sorry!” began Mrs. McLean,
consolingly.
“Well, Miss Kate, you know some folks is easier spared
'n others. Some tongues sharper 'n others. Alwes liked
to gib a hot temper time to cool, 's Massa says.”
“And how do you do, Capua?”
“Pretty well, Miss Kate; leastways, I'se well enough,
— a'n't so pretty.”
“What is his name?” whispered Helen.
“'Annible, Missis,” said the attentive Capua, whose eyes
had been for some time oscillating with indecision between
Helen Heath and Mrs. Laudersdale. “Hannibal Raleigh
's my name; though Massa alwes call me Cap,” he added,
insinuatingly, — which, by the way, “Massa” never had
been known to do.
“And are you always going to stay and take care of
Master Roger?”
“'Spect I shall. Lors, Miss Kate, he 's more bother to
me 'n all my work, — dat boy!”
“That will do, Capua,” said his master; “you may go.”
And therewith Capua scuffled away.
“Well, Roger, what does this mean?” asked Mrs. McLean,
as the door closed.
“It means that Capua, having been dying of curiosity,
has resolved to die game, and therefore takes matters into
his own hands, and arrives to inspect my conduct and my
company.”
“Ah, I see. He trembles for his sceptre.”
“Miss Heath,” said Mr. McLean, rallyingly, “you received
a great many of the sable shafts.”
“A Saint Sebastiana,” said his wife.
“Saint Sebastian died of his wounds. Not I,” said
Helen.
“Let me tell you, Miss Helen,” said Mr. Raleigh,
“that Capua is a connoisseur, and his dictum is worth
all flatteries. If he had only been with us this morning!”
“You have teased me so much about that, Mr. Raleigh,
that I have half a mind never to go with you on another
expedition.”
“Make no rash vows. I was just thinking what fine
company you would be when trouting. The most enchanting
quiet is required then, you are aware.”
“Oh! when shall we go trouting?”
“We? It was only half a mind, then! We will go
to-morrow, wind and weather agreeing.”
“And what must I do?”
“You must keep still, stand in the shadow, and fish upstream.”
At this point, Capua put his head inside the door
again.
“What is it?” asked Mr. Raleigh.
“Forgot to say, Massa,” replied Capua, rolling his eyes
fearfully, and still hesitating, and half-closing the door, and
then looking back.
“Well, Capua?”
“Mass' Raleigh, your house done been burned up!”
said Capua, at last, jerking back his head, as if afraid of
losing it.
“Ah? And what did you do with —”
“Oh, eberyting safe an' sound. 'T a'n't dat house;
't a'n't dis yer house Massa lib in; — Massa's sparrer-
house. Reckoned I 'd better come and 'form him.”
“Is that all?” asked his master, who was accustomed
to Capua's method of breaking ill news.
“Now, Mass' Roger, don't you go to being pervoked
an' flyin' into one ob dese yer tempers! It 's all distinguished
now. Ole Cap did n't want to shock his young
massa, so thought 't warn't de wisest way to tell him
't warn't de sparrer-house, either, at first. 'Twas de inside
ob de libery, if he must know de troof; wet an' smutty
dar now, mebbe, but no fire.”
“Why not? What made the fire go out?” asked Mr.
Raleigh, composedly.
“Well, two reasons,” replied Capua, rolling a glance
over the company; — “one was dis chile's exertions; an'
t'other fact, on account ob wich de flames was checked,
was because dere warn't no more to burn. Hi!”
“Capua, take Nan, and don't let me see your face
again, till I send for it!” said his master, now slightly
irate.
“Massa's nigger alwes mind him,” was the dutiful response.
Mrs. Laudersdale's handkerchief fell at that moment
darted to restore it.
“Bress her pretty eyes!” said he. “Ole Cap see's
fur into a millstone as any one!” and vanished through
the doorway.
“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Raleigh, turning to Mrs.
Laudersdale. “He has refused to leave me, and I must
indulge him too much, and my sins fall on the head of the
nearest passer. He appears to have a constitutional inability
to comprehend this absence of punishment. His
immunity is so painful to him that I sometimes fancy him
to be homesick for a lashing. In fact, all those Burdens
of the Book of Isaiah, which his people carry on their
backs, are dust in his balance. The sorrows that have
darkened the brows of his race touch no electric chord in
him. Capua is not a representative man. He is only
the dry-nurse of my failings. Ah, welladay! Now if I
do not hasten home, Kate, I shall find a conflagration of
the whole house there before me.”
And making quick adieux, — while Mrs. Laudersdale
jested about tempting the raging waters, and the dinner-bell
was ringing, and Helen singing,
Come o'er the stream, Charlie, and dine wi' McLean!”
seen, and the segment of an afternoon rainbow, shut it,
and was gone.
Early again the next morning, Mr. Raleigh sought the
Bawn, followed this time by Capua, who was determined
not to lose any ground once made, and who now carried
the rods, bait, and other paraphernalia.
“Powerful pretty woman, dat, Massa!” said he, as
and answering.
“Which one, Capua?” asked his master.
“A'n't no t'orrer,” was his reply; “leastwise, a'n't no
'count, — good for nott'n. Now she, — pity she a'n't single,
Massa, — should say she 'd lived where sun was
plenty and had laid up heaps in her heart.”
Here Mrs. Laudersdale came out, and shortly afterward
Helen and three or four others. In reply to their
questions, Mr. Raleigh stated that the preceding day's
disaster had been occasioned by a meerschaum, and had
merely charred a table with its superficies of papers and
pamphlets, which Capua had chosen to magnify for his
own purposes; and the assemblage immediately turned
its course inland and toward the brooks. The two who
led soon distanced the rest, Capua trudging respectfully
behind and keeping them in sight. Here, as they brushed
along through the woods, they delayed in order to examine
a partridge's nest, to tree a squirrel, to gather some strange
wild-flower opening at their approach. Here on the banks
they watched the bitterns rise and sail heavily away, and
finally in silence commenced the genuine sport.
“Nonsense!” said Helen Heath, meaningly, as Mrs.
Laudersdale, when the others joined them, displayed her
first capture. “Is that all you 've caught?”
Mrs. Laudersdale drew in another for reply.
“How absurd!” said Helen. “Here a month ago
you were the dearest and most helpless of mortals, and
now you are doing everything!”
The other opened her eyes a moment, and then laughed.
“Hush!” said she.
“Shs! shs!” echoed Capua, making an infinite hubbub
himself.
Silence accordingly reigned and produced a string fit
for the Sultan's kitchen, — of all the number, Mrs. Laudersdale
adding by far the majority, — possibly because
her shining prey found destination in the same basket
with Mr. Raleigh's, — possibly because, as Helen had intimated,
a sudden deftness had bewitched her fingers, so
that neither dropping rod nor tangling reel detained her
for an instant.
“Our lines have fallen in pleasant places,” said Helen,
as they took at last their homeward path; “and what a
shame! not an adventure yet!”
Mrs. McLean hung on Mr. Raleigh's arm as they went,
— for she had taken a whim and feared to see her cousin
in the fangs of a coquette; by which means Helen became
the companion of Captain Purcell and his daughter,
and Mrs. Laudersdale kept lightly in advance, leading a
gambol with the greyhound that Capua had added to the
party, and presenting in one person, as she went springing
from knoll to knoll along the bank, now in sunshine, now
in shade, lifting the green boughs or sweeping them aside,
a succession of the vivid figures of some antique and processional
frieze. Suddenly, with a quick cry, she disappeared,
and Helen had her adventure. Mr. Raleigh
darted forward, while the hound came frisking back;
yet, when he found her fainting in the hollow, stood
with stolid immobility until Capua snatched her up and
carried her along in his arms, leaving his master to reflect
how many times such swarthy servitors might have borne
her, as a child, through her island groves. And thus the
party, somewhat sobered, resumed their march again.
But in the discovery that he had not dared to lift her
in his arms, he who took such liberties with every one, —
that, lying under her semblance of death, she had inspired
woman to be an object somewhat sacred, — in this discovery
Mr. Raleigh learned not a little. And it would not,
perhaps, be an untrue surmise that he found therein as
much of pain as of any other emotion; since all the experiences
and passions of life must share the phenomena
of the great fact itself whose pulse beats through them;
and if to love unawares be to dwell like a child in the region
of thoughtless and innocent bliss, in attaining manhood
all the sadness which is to be eliminated from life
becomes apparent, and bliss henceforth must be sought
and earned. From that day, then, Mr. Raleigh with difficulty
retained his former habits, prevented any eagerness
of manner, maintained a cautious vigilance, and in so doing
he again became aware that the easy insouciance with
which he addressed all other women had long been lost
toward Mrs. Laudersdale, or, if yet existing, had become
like the light and tender play of any lingering summer-wind
in the tress upon her brow.
Mrs. Laudersdale's ankle having been injured by her
fall, and Mrs. McLean having taken a cold, the two invalids
now became during a week and a day the auditory
for all quips and pranks that Miss Heath and Mr. Raleigh
could devise. And on the event of their convalescence,
the Lord of Misrule himself seemed to have ordained the
course of affairs, with a swarming crew of all the imps
and mischiefs ever hatched. Mr. Raleigh and Capua
went and came with boat-loads of gorgeous stuff from
across the lake, a little old man appeared on the spot in
answer to a flight of telegrams, machinery and scenery
rose like exhalations, music was brought from the city,
all the availables of the family were to be found in garden,
closet, house-top, conning hieroglyphical pages, and
into a little Spanish Masque, to which kings and queens
have once listened in courtly state, and which now unrolls
its resplendent pageant before the eyes of Mrs. Laudersdale,
translating her, as it were, into another planet, where
familiar faces in pompous entablature look out upon her
from a whirl of light and color, and familiar voices utter
stately sentences in some honeyed unknown tongue. And
finally, when the glittering parade finishes, and the strange
groups, in their costly raiment, throng out for dancing, she
herself gives her hand to some Prince of the pageantry,
who does her homage, and, sealing the fact of her restoration,
swims once round the room in a mist of harmony, and
afterward sits by his side, captive to his will, and subject
to his enchantment, while
The flute, violin, bassoon,
All night had the casement jessamine stirred
With the dancers dancing in tune,
Till a silence fell with the waking bird
And a hush with the setting moon.”
This little episode of illness and recovery having been
thus duly celebrated, the masqueraders again forswore
roofs and spent long days in distant junketing throughout
the woods; the horses, too, were brought into requisition,
and a flock of boats kept forever on the wing. And
meanwhile, as Helen Heath said, — she then least of all
comprehending the real drama of that summer, — Mrs.
Laudersdale had taught them how the Greek animated
his statue.
“And how was that?” asked Mr. Raleigh.
“He took it out-doors, I fancy, and called the winds to
curl about it. He set its feet in morning-dew, he let in
light and shade through green dancing leaves above it, he
to chirp and whistle in its ear, and finally he steeped
it in sunshine.”
“Sunshine, then was the vivifying stroke?”
Helen nodded.
“You are mistaken,” said he; “the man never found a
soul in his work till he put his own there first.”
“I always wonder,” remarked Mrs. Laudersdale here,
“that every artist, in brooding over his marble, adding,
touching, bringing out effects, does not end by loving it, —
absorbingly, because so beautiful to him, — despairingly,
because to him forever silent.”
“You need n't wonder anything about it,” said Helen,
mischievously. “All that you have to do is to make the
most of your sunshine.”
Mr. McLean, struck with some sudden thought, inspected
the three as they stood in a blaze of the midsummer
noon, then crossed over to his little wife, drew her
arm in his, and held it with cautious imprisonment. The
other wife did as she was bidden, and made the most of
her sunshine.
If, on first acquaintance, Mrs. Laudersdale had fascinated
by her repose, her tropical languor, her latent fire,
the charm was none the less, when, turning, it became
one dazzle of animation, of careless freedom, of swift and
easy grace. Nor, unfamiliar as were such traits, did
they seem at all foreign to her, but rather, when once
donned, never to have been absent; as if, indeed, she had
always been this royal creature, this woman bright and
winning as some warm, rich summer's day. The fire
that sleeps in marble never flashes and informs the whole
mass so fully; if a pearl — lazy growth and accretion of
amorphous life — should fuse and form again in sparkling
unconsciousness had she stepped from passive to
positive existence, and found this new state to be as sweet
and strange as any child has found it! Long a wife, she
had known, nevertheless, nothing but quiet custom or indifference,
and had dreamed of love only as the dark and
silent side of the moon might dream of light. Now she
grew and unfolded in the warmth of this season, like a
blossom perfumed and splendid. Sunbeams seemed to
lance themselves out of heaven and splinter about her.
She queened it over demesnes of sprite-like revelry; the
life they led was sylvan; at their fêtes the sun assisted.
The summer held to her lips a glass whose rosy effervescence,
whose fleeting foam, whose tingling spirit exhaled
a subtile madness of joy, — a draught whose lees were
despair. So nearly had she been destitute of emotion
hitherto that she had scarcely a right to be classed with
humanity; now, indeed, she would win that right. Not
only her character, but her beauty, became another thing
under all this largess; one remembered the very Persian
rose, in looking at her, and thought of gardens amid
whose clouds of rich perfume the nightingales sang all
night long; her manner, too, became strangely gracious,
and a sweetness lingered after her presence, delicate and
fine as the drop of honey in some flower's nectary. So
she woke from her icy trance; but, alas! what had
wakened her?
The summer was passing. Every day the garden-scenes
of Watteau became vivid and real; every evening
Venice was made possible, when shadowy barks slipped
down dusk tides, freighted with song and laughter, and
snatches of guitar-tinkling; and when some sudden torch,
that for an instant had summoned with its red fire all
quenched below, and, a fantastic flotilla, they passed on
into the broad brilliance of a rising moon, all Middle-Age
mythology rose and wafted them back into the obscurity.
It was a life too fine for every day, fare too rich for
health; they must be exotics who did not wither in such
hot-house air. It was rapidly becoming unnatural. They
performed in the daylight stray clarified bits from
Fletcher or Molière, drama of an era over-ripe; they
sang only from an old book of madrigals; their very
reading was fragmentary, — now an emasculated Boccaccio,
then a curdling phantasm of Poe's, and after some
such scenic horror as the “Red Death” Helen Heath
dashed off the Pesther Waltzes.
If, finally, on one of the last August-nights, we had
passed, Asmodeus-like, over the roofs, looking down we
should have seen three things. First, that Mrs. Laudersdale
slept like any innocent dreamer, and, wrapped with
white moonlight, in her long and flowing outline, in her
imperceptible breath, resembling some perfect statue that
we fancy to be instinct with suspended life. Next, that
Mr. Raleigh did not sleep at all, but absorbed himself, to
the entire disturbance of Capua's slumbers, in the rapture
of reproducing, as he could, the turbulent passion and joy
of souls larger than his own. And, lastly, that Mrs.
McLean woke with visions of burglars before her eyes,
to find her pillow deserted and her husband sitting at a
writing-table.
“How startled I was!” she exclaimed. “What are
you doing, dear?”
“Writing to Laudersdale,” he said, in reply.
“Why, what for? — what can you be writing to him
for?”
“I think it best he should come and take his wife off
my hands.”
“How absurd! how contemptible! how all you husbands
band together like a parcel of slaveholders, and
hunt down each other's runaways!”
Mr. McLean laughed.
“Now, John, you 're not making mischief?”
“No, child, I am preventing it.” And therewith the
worthy man, dropping the wax on the envelope, imprinted
it with a Scotch crest, and put out the light. “That 's
off my mind!” said he.
At last September came; a few more weeks, and they
would separate, perhaps, to the four corners of the earth.
Mr. Raleigh arrived one afternoon at the Bawn, and
finding no one to welcome him, — that is to say, Mrs.
Laudersdale had gone out, and Helen Heath was invisible,
— he betook himself to a solitary stroll, and, by a
short cut through the woods, to the highway, and just
before emerging from the green shadows he met Mrs.
Laudersdale.
“Whither now, Wandering Willie?” said she; for,
singularly enough, they seemed to avoid speaking each
other's name in direct address, using always some title
suggested by their reading or singing, or some sportive
impromptu.
“I am going to take the road.”
“Like a gallant highwayman?” And without more
ado, and naturally enough, she accompanied him.
The conversation, this afternoon, was sufficiently insignificant;
indeed, Mrs. Laudersdale always affected you
more by her silence than her speech, by what she was
rather than by what she said; and it is only the impression
produced on her by this walk with which we have
any concern.
The road, narrow and winding in high banks fringed
with golden-rod and purple asters, was at first completely
shadowed, — an old, deep-rutted, cross-country road,
birch-trees shivering at either side, and every now and
then a puff of pine-breath drifting in between. After a
time it rose gradually into the turnpike, and became a
long, dusty track, stretching as far as the eye could see, a
straight, dazzling line, burnt white by summer-heats,
powdered by travel. There was no wind stirring; the
sky was lost in a hot film stained here and there with
sulphurous wreaths; the distant fields, skirted by low
hills, were bathed in an azure mist; nearer, a veil of dun
and dimmer smoke from burning brush hung motionless;
around their feet the dust whirled and fell again. Bathed
in soft, voluptuous tints, hazed and mellowed, into what
weird, strange country were they hastening? What visionary
land of delight, replete with perfume and luxury,
lay ever beyond? — what region rich, unknown, forbidden,
whose rank vegetation steamed with such insidious poison?
And on what arid, barren road, what weary road,—
but, alas, long worn and beaten by the feet of other wayfarers!
a road that ran real and strong through this
noxious and seducing mirage!
A sudden blast of wind lifted a cloud of dust from before
them and twisted it down among the meadows; the
sun thrust aside his shroud and burnt for an instant on a
scarlet maple-bough that hung in premature brilliance
across the way. The hasty color, true and fine, was like
a spell against enchantment; it was the drop that tested
the virtue of this chemistry and proved it naught.
Mrs. Laudersdale looked askance at her companion,
then turned and met his gaze. Slowly her lashes fell,
the earth seemed to fail beneath her feet, the light to
swept branding and burning up throat and face, stinging
her very forehead, and shooting down her finger-tips.
In an instant it had faded, and she shone the pallid,
splendid thing she was before. In that instant, for the
first time this summer, she comprehended that her husband's
existence imported anything to her. Behind the
maple-tree, the wood began again; without a syllable, she
stepped aside, suffered him to pass, and hastened to bury
herself in its recesses.
What lover ever accounted for his mistress's caprices?
Mr. Raleigh proceeded on his walk alone. And what
was her husband to him? He did not know that such a
man existed. For him there had been no deadly allurement
in the fervid scene; it had stretched a land of
promise veiled in its azure ardors, with intimations of
rapture and certainty of rest. Now, as he wandered
on and turned down another lane to the woods, the
tints grew deeper; his eyes, bent inward, saw all the
world in the color of his thought; he would have affirmed
that the bare brown banks were lined in deeptoned
indigo flower-bells whose fragrance rose visible
above them or curled from stem to stem, and that the
hollows in which the path hid itself at last were of the
same soft gloom. But, finally, when not far distant from
the Bawn again, he shook off his reverie and struck another
path that he might avoid rencontre. Perhaps the
very sound that awoke him was the one he wished to
shun; at the next step it became more distinct, — a
child's voice singing some tuneless song; and directly a
tiny apparition appeared before him, as if it had taken
shape, with its wide, light eyes and corn-silk hair, from
the most wan and watery of sunbeams. But what had a
did it come? Impossible to imagine. Her garments, of
rich material, hung freshly torn, it may be, but in shreds;
her skin, if that of some fair and delicate nursling, was
stained with berries and smeared with soil; she seemed
to have no destination; and after surveying him a moment,
she mounted a fallen tree, and, bending and swinging
forward over a bough, still surveyed him.
“Ah, ha!” said Mr. Roger Raleigh; “what have we
here?”
The child still looked in his face, but vouchsafed, in her
swinging, no reply.
“What is the little lady's name?” he asked then.
This query, apparently more comprehensible, elicited a
response. She informed him that her name was “Dymom,
Pink, and Beauty.”
“Indeed! And anything else?”
“Rose Pose,” she added, as if soliciting the aid of memory
by lifting her hands near her temples.
“Is that all?”
“Little silly Daffodilly.”
“No more?”
“Rite.”
“Rite, — ah, that is it! Rite what?”
“Rite!” said the child, authoritatively, bringing down
her foot and shaking back her hair.
“And how old is Rite?”
“One, two, four, twenty. Maman is twenty; — Rite is
twenty, too.”
“When was Rite four?”
“A great while ago. She went to heaven in the afternoon,”
was added, confidentially, after a moment's inspection
to see if he were worthy.
“Ah! And what was there there?”
“Pitchtures, and music, and peoples, and a great
house.”
“And where is Rite going now?”
“Going away in a ship.”
“Rite will have to wash her face first.”
But at this proposition the child flashed open her pale-blue
orbs, half-closed them as a sleepy cat does, and, with
no other change of countenance to mark her indignation,
appeared to shut him out from her contemplation. Directly
afterward, she opened them again, bent forward and
back over the swinging, and recommenced her song, as if
there were not another person than herself within a hundred
miles. Half-hidden in the great hemlock-bough, this
tiny, fantastic creature, so fair, so supercilious, seemed
in her waywardness a veritable fay, mate for any of
the little men in green, bibbers of dew-drops, lodgers in
bean-blossoms, Green-Jacket, Red-Cap, and White-Owl's-Feather.
Mr. Raleigh hesitated whether or not he should remain
and watch her fade away into the twilight, wondered if
she were bewitching him, then rubbed his hand across
his eyes and said, in a disenchanted, matter-of-fact manner,
—
“Do you know your way home, child?” and obtained,
of course, no reply. For an instant he had half the mind
to leave her to find it; but at once convicted of his absurdity,
“Then I shall take you with me,” he said, making
a step toward her, — “because you are, or will be,
lost.”
At the motion, she darted past and stood defiantly just
out of his reach. Mr. Raleigh attempted to seize her, but
he might as easily have put his hand on a butterfly; she
such a dance up and down the forest-path as none other
than a will-o'-the-wisp, it seemed, could have woven. All
at once a dark figure glided out from another alley and
snatched the sprite into its arms. It was a colored nurse,
who poured out a torrent of broken French and English
over the runaway, and made her acknowledgments to Mr.
Raleigh in the same jargon. As she turned to go, the
child stretched her arms toward her late pursuer, making
the nurse pause, and, putting up her little lips, touched
with them his own; then, picturesque as ever, and thrown
into relief by the scarlet sack, snowy turban, and sable
skin of her bearer, she disappeared. It is doubtful if in
all his life Mr. Raleigh would ever receive a purer, sweeter
kiss.
He had promised to be at the Bawn that evening, and
now accordingly sought the shore, where the Arrow lay,
and was soon within the shelter of his own house. The
arrangement of toilet was a brief matter; and that concluded,
Mr. Raleigh entered his library, an apartment
now slightly in disarray, and therefore, perhaps, not uncongenial
with his present mood. After strolling round
the place, Mr. Raleigh paused at the window an instant,
the window overhung with clematis, and commanding the
long stretch of water between him and the Bawn, which
last was, however, too distant for any movement to be
discerned there. Soon Mr. Raleigh turned his back upon
the scene that lay pictured in such beauty below, and,
throwing himself into a deep arm-chair, remained motionless
and plunged in thought for many moments. Rising
at last, he took from the table a package of letters from
India that had arrived in his absence. Glancing absently
at the superscriptions, breaking the seal of one, he replaced
they must wait. Then Mr. Raleigh had recourse to a
universal panacea, and walked to and fro across the
room, with measured, unvarying steps, till the striking
clock warned him that time was passing. Mr. Raleigh
drew near his desk again, took up the pen, and hesitated;
then recalling his gaze that had seemed to search his own
inmost nature, he drew the paper nearer and wrote.
What he wrote, the very words, may not signify; with
the theme one is sufficiently acquainted. Perhaps he
poured out there all that had so often trembled on his
lips without finding utterance; perhaps, if ever passionate
heart flashed its own fire into its implements, this pen and
paper quivered beneath the current throbbing through
them. The page was brief, but therein all was said.
Sealing it hastily, he summoned Capua.
“Capua,” said he, giving him the note, “you are to go
with me across the lake now. We shall return somewhere
between eleven and twelve. Just as we leave, you are to
give this note to Mrs. Laudersdale. Do you understand?”
“Yah, Massa, let dis chile alone,” responded Capua,
grinning at the prospect of society, and speedily following
his master.
The breeze had fallen, so that they rowed the whole distance,
with the idle sail hanging loosely, and arrived only
just as the red sunset painted the lake behind them with
blushing shadows. Mr. Raleigh joined Helen Heath and
his cousin in the hall; Capua, superb with the importance
of his commission, sought another entrance. But just as
the latter individual had crossed the threshold, he encountered
the nurse whom his master had previously met in
the wood. Nothing could have been more acceptable in
his eyes than this addition to the circle below-stairs.
curtsies and articulations and gesticulations followed with
such confusing rapidity, that, when the mutually pleased
pair turned in company toward the kitchens, a scrap of
white paper, that had fluttered down in the disorder, was
suffered to remain unnoticed on the floor. The courier
had lost his despatch. Coming in from her walk, not five
minutes later, Mrs. Laudersdale's eye was caught thereby;
stooping to take it, she read with surprise her own name
thereon, and ascended the stairs possessed thereof.
What burden of bliss, what secret of sorrow, lay infolded
there, that at the first thought she covered it with
sudden kisses, and the next, crushing it against her heart,
burst into a wild weeping? Again and again she read it,
and at every word its intense magnetic strength thrilled
her, rapt her from remembrance, conquered her. She
seized a pencil and wrote hurriedly: —
“You are right. With you I live, without you I die.
You shut heaven out from me; make earth, then, heaven.
Come to me, for I love you. Yes, I love you.”
She did not stay to observe the contrast between her
fervent sentences and the weak, faint characters that
expressed them, but hastily sought the servant who was
accustomed to act as postman, gave him directions to acquaint
her of its reception, and watched him out of sight.
All that in the swiftness of a fever-fit. Scarcely had the
boat vanished when old thoughts rushed over her again,
and she would have given her life to recall it. Returning,
she found Capua eagerly searching for the lost letter,
and thus learned that she was not to have received it
until several hours later.
Perhaps no other woman in her situation could have
done what Mrs. Laudersdale had done, without incurring
such isolation as she, — whose intellect, naturally subject
to her affection, had become more so through the absence
of systematic education, — whose morality had been
allowed to be merely one of instinct, — to whom introspection
had been till now a thing unknown, — and who,
accepting a husband as another child accepts a parent,
had, in the whirl of gay life where she afterward reigned,
found so little time for thought, and remained in such
mental unsophistication as to experience now her first
passion.
As Mrs. Laudersdale entered her room again, the opposite
door opened and admitted that individual the selfishness
of whose marriage was but half expiated when he
found himself on the surplus side of the world.
In the meanwhile, Mr. Raleigh was gayly passing the
time with Helen Heath. There were to be some guests
from the town that evening, and they were the topic of
her discourse.
“I wonder if we are never to have tea,” said she at
last, looking at her watch.
“I did n't know you were attached to the custom,” said
he, indifferently, as he had said everything else, while
intently listening for a footstep.
“Ah! but I like to see other folks take their bitters.”
“Do not even the publicans the same?”
“You will become a proficient chemist, converting the
substance of my remarks to airy nothings through your
gospel-retorts.”
“Oh, I understand your optics as well. You like to
see other folks; taking the bitters is a different thing.
The tea-bell is a tocsin.”
“Pshaw! You don't care to see any one! But shall
for a sweet tooth?”
“None at all.”
“Not even in Mrs. Laudersdale's instance?”
“Mrs. Laudersdale has a sweet tooth, then?” Mr.
Raleigh asked in return, as if there were any trivial thing
concerning her in which he could yet be instructed.
“I 'm not going to tell you anything about Mrs.
Laudersdale.”
“There comes that desired object, the tea-tray. It 's
not to be formal, then, to-night. That 's a blessing!
What shall I bring you?” he continued, — “tea or
cocoa?”
“Neither. You may have the tea, and I 'll leave the
cocoa for Mrs. Laudersdale.”
“Mrs. Laudersdale drinks cocoa, then?”
“You may bring me some milk and macaroons.”
As Mr. Raleigh was about to obey, his little apparition
of the wood suddenly appeared in the doorway, followed
by her nurse, — having arisen from the discipline of bath
and brush, fair and spotless as a snowflake. She flitted
by him with a mocking recognition.
“Rite!” cried a voice from above, familiar, but with
how strange a tone in it! “Little Rite!”
“Maman!” cried the sprite, and went dancing up the
stairs.
Mr. Raleigh's face, as he turned, darkened with a
heavier flush than half a score of Indian summers
branded upon it afterward.
“That is Mrs. Laudersdale's little maid?” asked he,
when, after a few moments, he brought the required
salver.
“Yes, — would you ever suspect it?”
Numberless as had been the times he had heard her
speak of Rite, he never had suspected it, but had always
at the name pictured some indifferent child, some baby-friend,
or cousin by courtesy.
“She is not like her mother,” said he, coolly.
“The very antipodes, — all her father. — Bless me!
What is this? A real Laudersdale mess, — custards and
cheese-cakes, — and I detest them both.”
“Blame my unfortunate memory. I thought I had
certainly pleased you, Miss Helen.”
“When you forgot my orders? Well, never mind.
In n't she exquisite?”
“Is n't who exquisite? Oh, the little maid? Quite!
Why has n't she been here all summer?”
“She was always a sickly, ailing thing, and has been
at one of those rich Westchester farms where health and
immortality are made. And now she is going away to
Martinique, where her grandmother will take charge of
her, bottle up those spirits, and make her a second edition
of her mother. By the way, how that mother has effervesced
this summer!” continued Helen, as the detested
custard disappeared. “I wonder what made her. Do
you suppose it was because her husband was away?”
At that instant Mrs. Laudersdale came sailing down
the stairs.
A week previously, when, to repay the civilities of
their friends in the neighboring city, Mrs. McLean had
made a little fancy-party, Helen appearing as Champagne,
all in rosy gauzes with a veiling foam of dropping silver
lace, had begged Mrs. Laudersdale to give her prominence
by dressing for Port; and accordingly that lady
had arrayed herself in velvet, out of which her shoulders
rose like snow, and whose rich duskiness made her perfect
color was sprinkled with glittering crystal drops and coruscations;
and wreathing her forehead with crisp vine-leaves
and tendrils, she had bunched together in intricate
splendor all the amethysts, carbuncles, garnets, and rubies
in the house, for grape-clusters at the ear, till she seemed,
with her smile and her sunshine, the express and incarnate
spirit of vintage. To-night, stripped of its sparkling
drops, she wore the same dress, and in her hair a wreath
of fresh white roses. Behind her descended a tall and
stately gentleman. She swept forward. “Mr. Raleigh,”
she murmured, while her eyes diffused their gloom and
fell, “let me introduce you to my husband!”
The blow had come previously. Mr. Raleigh bowed
almost to the ground, without a word, then looked up and
offered his hand. Mr. Laudersdale comprehended the
whole matter at a heart-beat, and took it. Then they
moved on toward other friends, whom, while waiting for
knowledge of his wife's return from her walk, Mr. Laudersdale
had not seen. Mr. Raleigh went in search of
Capua, and ere long reappeared.
It grew quite dark; the candles were lighted. Rite
slipped in, and, after having flown about like a thistledown
for a while, mounted a chair and put her arms
about her mother's shoulders. Then Mr. Raleigh, sitting
silently on a sofa, attracted her, and shortly afterward she
had curled herself beside him and fallen asleep with her
head upon his knee; otherwise he did not touch her.
Mrs. Laudersdale stood by an open casement; the servant
who had carried her note came up the lawn and
spoke to her from without. There was no one in the
house, and he had left it on the library-table. The pressure
of those tender little arms was yet warm about the
“He shall never see that note!” she murmured, and
slipped through the casement.
Accustomed to all rash and intrepid adventure during
this summer, it was nothing for her to unmoor a boat, enter
it, and lift the oars, not pausing to observe that it was
the Arrow. Just then, however, a little wind ruffled down
and shook the sail, a wind not quite favorable, but in which
she could tack across and back; she drew in the oars, put
to the proof all her new boat-craft, and recklessly dashed
through the dark element that curled and seethed about
her. She had to make but two tacks in that hour's impetuous
progress, before the house rose, as it had frequently
done before, glooming at but a few rods' distance,
and loading with odorous breath the air that tossed its
vines ere stealing across the lake. She trembled now,
and remembered that she alone of all the party had always
unconsciously evaded entering Mr. Raleigh's house,
had never seen the house nearer than now, and never
been its guest. It was entering some dark, unknown
place; it was to intrude on a sacred region. But the
breeze hurried her along while she thought, and the next
moment the keel was buried in the sand. There was no
time to lose; she left the boat, ascended a flight of stone
steps close at hand, and was in the garden. Low, ripe
greenery was waving over her here, deep alluring shadows
opening around, full fresh fragrance fanning idly to and
fro and stealing her soul away. Beyond, the lake gleamed
darkly, the water lapped gently, the wind sighed and fell
like a fluttering breath. She would have lingered forever,
— she dared not linger a moment. She brushed
the dew from the heavy blossoms as she swept on, then
the drenching branches swayed and closed behind her;
which appeared.
There were stray starbeams in this apartment; her
eyes were accustomed to the gloom; she could dimly
discern the great book-cases lining the wall, — an antique
chair, — the glittering key-board of a grand-piano
that stood apart, yet thrilling perhaps with recent harmonies,
— a colossal head of Antinoüs, that self-involved
dreamer, stone-entranced in a calm of passion. She had
been feverishly agitated; but as this white silence dawned
upon her, so strong, yet voluptuous, never sad, making in
its masque of marble one intense moment eternal, some of
the same power spread soothingly over her. She paused
a moment to gather the thronging thoughts. How still the
room was! She had not known that music was at his
command before. How sweet the air that blew in at the
window! what late flowers bore such pungent balm?
That portrait leaning half-startled from the frame, was
it his mother? These books, were they the very ones
that had fed his youth? How everything was yet warm
from his touch! how his presence yet lingered! how
much of his life had passed into the dim beauty of the
place! How each fresh waft from the blooms without
came drowned in fine perfume, laden with delicious languor!
What heaven was there! and, ah! what heaven
was yet possible there!
Something that had flitted from the table in the draught,
and had hovered here and there along the floor, now lay
at her foot; she caught it absently; it was her letter. To
snatch it from its envelope, and so tear it the more easily
to atoms, was her first thought; but as suddenly she
paused. Was it hers? Though written and sealed by
her hand, had she any longer possession therein? Had
might be in the room? Absurd refinement of honor!
She broke the seal. Yet stay! Was there no justice
due to him? That letter which had been read long before
the intended time, whose delivery any accident might
have frustrated, whose writer might have recalled it, —
did it demand no magnanimity of reply on her part?
Had he now no claim to the truth from her? As she
knew what he never would have told her an hour later,
had she authority to recede from the position she had
taken in response, simply because she could and he could
not? Should she ignobly refuse him his right?
Whether this were a sophism of sin or the logic of
highest virtue, she, who would have blotted out her writing
with her heart's blood, did not wait to weigh.
“To him, also, I owe a duty!” she exclaimed, dropped
the letter where she had found it, and fled, — fled, hurrying
through all the bewildering garden-walks, down from
the fragrance, the serenity, the bowery seclusion, from all
this conspiring loveliness that tempted her to dally and
commanded her to stay, — fled from this dream of passion,
this region of joy, — fled forever, as she thought,
out into the wide, chill, lonely night.
Pushing off the boat and springing in, once more the
water curled beneath the parting prow, and she shot with
her flashing sail and hissing wake heedlessly, like a phantom,
past another boat that was making more slowly in to
shore.
“This way, Helen,” murmurs a subdued voice. “There
are some steps, Mr. Laudersdale. Here we are; but it 's
dark as Erebus. Give me your hand; I 'm half afraid;
after that spectre that walked the water just now, these
shadows are not altogether agreeable. There 's the door,
McLean would say. Don't believe he 'd like it.”
“What made you come, then?” asks Helen, as they
step within.
“Oh, just for the frolic; it was getting stupid, too. I
suppose we we 've ruined our dresses. But there! we must
hurry and get back. I did n't think it would take so
long. He can't manage a boat so well as Roger,” adds
Mrs. McLean, in a whisper.
“Goodness!” exclaims Helen. “I can't see an inch
of the way. We shall certainly deal devastation.”
“I 've been exploring a mantel-shelf; here 's a candle,
but how to light it? Have n't you a match, Mr. Laudersdale?”
That gentleman produces one from a little pocket-safe;
it proves a failure, — and so a second, and a third.
“This is the last, Mrs. McLean. Have your candle
ready.”
The little jet of flame flashes up.
“Quick, Helen! a scrap of paper, quick!”
“I don't know where to find any. Here 's a billet on
the floor; the seal's broken; Mr. Raleigh don't read his
letters, you know; shall I take it?”
“Anything, yes! My fingers are burning! Quick,
it 's the last match! There!”
Helen waves a tiny flambeau, the candle is lighted, the
flame whirled down upon the hearth and trodden out.
“I wonder what it was, though,” adds Mrs. McLean,
stooping over it. “Some of our correspondence. No
matter, then. Now for that Indian mail. Here, — no,
— this must be it. `Mr. Roger Raleigh,' — `Roger Raleigh,
Esq.,' — that 's not it. `Day, Knight, & Co., for
Roger Raleigh.' Why, Mr. Laudersdale, that 's your
`Mrs. Catherine McLean, care of Mr. Roger Raleigh.'
Does n't that look handsomely, Helen?” contemplating
it with newly married satisfaction.
“Now you have it, come!” urged Helen.
“No, indeed! I must find that Turkish tobacco, to
reward Mr. Laudersdale for his heroic exertions in our
behalf.”
Mr. Laudersdale, somewhat fastidious and given to
rigid etiquette, looks as if the exertions would be best
rewarded by haste. Mrs. McLean takes the candle in
hand and proceeds on a tour of the apartment.
“There! is n't this the article? John says it 's pitiful
stuff, not to be compared with Virginia leaf. Look at
this meerschaum, Mr. Laudersdale; there 's an ensample.
Prettily colored, is it not?”
“Now are you coming?” asks Helen.
“Would you? We 've never been here without my
worshipful cousin before; I should like to investigate his
domestic arrangements. Needle and thread. Now what
do you suppose he is doing with needle and thread? Oh,
it 's that little lacework that Mrs. — Sketches! I
wonder whom he 's sketching. You, Helen? Me? Upside
down, of course. No, it 's — Yes, we may as
well go. Come!”
And in the same breath Mrs. McLean blows out the
candle and precedes them. Mr. Laudersdale scorns to
secure the sketch; and holding back the boughs for Miss
Heath, and assisting her down the steps, quietly follows.
Meantime, Mrs. Laudersdale has reached her point of
departure again, has stolen up out of the white fog now
gathering over the lake, slipped into her former place,
and found all nearly as before. The candles had been
doorways. Some of the guests were in the brilliant dining-room,
some in the back-parlor. Mr. Raleigh, while
Fate was thus busying herself about him, still sat motionless,
one hand upon the sofa's side, one on the back, little
Rite still sleeping on his knee. Capua came and exchanged
a few words with his master; then the colored
nurse stepped through the groups, sought the child, and
carried her away, head and arms hanging heavy with
slumber. Still Mr. Raleigh did not move. Mrs. Laudersdale
stood in the window, vivid and glowing. There
were no others in the room.
“Where is Mrs. McLean?” asked Mary Purcell at
the door, after the charade in which she had been engaged
was concluded.
“Gone across the lake with Nell and Mr. Laudersdale
for a letter,” replied Master Fred Heath, who had returned
that afternoon from the counting-room, with his
employer, and now sauntered by.
Mrs. Laudersdale started; she had not escaped too early;
but then — Her heart was beating in her throat.
“What letter?” asked Mrs. Heath, with amiable curiosity,
as she joined them.
“Do you know what letter, Mr. Raleigh?”
“One from India, Madame,” was his response.
“Strange! Helen gone without permission! What
was in the letter, I wonder. Do you know what was in
the letter, Mr. Raleigh?”
“Congratulations, and a recommendation of Mrs. McLean's
cousin to her good graces,” he said.
“Oh, it was not Helen's, then?”
“No.”
“My young gentleman 's not in good humor to-night,”
nod, and moving off.
“How did you know what was in Mrs. McLean's letter,
sir?” asked Mary Purcell.
“I conjectured. In Mrs. Heath's place, I should have
known.”
“There they come! — you can always tell Mrs. McLean's
laugh. You 've lost all the charades, Helen!”
They came in, very gay, and seemed at once to arouse
an airier and finer spirit among the humming clusters.
Mr. Laudersdale did not join his wife, but sat on the
piazza talking with Mr. McLean. People were looking
at an herbal, others coquetting, others quiet. Some one
mentioned music. Directly afterward, Mr. Raleigh rose
and approached the piano. Every one turned. Taking
his seat, he threw out a handful of rich chords; the instrument
seemed to diffuse a purple cloud; then, buoyed
over perfect accompaniment, the voice rose in that one
love-song of the world. What depth of tenderness is
there from which the Adelaide does not sound? What
secret of tragedy, too? Singing, he throbbed through it a
vitality as if the melody surcharged with beauty grew
from his soul and were his breath of life indeed. The
thrilling strain came to penetrate and fill one heart; the
passionate despair surged round her; the silence following
was like the hand that closes the eyes of the dead.
Mr. Raleigh did not rise, nor look up, as he finished.
“How melancholy!” said Helen Heath, breaking the
hush.
“All music should be melancholy,” said he.
“How absurd, Roger!” said his cousin. “There is
much music that is only intensely beautiful.”
“Intense beauty at its height always drops in pathos,
infinite, the soul finite.”
“Nonsense! There 's that song, Number Three in
Book One —”
“I don't remember it.”
“Well, there 's no pathos there! It 's just one trill of
laughter and merriment, a sunbeam and effect. Play it,
Helen.”
Helen went, and, extending her hands before Mr.
Raleigh, played a couple of bars; he continued where
she left it, as one might a dream, and, strangely enough,
the little, gushing sparkle of joy became a phantom of
itself, dissolving away in tears.
“Oh, of course,” said Mrs. McLean, “you can make
mouths in a glass, if you please; but I, for one, detest
melancholy! Don't you, Mrs. Laudersdale?”
Mrs. Laudersdale had shrunk into the shadow of the
curtain. Perhaps she did not hear the question; for her
reply, that did not come at once, was the fragment of a
Provençal romance, sung, — and sung in a voice neither
sweet nor rich, but of a certain personal force as potent
as either quality, and a stifled strength of tone that made
one tremble.
The moon and stars are dead and gone,
The night 's at deep, the winds asleep,
And thou and I are all alone!
What care have we, though life there be?
Tumult and life are not for me!
Silence and sleep about us creep:
Tumult and life are not for thee!
How late it is since such as this
Had topped the height of breathing bliss!
And now we keep an iron sleep, —
In that grave thou, and I in this!
Her voice yet shivered through the room, he struck a
chord of dead conclusion, the curtain stirred, she emerged
from the gloom and was gone.
Mr. Raleigh rose and bade his cousin good night.
Mrs. McLean, however, took his arm and sauntered with
him down the lawn.
“I thought Capua came with you,” she remarked.
“He returned in a spare wherry, some time since,” he
replied; and thereon they made a few paces in silence.
“Roger,” said the little lady, taking breath preparatory
to wasting it, “I thought Helen was a coquette. I 've
changed my mind. The fault is yours.”
He turned and looked down at her with some surprise.
“You know we have n't much more time, and certainly
—”
“Kate!”
“Yes, — don't scold! — and if you are going to propose,
I really think you ought to, or else —”
“You think I ought to marry Miss Heath?”
“Why — I — well — Oh, dear! I wish I had held
my peace!”
“That might have been advisable.”
“Don't be offended now, Roger!”
“Is there any reason to suppose her — to suppose
me —”
“Yes, there!” replied Mrs. McLean, desperately.
He was silent a moment.
“Good God, Kate!” said he, then, clasping his hands
behind his head, and looking up the deep transparence of
the unanswering night. “What a blessing it is that life
don't last forever!”
“But it does, Roger,” she uttered under her breath, —
storm she had aroused.
“The formula changes,” he replied, with his old air,
and retracing their steps.
The guests were all gone. Helen Heath was eating
an ice; he bent over her chair and said, —
“Good night, Miss Helen!”
“Oh, good night, Mr. Raleigh! You are going? Well,
we 're all going soon. What a glorious summer it has
been! Are n't you sorry we must part?”
“Why must we part?” he asked in a lower tone.
“Where is the necessity of our parting? Why won't you
stay forever, Helen?”
She turned and surveyed him quickly, while a red —
whether of joy or anger he could not tell — flashed up her
cheek.
“Do you mean —”
“Miss Health, I mean, will you marry me?”
“Mr. Raleigh, no!”
With a bow he passed on.
Mr. Raleigh trimmed the Arrow's sail, for the breeze
had sunk again, and swept slowly out with one oar suspended.
A waning moon was rising behind the trees, it
fell upon the little quay that had been built that summer,
and seemed with its hollow beams still to continue the
structure upon the water. The Arrow floated in the
shadow just beyond. Mr. Raleigh's eyes were on the
quay; he paused, nerveless, both oars trailing, a cold
damp starting on his forehead. Some one approached
as if looking out upon the dim sheet, — some one who,
deceived by the false light, did not know the end to be so
near, and walked forward firmly and confidently. Indeed,
the quay had been erected in Mr. Laudersdale's absence.
The water was deep there, the bottom rocky.
“Shout and warn him of his peril!” urged a voice in
Mr. Raleigh's heart.
“Let him drown!” urged another voice.
If he would have called, the sound died a murmur in
his throat. His eyes were on the advancing figure; it
seemed as if that object were to be forever stamped upon
the retina. Still as he gazed, he was aware of another
form, one sitting on the quay, unseen in shadow like himself,
and seeing what he saw, and motionless as he. Would
Mrs. Laudersdale dip her hands in murder? It all passed
in a second of time; at the next breath he summoned
every generous power in his body, sprang with the leap
of a wild creature, and confronted the recoiling man. Ere
his foot touched the quay, the second form had glided from
the darkness, and seized her husband's arm.
“A thousand pardons, sir,” said Mr. Raleigh, then. “I
thought you were in danger. Mrs. Laudersdale, good
night!”
It was an easy matter to regain the boat, to gather up
his oars, and shoot away. Till they faded from sight, he
saw her still beside him; and so they stood till the last
echo of the dipping oars was muffled in distance and lost.
Summer-nights are brief; breakfast was late on the
next morning, — or rather, Mrs. Laudersdale was late, as
usual, to partake it.
“Shall I tell you some news?” asked Helen Heath.
She lifted her heavy eyes absently.
“Mrs. McLean has made her husband a millionnaire.
There was an Indian mail yesterday. Mr. Raleigh read
his letters last night, after going home. His uncle is dying,
— old, unfortunate, forlorn. He has abandoned everything,
and must hew his own way in the world from this
day forward. Mr. Raleigh left this morning for India.”
When you saw Mrs. Laudersdale for the first time, at
a period thirteen years later, would you have imagined
her possessed of this little drama? You fancy now that
in this flash all the wealth of her soul burned out and left
her a mere volition and motive power? You are mistaken,
as I said.
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