 | CHAPTER XXX.
FINE TALK AND UGLY NEWS. The Wetherel affair |  |
30. CHAPTER XXX.
FINE TALK AND UGLY NEWS.
Nestoria was saved from a flight which might have led Lehming, and even
the transcendentally unpractical Bowlder, to suspect something strange in her
history.
Miss Jones saved her; not that she meant salvation; not that she perceived
the advent of a crisis which required interference; on the contrary, she was
thinking solely of herself, what she must do and how she must appear; her
soul, as was too often the case with it, was intent upon her own aggrandizement
in the eyes of her fellow creatures.
“Have the kindness to be seated, Nettie, and you also, gentlemen,” she
said, waving her hand majestically toward chairs, and talking with her front
teeth, as we must do when we wish to inspire respect. “I regret, for your
sakes, that my accommodations are not more palatial. But such as I have
that I give, and most freely.”
“Monarchs could demand no more,” answered John Bowlder, who had by
this time recovered from his trance, and saw an opening for philosophy. “A
true monarch, a natural kingly soul, would desire no more. The angels who
visited Abraham found no fault with his tent. Damask curtains and velvet
sofas are merely adventitious circumstances, which may or may not attend hospitality.
We think too lowly of our impulses and too highly of our material
surroundings. Man is the oak and wealth the vine; and it is well if the vine
do not strangle the oak; it is well if we cultivate the tree rather than the parasite.
And when I say man, Miss Jones, I mean woman as well.”
This sort of talk was rather deep water for Imogen Eleonore. She was at
home in the spasmodic tempests of romance, but her first glimpse of the obscure
ocean of transcendentalism daunted her. Her vanity and pluck, however,
rebelled against the idea of being silenced. As the reader may already
have suspected, she prided herself on being what she called a “conversationist,”
and held it a shame to let dumbness prevail in her society. She was always
looking for opportunities to shine, and, although her shining was as the
shining of a monkey who has daubed himself with molasses, being rather ludierous
and inconvenient than illuminating, nevertheless she was not in the
least aware of this discouraging fact, and so did her best to scintillate on all occasions.
“Alas, how little we understand the opacities of life!” she said with a
“How much we are captivated by the palatial brown-stone fronts, nor divine
the meanness of the ignoble souls which they shelter, and which perchance are
more miserable on Turkish carpets than they would be on sanded floors!”
Like many people of small means, who would dearly love to wallow in luxury,
Miss Jones was much given to imputing unrighteousness to the rich, and
trusting that they have at bottom a hard time of it.
“The finest linen, the soft frills of lace embroidery, and the costliest Majolica
needlework, are often naught but veils for vice and misery,” she went on
cheerfully and magnanimously. “As you observe, Mr. Bowlder, we must not
prize surroundings nor judge people by them. Often and often, as I have
passed unnoticed and unknown, garmented only in my proud poverty and isolation,
before the abodes of uptown magnificence, I have said to myself, Is joy
here? No, surely not, was the drear response; at least not necessarily. What
do you think, Mr. Lehming?”
“Don't let us be too hard on the rich,” smiled the kindly pygmy. “They
are unfortunate in their circumstances, it is true. But, as you were saying just
now, ought we to blame people for their surroundings? Let us judge the men
themselves. Considering how little harm the wealthy really do, when they
have the power to do so much, I am disposed to pardon them their shortcomings,
and even to grant them some admiration.”
“Certainly,” bowed Imogen Eleonore, disposed to assent to these opinions
because they had been imputed to her.
“And now let us make a little journey,” continued Lehming, rising. “I
want to show you something which I think will give you a pleasure. Miss
Nettie,” he added, turning to Nestoria, and addressing her as he would have
addressed a child, so youthful was her appearance—“Miss Nettie, will you
walk with me? You and I are so nearly of a size that we shall not overshadow
each other. We will let those two loftier people follow us. The brownies
and fairies preceded the human beings in the procession of existence. Poor
little extinct fairies and brownies! You and I are almost the last of those
races.”
They marched two and two through the passage to the door of Lehming's
study.
“Enter my palace,” he said. “This is my hall of glamour and enchantment.
Here are treasures of gladness, my dear Miss Jones, which brown-stone
palaces cannot surpass. This is our common reading-room, and the
reading-room of all in this house. You two ladies must come here whenever
you wish, and carry away whatever you like. A daily paper and two literary
weeklies and half a dozen magazines and four hundred books will keep us all
in luxury.”
“Oh, I am so grateful to you, sir!” exclaimed Nestoria. Her pale cheeks
flushed with pleasure, and the flushing caused a sudden, surprising increase in
her beauty, not unlike what we see in the light of certain stars, which one moment
are dim and the next luminous.
“You are fond of reading,” said Lehming, delighted with her satisfaction.
“Very,” replied the girl, her eyes wandering greedily along the book-shelves.
“You surprise me, Nettie,” observed Miss Jones. “You hardly ever look
at the stacks and stacks of literature in my room.”
“The `Spasmodic' and the `Turtle Dove!' ” smiled Lehming. “I decline
and the `Turtle Dove,' and it is time that we give our attention to
them.”
“I thought you approved of fiction,” stammered Imogen Eleonore, a sensitive
plant by reason of much vanity, and disposed to accept exhortation as reproof.
“Here are Dickens and Hawthorne and Trollope and Charles Reade,” continued
Lehming. “They tell better stories than you will find in our New
York weeklies.”
“I have read `Foul Play,' ” said Miss Jones, glancing at the title of that
work. “It was in a ten-cent pamphlet, the same as a `Dime Novel.' That is
by Charles Reade, I see. Did he ever write anything else?”
Even Lehming, accustomed as he was to the humbler society of New York,
marvelled at such amazing ignorance in a veteran devourer of romance. Here
was a young woman who read almost nothing but novels, and who yet scarcely
knew the name of Charles Reade, while Hawthorne and Trollope were evidently
as strange to her as Berosus and Sanchoniathon. To a person of refined
taste the lack of literary culture among the great mass, the overwhelming
majority, of the so-called reading public is all but incredible. The million,
or perhaps one might truthfully say the millions, who find their sentimental
recreation in such papers as the sanguinary “Spasmodic” or the amatory
“Turtle Dove,” are as unaware of the real masters of dramatic and literary
art as they are of the celebrities of metaphysics or philology. They do not
know their works at all, and if they knew them they would not like them. A
sensational weekly which should attempt to entertain its subscribers with the
novels of Hawthorne or George Eliot, would probably come to an early decease.
The true secret of gaining the favor of this immensely numerous class
of readers is to furnish them with matter just a little better than they could
write themselves.
“You may trust Reade,” said Lehming, who was anxious to raise Miss
Jones's standard of taste. “He will always give you a well-ordered plot and an
interesting sequence of incidents. Some of his characters, too, are sketched
vigorously, and have the broad traits of human nature recognizable everywhere.
I should think a Chinaman might be interested in Reade. Try him
by all means; then we will go higher.”
Imogen Eleonore, meanwhile, was reconnoitring the pages of “Griffith
Gaunt” with a questioning and skittish eye, ready to start back if she should
discover anything grave or tedious.
“Here is what seems to speak to my soul,” she at last said, though with
some hesitation, as though the speech were indistinct or the soul hard of hearing.
“There is a tremulous strain of woe in this tale which I think will suit
me,” she added, putting the book under her arm, and turning to the more alluring
matter of a pictorial weekly.
Meantime Nestoria had taken a small, plain volume from the shelves, and
had plunged her face into it with the eager air of one violently athirst, who satiates
himself from a fountain.
“May I ask what you have there, Miss Nettie?” inquired Lehming, approaching
her in his gentle, gliding, nurselike way.
She held up that eloquent confession of a devout soul, written in the simplest,
purest, most idiomatic English—a book which great literary ability could
not imitate either in feeling or style—John Bunyan's “Grace Abounding.”
“It is a masterpiece,” he said reverently, after glancing at her with surprise.
“It equals Herodotus in childlike grace, and it surpasses him in sublimity
and pathos. There are passages in it which have made me turn to the
epistles of Paul, to see which is the greater saint and the greater writer. Will
you allow me to give it to you?”
“I thank you,” replied the girl, while a flush of gratitude colored her entire
face, there was such abundance and fervor in it.
“She feels the need of abounding grace and mercy,” thought Lehming to
himself. “I am in the solemn and awful presence of a profoundly troubled
soul.”
They looked at each other in serious silence, regardless of John Bowlder
and Imogen Eleonore, who were holding some nondescript babble at the other
end of the room.
“You are more kind than I know how to tell you,” continued Nestoria.
“If I could tell you how much your kindness touches me, you would be astonished.”
“My dear child, you alarm me,” sighed Lehming. “I fear that I am not
so worthy and wise a friend as you need.”
Nestoria was on the point of answering, “You are no doubt far better than
I deserve;” but she did not dare come so near to a confession of her haunting
horror; she remained silent.
“Have you no relatives, no intimates?” Lehming presently inquired.
“I am quite alone,” she responded, after a moment of natural hesitation.
“Could you trust me to find you some acquaintances, such as I should judge
suitable?”
She shook her head. “No, no. I have no time for society. I must work
all the while. It will be all I need if I see you and your cheerful, pleasant
friend. I like him, he has such kind eyes.”
“It shall be as you wish,” bowed Lehming. “You shall see us every day,
and no one else. I trust that you will come to this room freely and make use
of everything in it precisely as if it were your own.”
“I thank you,” said Nestoria. “I will come now and then—perhaps every
day.”
And with this understanding the interview ended, the two young women
returning to their own rooms.
“Those men seem very, very good,” observed Nestoria to Imogen, when
they were alone. “I don't believe that either of them could commit a crime.”
“What stra—nge speeches you do make!” stared Miss Jones, absolutely
envious of an eccentricity of thought or sentiment which she felt herself incapable
of rivalling. “Who that one really knows, who of all the feeble beings
that one is daily obliged to herd with, is capable of the sublimity of crime?
If I knew a man who dared be a wretch,” she continued, rolling mock-heroic
eyes, “I could wor—ship him. Grandeur of soul, whether for good or evil, is
what I seek through the feeble—oh how feeble!—inanities of commonplace
life.”
One is tempted to make a long pause over the contrast presented by these
two young women; the one forever strutting in simulated gloom and real satisfaction
through some sham tragedy of the fancy; the other speechless and almost
crushed under that pantherish thing which a real romance almost always
is. But there is no need of philosophizing; the situation is visible at the first
glance.
“You must not speak in that way,” replied Nestoria quietly, though with
an inward shudder. “God may some day take you at your word and grant
your desire. You would be very wretched.”
Secretly awed by the solemnity of this warning, Imogen Eleonore gave one
stare at her unfathomable companion, and then turned for cheering diversion
to the evening newspaper. As usual she read first the marriages and then the
obituaries.
“Nobody is dead that I know,” she sighed. “And only one person who
seems to be of any note. The paper calls him the celebrated missionary, Doctor
Bernard. Died at Erzeroum, August 5th. What a dolefully dull sheet!
Do you want to look at it?”
Nestoria mechanically took the journal, rose from her chair with a great effort,
walked unsteadily into her own room, and closed the door behind her.
“What a queer piece!” thought Miss Jones. “She has such starts and
ways that sometimes she puts me out of all patience. Let her go and freak it
out alone.”
But half an hour later she thought she heard sobbing in Nestoria's room,
and, forgetting her petulance, she went to see about it. The orphaned girl lay
on her bed, tossing and twitching spasmodically, her eyes dry and feverish and
her face flushed.
“You are ill, Nettie,” said Imogen. “Why didn't you call me? I must
go and get a doctor.”
“No, no!” gasped Nestoria, starting up on her elbow and putting out one
hand in earnest protest.
“But you need one,” urged Miss Jones. “I am afraid you are going to be
real sick.”
“Oh, let me be sick!” pleaded Nestoria, tired of life and longing to die.
“I beg of you not to call any one.”
Daunted by such despair, and overcome by its imperious tone of urgency,
Imogen Eleonore sat down.
But an hour later she slyly slipped out, hurried to the reading-room, found
Lehming there writing, and whispered, “My little friend is dreadfully ill.”
| CHAPTER XXX.
FINE TALK AND UGLY NEWS. The Wetherel affair | |