University of Virginia Library

3. CHAPTER III.
THE GAYETIES OF SEACLIFF.

AT eight o'clock of that clear June evening, anxious to
meet the pretty Misses Westervelt again, still more
anxious, perhaps, to get a satisfactory glimpse of the
mystery which haunted their family, I made my second entry
into the house of Seacliff. Mrs. Westervelt was in the parlor
to receive me, but seeming so worn and depressed that I
readily credited her morning excuse of illness. She had
changed considerably, and for the worse, since I left her on
the brow of the Righi: her complexion had lost colour, her
cheeks had sunk a little, her mild hazel eyes had faded; and
her whole look had a weary, discouraged expression, which
told of either invalidism or sorrow. She still retained, however,
that inspid grace, that soft, soulless charm of manner,
which made her so fascinating to some people.

“I am glad you came again,” said she. “I thank you for
this second call, really,—for I was very sorry not to see you
this morning,—disappointed, really. You know, of course,
how pleasant it is to meet old travelling companions; they
bring up so many recollections, and they seem such intimate
friends! But it can't be as great a treat to you as it is to us.
You are on the move and amused all the while; and we are
so quiet and lonesome in our little country place. Ah! you
remember how fond I used to be of balls, and operas, and
those things. Well, you will hardly believe it, but I have

got over all that, at least very nearly. I feel a little forsaken
now and then at Seacliff, but still I have no desire to go into
city life again. Matinées, and parties, and rounds of visits,—
I am quite tired of all that, I assure you. What you saw in
me abroad was the last flicker of the candle. I am as domestic
now as my husband, if not more so. Oh, it will be a
long time before you can come to this state of feeling, unless
you should have bad health or meet with some great trouble.
Trouble saddens one for a long while. I never have been
quite the same person that I was before the death of my poor
uncle who adopted me. Oh, you need not try to tell me;—I
know all about it by experience;—if people are gay once,
they are gay for a good while; but they can be sobered by
sickness and misfortune. I wouldn't have thought once that
I could be as much like a nun as I am now. You wouldn't
have thought it, either, if you could have seen how fond of
society I was ten years ago. Oh, it seemed to me like being
asked to Paradise when I had an invitation to a ball. But
that was foolish, of course; and I suppose that I am fortunate
in having outlived such ideas.”

Such was the style of Mrs. Westervelt's observations. It
will be seen, I suppose, that she was a woman of barely
average originality and conversational powers. Ten years
previous to this time, when her name was famous in the
Saratoga letters of Jenkins as Miss Van L—, she had
reigned in the second circle of New York society as a belle,
by mere dint of beauty, of taste in dress, of grace in dancing,
and of proficiency in etiquette. Now, through her marriage
with Mr. Westervelt, she moved in the first circle, but not as
a queen, because beauty, that mightiest wand of womanly enchantment,
had disappeared from among her treasures. Her
face and form were still regular and agreeable, but the most
flattering of mirrors could say no more; for leanness, that
gaunt enemy of American bellehood, had robbed her of half
her outlines at the early age of thirty-three. But she was
a harmless, genteel, sweet-voiced lady, an acquaintance to

whom you accorded an average amount of respect, an amiable
friend, an affectionate wife, and a kind mother-in-law, I
am certain, notwithstanding the hints of the embittered Genevieve.
Let us do her some little honor, for her heart was
stronger than her head, and that is not an unworthy thing
in woman.

After a few minutes of dialogue, she quitted me to receive
some people who had called over, in their own carriage, from
Rockford. I now slipped out of the parlor under the guidance
of Mrs. Van Leer, who led me into the library, where
the rest of the family were arranging the programme and
preparing the costumes of a series of tableaux vivants.

“Come along; we shall press you into the service; we
shall make you good for something; we are going to have
Rebecca and Rowena, the execution of Anne Boleyn, and a
lot of other awful scenes,” she prattled. “Mr. Somerville,
just look at this gentleman and see what he will answer for.
Won't he go in the execution?”

“Oh, exactly; just the person we want,” said Somerville.
“Six feet high; dark and determined; broad-shouldered
enough for a battle-axe; give an awful fierceness to the
tragedy; make a really tremendous spectator. He shall
have the second biggest hatchet, and stand by the scaffold as
a bloodthirsty lord, one of the remorseless enemies of the
queen. Mr. Fitz Hugh, have the kindness to blow up all
the ferocity there is in your nature, and let it blaze in your
countenance. Mrs. Van Leer will deepen the gloom of your
eyebrows with a piece of burnt cork. By the way, couldn't
we have another tableau, representing a devil trying to
carry off a soul, and an angel driving him out of the death-chamber?
Miss Westervelt is just blonde enough for an
angel; her sister would be a beautiful corpse, and Mr. Fitz
Hugh will play the devil; he is tall enough to make a very
majestic one.”

“Agreed! agreed!” exclaimed Mrs. Van Leer. “Mr.
Fitz Hugh, please to feel fiendish imme—diately, for we will

have that scene first. Now, who is to be executioner in
Anne Boleyn?”

“Some herculean person, of course,” replied Somerville.
“I think Robert is as near the true build as we can furnish;
besides, he has a tremendous biceps muscle,—for we must
have his arms bare. As for the ponderous king, your husband
will do, with some flour on his head and a pillow under
his waistcoat. We must ignore the absurd fact that the king
was absent.”

“Good!” said the lively lady. “King Harry, too! Why,
Henry, my dear, you were born for this very occasion. But
then,—as to specta—tors,—as to somebody to witness our
success,—there's the rub! We shall have to call up the
ser—vants, and send for Mr. and Mrs. Treat, who won't
come, of course, because its theat—rical. Oh! by the way,
the Capers of Rockford are in the other room. I'll go
and engage them to stay. We must have specta—tors, or
there's no use in acting. What a stu—pid place the country
is, to be sure, where people are so apt to live a great ways
from each other!”

“Do exert your fascinations, Mrs. Van Leer,” implored
Somerville. “Engage the Capers, and then come back to us,
for we can't get along a moment without you.”

Presently she returned, exclaiming, “Capers will stay.
Capers has agreed to witness our spectacle. Eter—nal thanks
to Capers! We must never cut Capers.”

Without Somerville, our wardrobe would have been a failure.
Theatrical habiliments there were none in the house
except a single costume of the times of Louis XIV., which
Mrs. Westervelt had once worn to a fancy ball. For the rest
of our materials we had to depend on a transfiguration of old
clothes. A lady's velvet cloak of obsolete fashion became a
royal mantle; a brilliant smoking-cap served for an earl's
bonnet; costumic anachronisms were disregarded; necessity
was the mother of invention; and the result was splendidly
illusive. We seized upon the back parlor, closed the sliding

doors, and arranged with a most jovial and human gabble the
demoniac horror of the first tableau. Genevieve Westervelt,
covered with a black cloak for a pall, was stretched upon
three consecutive ottomans, her beautiful face bare and still,
her long eyelashes depressed upon her cheeks, deathlike with
flour, her flaxen hair drawn smoothly across her temples,
and her hands folded on her breast. An infinity of sable
cambric swathed my stature, and drooped from my arms in
the form of most clumsy pinions, changing me into the similitude
of a fiend, black and ill-shapen enough to be very wicked
indeed. Behind a window-curtain hid Miss Westervelt as
guardian angel, in a morning dress of white muslin, with auburn
hair lying over her shoulders, and wings fabricated of
bridal veils. All things had been arranged by Somerville, at
the same time that he seemed to listen with the utmost deference
and delight to the dictation of every eager co-laborer.
He heard each one attentively; he smiled and said it was a
capital idea; then, he suggested his own plan, merely as a
sequel of yours; finally he put his plan into practice and
complimented you on the success of it. Each one of us was
persuaded to take immense credit to himself or herself for the
perfection of the result. I never saw such another insinuating
fellow as Somerville, nor one who was so strong in the
weakness of his fellow-creatures.

The drama was ready to open, and the lights were extinguished.
Mrs. Van Leer, her husband, and his brother,
hurried through the hall into the front parlor, to become
spectators, while Somerville and Hunter withdrew the sliding
doors simultaneously, exposing a sombre death-chamber
seen dream-like through the illusive gauze of a mosquito-net.

If ever there was a moment of unmitigated terror and tremendous
extremity on this earth, it was when I glided forward
in my tartarean drapery to the side of Genevieve, and waved
my ebon pinions, or rather fins, above her in significance of
monstrous, fiendish, and eternal triumph. Second by second

the horror deepened, and the cambric flapped a clearer affirmation
of the diabolical, the everlasting catastrophe. At last,
when human hope had fled the scene, when despair was at its
awfullest culmination, when the spectators in the front parlor
were shuddering with helpless sympathy, forth rustled the
guardian angel from the window-curtains, and flitted straight
at the exultant devil. Now ensued a noiseless but terrible
contest between the powers of light and the powers of darkness.
Four wings going at once; bridal veils against cotton
cambric; virtue supernal against vice internal; devil the
biggest, but angel a hundred times the handsomest; black
waving the highest, but white the quickest and most gracefully;
battle tough and tight, but Beelzebub slowly losing
ground, according to agreement. About thirty swings of the
bridal veils fairly took the conceit out of Satan, and he began
to cower. Downward he sloped, lower and lower, crouching,
sliding backwards, frightened, whipped, pursued by the conquering
angel, not the ghost of a chance, giving it up, and
slipping blackly out of a side door with an air of discomfiture
approaching to extermination. Then back to the bier glided
the heavenly spirit, and raised over it her gauzy wings
in expression of a holy, salvatory, eternal benison. The
drama was finished; the spectators clapped their hands
over the triumph of the good cause; the sliding doors met
each other half-way, advancing stickily on unmellifluous
castors.

“First rate! Splendid! I tell you, Mary did look like
an angel. Oh, Fitz Hugh! you was awful,” shouted Robert
Van Leer, roaring through the hall and exploding among us
with the enthusiasm of a bombshell.

“I begin to believe that the devil is fully as dark as he is
painted,” said Somerville, smiling upon me so graciously that
I felt flattered, and thought that I must have played my part
exceedingly well. “If you had been the very imp that Luther
threw his inkstand at, you could not have looked
blacker.”

“Beautiful! Charming! Did you ever!” exclaimed the
Capers in a chorus of admiration.

“His riverence got the worst of it,” giggled one of the
Irish servant girls, who had taken me to represent a priest,
and thus had totally lost the moral of the tableau.

As I had nothing to do with the affairs between Rebecca
and Rowena, I walked into the parlor, and was introduced to
the Capers. The family consisted of papa, maiden sister,
young lady daughter and boy of fourteen. Mr. Capers was a
tall, thin, pale, mild man, high in the shoulders, loose in his
coat and pantaloons, tight and white about the neck, with
light, tearful eyes, a Roman nose set slightly to one side, and
a chin like the after peak of a saddle. Miss Capers, the
elder, was a half-century plant, of much the same pattern
with her brother, but frost-bitten and tartish in aspect. The
daughter was eighteen years old, aquiline in feature, with
black eyes, and the general freshness of a healthy village
belle; the son, a stout boy, good-looking enough, but grimy
under the finger-nails, ill at ease in his best clothes, and
speechless with bashfulness. Mr. Hunter, who, like myself,
had no part in the next scene, had already got the daughter's
arm in his own, and was drifting away with her into the
verandah, under pretext of extraordinary moonlight effects on
Long Island. Falling in between the father and maiden
sister, I talked of tableaux vivants, as that seemed to be their
choice of subjects. The lady was theologically minded,
asserted her belief in the existence of the devil, dwelt
upon the awful lesson which had been taught by the tableau,
and asked me whether I had lately suffered any bereavements
in my family. I was obliged to confess, however unwillingly,
that for some years past the Fitz Hughs had not
been visited by the black horses, whereupon her interest
in me evidently diminished, and she swept over to the sofa,
where Mrs. Westervelt was painfully extracting a few syllables,
like grinders, from writhing Master Capers. Her
brother, however, clung to me, and demanded sympathy with
mournful eye and speech.

“Ah, sir!” he whispered, shaking his head and sighing;
“that little drama touched a tender spot in our hearts.”

I started, and felt really pained that we had exhibited such
a tableau; for I now observed, for the first time, that the
whole family was in mourning.

“Yes, sir, I lost my wife five weeks ago,” he continued
with a simple, earnest look, that was really curious, although
it made a strong appeal to my compassion.

“I am grieved to hear it, and offer you my condolence,” I
replied. “I sincerely regret it, if our tableau has pained
you.”

“Oh, not at all!” said he. Don't think so. On the contrary,
it gave me a melancholy pleasure; everything gives
me pleasure that reminds me of her. She was a very handsome
woman,” he added, after a pause. “You would hardly
believe it, sir, but she was as young looking as her daughter,
—and much handsomer. Strangers often mistook them for
sisters, sir. A very tasty woman in dress, too, sir. Her
death was an awful blow to me, and to us all, and to Rockford,
also, I am sure. Our minister, the Reverend Mr. Jacobs,
told me so. I had her buried in a style worthy of her,
sir. I thought I knew how she would like to be, sir, and I
went and did it.”

“A very graceful tribute of affection,” I suggested, considerably
puzzled by this eccentric though unquestionably
sincere mourner.

“Yes, sir, I think it was rather graceful,” he assented,
sadly but gratified. “I went down to New York and got the
most beautiful rosewood coffin that I could find. Then I had
it lined with quilted white satin. As for a shroud, sir, I
wouldn't suffer her to be put in an ordinary shroud, but I got
a white satin dress made for her, very expensive and very
tasty, with real lace frills down the bosom and on the collar
and cuffs. Lastly, I put a bouquet of hothouse flowers in her
hand. Oh, sir! she looked very handsome. Why, sir, when
I led Lottie, my daughter, into the room, and showed her how

I had arranged everything, she broke right out, `Oh, pa,'
said she, `I do wish ma could see herself.' That was just
what she said, sir, and it was pure nature.”

He had told his story, and was satisfied. I never saw the
man but twice after that evening, but I am confident that he
repeated that same narrative to hundreds of persons. A spell
seemed to be upon him, as upon the Ancient Mariner of Coleridge,
compelling him to find a listener and to rehearse to him
his quaint tale of bereavement and of consolation.

While I hesitated on the brink of his melancholy, doubting
whether to disturb the stream or to let it roll on voicelessly,
a note of preparation ran through the house, and all rushed
into the front parlor, to behold the next tableau. The sliding
doors jolted backward, and through the mosquito-net we saw
Jewish Rebecca kneeling to Saxon Rowena. Genevieve
Westervelt's flaxen hair, large blue-gray eyes, delicate
blonde features, patrician expression, and white shoulders,
did full justice to the daughter of Cedric, while Mrs. Van
Leer looked handsomer as Rebecca than she had ever looked,
I imagine, in her proper personality. Abundant were the
jewels; artistic, rich, and deceiving the foldings of the draperies;
the front lights so well thrown as to make the very
shadows ornamental. It was a still picture, unstirred by gesture,
and quite eloquent in its silence.

“Oh! I do think that is so lovely!” whispered Miss Lottie
Capers, with an enthusiasm which almost made her forget to
address herself to Mr. Hunter. “The other was horrid; but
this is perfectly ro—mantic.”

Mr. Hunter lost not a moment in adding his mite to the
impression of the scene, by declaiming the entire passage
from Ivanhoe, with as much fluency and exactness as if he
had studied it for the occasion. The sliding doors met again,
and Miss Lottie admiringly murmured, “What a wonderful
memory you must have, Mr. Hunter!”

The artful youth immediately repeated a long passage from
Alexander Smith, concerning stars, and, under cover of it

inveigled Miss Capers into the presence of the heavenly host
as seen from the verandah.

After one more tableau, the execution of Anne Boleyn,
which I shall allow the reader to make just as beautiful or
just as hideous as he chooses, we closed our play, and the
evening's pomp was put away like old furniture in the garrets
of memory. In a few minutes more the Capers took
their departure, thanking us so earnestly for our entertainment,
that we all felt flattered and asserted our vehement desire
to continue the acquaintance. Hunter was especially
emphatic in his professions; favored them with the death of
Hugo and Parisina as he accompanied them to their carriage;
obtained a particular invitation to call, from Miss Lottie, and
joked a good deal about her during the rest of the evening.
As for me, I thought of the rich auburn streams of Miss
Westervelt's hair, and concluded that the neighborhood of
Seacliff would be a delightful summer residence,—for to most
men, at all events to men who have no sisters, few sights are
more persuasive, more circean, than that of a woman's hair
gracefully dishevelled. I must see her thus again, I said to
myself; and for that I will stay a week, perhaps a month.
It was because our tableaux gave rise to this resolution that
they form an important event in my life, and are worthy of
being recorded in the present volume. But for them and the
consequent shower of gold which fell down Miss Westervelt's
shoulders, I should next day have gone to New Haven, and
next day to Boston, and next day, perhaps, to Nahant or
Newport, and so never become identified with the fortunes of
Seacliff, nor had a chance to write its history.

But there was one other thing which contributed to make
the place interesting to me, and that was an absurd curiosity
to learn the meaning of the singular conversation which I
had partially overheard in the morning. Looking round for
Mrs. Van Leer, I observed that she had seated herself near
Somerville, and was coquetting to keep his attention. Aha!
I begin to understand, thought I: flirting in a wife begets

jealousy in a husband; jealousy is the natural or unnatural
parent of matrimonial quarrels; matrimonial quarrels are
sometimes carried on too loudly in back boudoirs; the consequence
is that chance visitors overhear family secrets. I
looked at Mr. Henry Van Leer, to see him chafe under the
affront; but if he had passed the last twenty years in sleeping
with his fathers, he could not have been more drowsily
indifferent to what was passing. Perhaps I am on the
wrong trace, I said to myself; or else the man is a better
dissembler than I should imagine. In the mean time, Mrs.
Westervelt and Genevieve were whispering confidences in
the veranda, and Mr. Hunter was troubling the spirit of
the piano with some halt and lame reminiscences of Linda
di Chamouni. Miss Westervelt had ruthlessly retired to
put up her hair, and I waited impatiently for her reappearance,
for I was anxious to receive an invitation to
remain a while in the vicinity of Seacliff, and for certain
instinctive, emotional reasons, which any one can understand
easier than I can explain, I preferred that the encouragement
should come from her rather than another. She appeared,
but instead of approaching me, she took Hunter's place from
him, and played Linda passionately, enchantingly. While I
was deliberating whether I should sulk or turn the leaves for
her, Genevieve entered, seated herself at the other end of my
sofa, and started a conversation by asking, “Did you get
tried of Europe?”

“Not at all. The longer I stayed, the better I liked it.”

“I would have remained if I had been you. What made
you come home?”

“There were too many temptations to idleness and good-for-nothingness;
my Yankee conscience rose against them.”

“I suppose it is better to work hard in doing nothing than
not to work at all,” she said.

“Of course. It is more ridiculous, to be sure; but it is
more respectable, and it makes one happier.”

“It is a consolation to hear you say so. I work hard from

year's end to year's end, and the only result is that I am
dressed; a very trifling result, you see, for I am not tall.”

“The world does not judge the result of labor by quantity,
but by quality,” I replied with a reverential glance at her
tasteful attire.

“Oh, there I think that you are mistaken,” said she, without
seeming to notice my compliment. “In this country, at
least, people are more astonished to see a man do a great
deal, than to see him do anything well.”

“Perhaps so; at any rate, I am afraid so; although the
charge is a sharp satire. Still, such a feeling cannot last; it
will give way as we become more esthetic; no refined and
tasteful people judges in that style. Just notice what decision
the great world of intelligent humanity pronounces in
matters of art, for instance. Suppose two artists, one of
whom produces in two years four or five statues of mediocre
merit, while the other in the same time produces only one
statue, but that one an Apollo Belvidere. The world will
gradually forget the first artist, and put the second among the
demigods. It recognizes that the latter has not only done
better work, but more of it. He has cut less stone, but,
artistically speaking, he has performed more labor. Just
imagine how many expressions he has conceived and rejected;
how many lines he has drawn in his mind, or in the
clay, and obliterated; how many incomplete ideals he has at
last married and moulded into one ideal perfection. The
world feels all this, although it may not reason it out, and
arrives by instinct at the true conclusion.”

“I think you are right,” said she. “It ought to be so, and
I suppose that in the long run it is so. However, all these
subjects are out of the circle of us women, and I wonder that
you should take the trouble to talk to me about them. We
women are allowed so few ambitions, so few emotions, so few
efforts! Why, I scarcely know what you mean by temptations.
Our only temptations are to dress, flirting, idleness,
and crossness.”

“It is not the great temptations that ruin us; it is the little
ones,” said I, oracularly.

“I don't believe that,” she objected, shaking her head.
“What do you mean by it?”

“Why, it is very clear. If the devil never asked us to do
anything less than steal a horse, for instance, he would hardly
catch a soul. We should get frightened at his first demand,
and quit him forever.”

“Exactly,” she replied, nodding and laughing. “He is
wonderfully cautious and cunning; before he asks you to
steal a horse, he gets you to steal a pony.”

How clever the creature had grown since I parted with
her a year before! She was no longer a girl of sixteen; she
had suddenly become a woman of seventeen.

“But what are you going to do in America, Mr. Fitz
Hugh?” she resumed. “What great labors are you going
to perform, to make amends for your European idleness?”

Now I really intended to become an author, having already
got a book of travels on the launching-ways of a New York
publisher, and having projected at least half a dozen other
works in history, biography, and romance, with which I
meant to storm the world's attention. But I naturally objected
to making an ostentation of these facts,—and so I
replied simply that I was engaged in a course of private
study.

“Are you going to study in the city?” she asked. “Will
the Astor Library be necessary?”

“I should prefer the country, if Seacliff is a fair specimen
of it.”

“Why not come to Seacliff, then?” interposed Mrs. Westervelt.
“There is a boarding-place close by, just under the
hill. Our neighbors are plain people, but they would make
you very comfortable. We have had friends there before.
Why not take rooms with them?”

“Yes, why not, Mr. Fitz Hugh?” said Miss Westervelt,
turning upon me from the piano.

“To be sure! It would be an act of the purest charity to
us,” added Mrs. Van Leer, with a sudden sparkle of interest
in her coquettish eyes.

Immensely flattered and gratified, I accepted the proposition,
although not entirely persuaded that the neighborhood
of Seacliff would be the most favorable of places for literary
application. It was late now, and I took my departure, with
the understanding that I should find my rooms engaged for
me when I came over next morning. Mr. Hunter was
obliging enough to drive me to Rockford in Van Leer's sulky,
and to drink three glasses of sherry, and smoke a couple of
cigars with his heels on my table. Such stories as the adolescent
told me under the inspiration of these modest stimulants!
Although doubt seemed almost wicked as I looked at
his persuaded face, still it was hard to believe that so young
a man could have seen so much life, been the hero of so
many adventures, and sacked the hearts of so many peerless
ladies. I felt obliged to respect either his precocious experience
or his imagination. The pace at which he drove away
was a furious one, and I went to my room hoping that his
neck was stronger than his head.

Some other questions gave me much more concern. Why
was it that the Seacliff family had set its youngest daughter
to invite me there, and not the eldest? Was it because Miss
Westervelt was engaged, or on the look-out for a richer or
more attractive match than Mr. Fitz Hugh? Finally, the
man who had no pity, and the woman who was in such imminent
danger of exposure, were they Mr. and Mrs. Van Leer,
or, if not, who were they?