University of Virginia Library

22. CHAPTER XXII.
TWILIGHT DIALOGUES.

AFTER tea, as dusk came on, I observed Somerville
walking slowly to and fro with Mrs. Westervelt, behind
a clump of hemlocks in the most retired corner
of the Seacliff grounds.

It suddenly occurred to me that I had not exchanged a
word with him during the day, and that he had carefully
avoided my presence ever since he accidentally became a
spectator of the destruction of those villainous letters. I resolved
that I would face him then, and see whether I could
not burn at least one blush into his cheek. It seemed more
likely that I should inflict this mild punishment upon him if
I surprised him in his confidences with Mrs. Westervelt; and
therefore I took a circuitous route toward the hemlocks, advancing
with the caution of a deerstalker, and always keeping
some thicket between me and my goal. I did not intend
to play peeping Tom, but to come upon them so suddenly
that they could neither have time to separate, nor to glaze
their faces into non-expression.

The only result of my stealthy march was to give a start
to Mrs. Westervelt. She had sat down desperately on the
grass, her head bent with such a weary, hopeless air, as if it
could nevermore be lifted, her left hand clutched hard upon
her knee, her right grasping one of the little hemlock
branches and beating it against the earth. Somerville had
vanished, and I could not even hear the sound of receding

footsteps. As I entered the little shadowy alcove, Mrs. Westervelt
rose up, looking so guilty and timorous that it seemed
as if I should only have to stand silent before her to drive
her to confession. But the moment I spoke she recovered;
the habits of social intercourse resumed their movement; the
trained smile of the world came out on her pale lips; and
she simpered with her usual soft insipidity. “Dear me, Mr.
Fitz Hugh! You surprised me, really.”

“I beg your pardon. I expected to surprise some one
else,” said I, not much caring how she understood me.

“Oh! you thought the geirls were here,” she replied, glancing
about her uneasily. “It is one of their favorite spots.”

I might as well talk of the girls as of anything else. The
subject was interesting at all times, and loomed up momentous
now that I suddenly recollected Somerville's declared
intention of marrying one of them. I was very grave;—I
moralized earnestly;—I had much to say of a mother's duty.
It was annoying to hear Mrs. Westervelt's easy commonplace
admission of her responsibilities, and to see what a low idea
she had formed of their nature.

“O! I am by no means the mother to them that I ought to
be,” she sighed, as unmeaningly as the wind. “It is my duty
to see them launched properly. Really, I haven't the strength
of mind to do it. You men, Mr. Fitz Hugh, have no idea
what a difficult and delicate job it is to manage a geirl's
début.”

Yes, in her eyes a mother was a chaperone, a sort of matrimonial
agent, and nothing more.

“There is my fine old friend, Mrs. Ottoman, is a perfect
model,” she continued. “She really makes a conscience of
it, now. She has married off two of her daughters splendidly,
and she is getting the most magnificent offers for the
third. Josephine is a great belle already, although she is
only eighteen, and there are plenty of handsomer geirls. But
her mother drills her most faithfully. Why, in New York,
last season, Josey often went to two and three balls a night

without fading at all. Her mother used to hurry her home
from one crush, give her a cold bath and frictions, and then
drive away with her to another, and so on till daylight. And
through all this the good old lady never left her, although
she had the gout and was ready to drop. I never knew such
devotion. Dear me! I am quite incapable of it. Now Mary
ought to be going through something of that sort. Isn't it a
shame that I am so idle and careless of my duties? Now
don't say a word. It is, really.”

I could not resist the vindictive temptation of letting slip
a word of bitter satire.

“You give the girls an example of the domestic virtues,
Mrs. Westervelt.”

“Do I? How you flatter, Mr. Fitz Hugh!” said she,
while the troubled, weary look settled down upon her face.
“I should like to think that you are in earnest. Well,” she
added, sadly, “I do as well as I can. I wish I could do
better.”

Then, looking up suddenly, as if fearful that she had betrayed
her secret, she observed, “I suppose you refer to my
living so contentedly in the country. To be frank, it is a
trial; but then I try to make no complaint. Mr. Westervelt
prefers to reside here, and I of course do not say a word,
although I am sometimes positively dying for a good New
York crush. You can't imagine how I enjoy dancing, Mr.
Fitz Hugh,” she continued, her face lighting up at the idea,
and her foot patting the earth as if about starting off in a
polka. “Oh, polking and waltzing! ta ra la, ta ra la; it's
delicious, it's heavenly! But my fancy dances were over, you
know, on the day that I married. It is a positive fact that
I have done nothing but quadrilles and lancers ever since.
That is leading an innocent life, isn't it? ha ha ha.”

“The thought of it must be a great consolation to you,”
I said, hardly trying to cover my irony with a smile.

“Do you know,” she observed presently, “I wish now that
I had cultivated a taste for reading, when I was at school.

I shall always blame Madame Duval severely for not teaching
me that. I can't read, I declare! And yet at school I
used to write pretty good compositions. They made me do
them, you know. I was drilled at it till I actually hated the
sight of pens and paper. My only consolation for it was
billets doux. Oh, the number of love-letters that we silly
girls used to get up at Madame Duval's, and throw out to
the fellows! Sometimes it seems to me that I could write
an amusing book about those days. But reading is another
thing. Your book there is the only one that I have read
clear through, for a long while. The funny parts, and what
you say about the fêtes, and the courts, and the balls, and the
nobility,—all that is delicious. But I can't understand how
you can admire scenery and sunsets so much. Now sunsets
tire me; that is, I can't bear to have people drag me off to
look at them; of course I don't object to the sun's setting,
ha ha ha! It would be useless, I suppose, if I did.”

Was it not too bad that such a simpleton could make sensible
people wretched? But so it is: the weakest can pile
mountains of misery; the stupidest have ingenuity enough
to destroy. Yet as I looked at the unhappy woman, I felt
more pity for her than disgust or anger. What should I
myself have been ere this if circumstances had enabled or
forced me to live out my full nature? Many a man walks
through life surrounded by loving faces and blest with the
approbation of even those who do not know him, simply
because but a part of his inward being has been called to
act outwardly. Many a man brags of his virtues, who only
has a right to be thankful for his exemption from temptation.
The wise man admits that below all his fair daily
life there is a dark abyss, which he himself cannot fathom,
and which he humbly prays may not be made manifest,
nor allowed to overbrim in deeds. He never looks into it
but that he trembles at the wicked capabilities that he sees
there; trembles to think how easily he might become an enemy
of society, an infidel, a libertine, a murderer. Accordingly,

as I stood gazing at Mrs. Westervelt, I had no desire
to cast the first stone at her.

I understood now what it was that had made me study
that insipidly pleasing face so often. I saw the meaning of
that heavy-burdened air of her quiet moments, which alternated
so strangely with her somewhat hoydenish gayety
when excited by a sudden overcoming pleasure, and contrasted
so utterly with her youthful reputation as a frivolous
fashionable belle. I called up, as well as I could, her days
of frolic, and remembered, as I thought, that they had occurred
mostly in the absences of Somerville. Once or twice
she had made me the confidant of some vague sorrow. She
was melancholy; she did not care to live long; it was a
world of disappointments: a few low-spirited commonplaces,
in short; just such things as one hears from a romantic
school miss. At the same time she nervously added that she
had no particular cause of unhappiness; her husband was
perfect, and the children (dear geirls!) were beautiful and
amiable; she had a great many friends, and country life was
delightful.

Now I comprehended it all. But had any other person
sounded the mystery? Mr. Westervelt may have suspected
some evil thing, for I had often seen him eye Somerville with
timid doubt and dislike; but he could not have known what
I knew, or he would not have suffered this man nor this
woman to remain under his roof. Absorbed in business and
frequently away from home, he was necessarily purblind to
much that passed in his family. Correct in life, passionless
in temperament, and no longer young, he would not readily
accuse others of falling before a temptation which to him was
no temptation. No, he knew nothing, and I dared tell him
nothing.

Mary Westervelt? If she was aware of the secret, she
had never betrayed her knowledge. I had seen her, sometimes
sad, sometimes watchful, but never so much so as to
excite suspicion in one who did not already suspect. If the

household phantom haunted her, she was a brave girl who
could look upon it without letting others doubt that she saw
it, or saw anything which they did not.

Genevieve? Ah, this child had either seen more, or was
less capable of self-repression. That she was not altogether
unconscious of the presence of the spectre appeared, I now
thought, in her sullen fits, her sarcasms, and all the desultory
warfare which she had carried on with the peace of the
family. I felt that I must forgive her for that happy faculty,
—curiosa felicitas,—which she had shown in making her best
friends unhappy, and which, without such cause, would have
stamped hers as a vulgar nature. She possessed a trifle of
her grandfather's unpleasant talent for hating; but she had
certainly found an object which made its exercise almost a
Christian duty. There was something cunning and prudent,
too, in her. Once, when her father ventured very meekly to
reprove her spirit of contradiction, she made a reply which
must have been but a clever blind to her real feelings.

“I know it is wrong to be snappish, papa. But I can't
help thinking that this would be an awfully stupid world if
we all thought alike and acted alike. There would be no
excitement,—nothing to talk about. We should be yawning
from morning till night. One would get fearfully tired of
staying here. Death would be welcome, suicide common.
Don't you think so, papa?”

The Van Leers and Hunter? Imbeciles all, after different
manners. They saw nothing, probably; and if they did,
so much the worse.

I thought them all over while Mrs. Westervelt talked, and
then I went back to the mystery itself. It reminded me
of that brazen bottle in the Arabian Nights, out of which
ascended a smoke that spread until it became a great cloud,
and then slowly gathered into the form of a monstrous and
menacing Afreet. Gradually it had arisen from the family
life before my eyes, at first uncertain and almost ludicrous in
seeming, but daily taking shape and becoming more threatening,

until at last it was a sure and defined horror. It had
thus far, indeed, wrought no visible results, and for a time
longer it might continue dumb and deedless; but it was ever
present, stalking darkly behind the other events of our existence
like a ghost treading in the steps of living men; and
some day, any day, refusing longer to follow us, it might turn
and beckon some of us to follow it through lives of shame to
graves of sorrow.

I had scarcely got clear of Mrs. Westervelt when I fell in
with Hunter, smoking along the garden, and glancing at the
stars with the air of one who knows that he outshines them
all.

“Can you tell me where Somerville is?” I inquired.

“I am sorry to say not, my dear fellah. I was just looking
for our Admirable Crichton, myself. I wanted one more
hour with that brilliant intellect. I am off to-morrow, Fitz
Hugh. That blue-stockinged Calypso, Alma Mater, calls me
once more to her venerable bosom. I assure you, sir, that
I almost regret it. I shall miss these charmed hours,—your
company, my friend,—my cousins,—my sister. But more
than all,—I trust that you will neither be annoyed nor surprised
at it,—I shall miss Somerville. What a mind!
Copious and shining as a great river under the cloudless sun
of the tropics! Colossal and precious as the gold and ivory
Jupiter of Phidias! Then, too, the simple and common
sense observations, the instructive experiences, which he can
mingle with his loftier converse! Why, let me give you an
idea of his tact and cleverness, Fitz Hugh. I was talking to
him the other day about those matrimonial engagements that
I had got into with certain damsels who live within easy walk
of our classic sanctuary. Says I, `I wonder you never got
caught that way, old fellah.” (Hunter never did call him `old
fellah;' always addressed him reverentially, if not flatteringly.)
“Well, upon that, he admitted that he hadn't always
escaped the girls. He got lasso'd once; it's a solemn fact,
I pledge my word; and then he wanted to get away. The

trick that he hit upon was the cleverest thing that I ever
heard of; a perfect stroke of genius, I assure you; try it
myself as soon as I get back to college. He was staying at
Saratoga in the same hotel with the girl and her father.
Well, sir, he just got beastly drunk in the street, and had to
be carried to his room by the porters. The girl cried and
wanted to forgive him; but papa wouldn't stand it, and the
engagement was a flunk. Says I, `Somerville, give me your
hand, old fellah; I owe you a box of cigars for that idea.”'

Will the reader please to remember that in a previous
interview Hunter claimed this swinish trick, so unlike the
style of Somerville, as his own conception.

“Keep owing it; don't pay it,” I counselled. “The
lesson isn't worth the box; much less the long nines.”

“Don't agree with you, Fitz Hugh,” responded Hunter.
“If you were harnessed in with the women as I am at —,
you would see the thing as I do, and be glad of learning how
to kick out of the traces, unless you are more of a Fresh
than I take you to be.”

“It's lucky that you are going away, Hunter,” said I.
“You pretend to be an awfully wicked person; but I am
afraid that Somerville really is one. Your moral education
is in bad hands here, my young innocent.”

“Now look here, Fitz Hugh,” he exclaimed, walking up
and down jauntily, after his usual fashion when the inspiration
of balderdash came upon him, “I shall pass over your
slur at my sincerity, not because it is just, but because I am
magnanimous. But I cannot allow you to live and die in the
mistaken supposition that savoir vivre is wickedness. Somerville,
sir, knows life; he is an incomparable analyst of society;
he is a man of the world in the largest sense of that large
phrase; he has studied his specialty with a subtley and
originality which give him claim to the word Genius! As a
discoverer of truths I consider him superior to Humboldt.
His field of research is nobler; he has to do, not with matter
but mind; not with physical truths but moral truths.”

“Immoral,” I suggested, as Hunter stopped to send a
breath of life through his dying cigar.

“Well, immoral, if you please; but truths at all events,
and practical ones. I have learned far more from his conversation
than from all the lectures of all the professors of
Alma Mater.”

“Don't I know it?” said I.

“Quit that. Fitz Hugh. I shall graduate yet. Besides,
it was the slough of rum and water which arrested my
progress, and not the stumbling-stones of the hill of science.
But let us return to our muttons. What are Latin and
Greek worth to me, practically, compared with a knowledge
of men and manners? Yes, women and manners, by Jove!
Somerville teaches me living life. The professors teach me
dead life, or rather the dead tongues of dead life. The only
result of this species of much learning is to make me mad.
I swear, I never see a bust of Cicero but what I want to
knock his old Roman nose off. Catiline and Messalina be
hanged! What I want to know is how to rule the bad men
and manage the naughty women of the present day. You
can't deny that Somerville knows women. He has analyzed
the sex all through its varieties, from ugliness to beauty,
from juicy sixteen to the dryness of old maidenhood. On
this subject, Fitz Hugh, I have received lessons of gold from
Somerville.”

“I can guess what they are. But where is the value of
them? What practical use can you put them to, that will not
subject you to contempt and remorse?”

“Contempt and remorse!” scoffed Hunter, strutting about
as if bearing mountains of both without the least inconvenience,
and quite forgetful of the anguish which the gossips
of Rockford had lately caused him. “Contempt is a chimera,
my friend, which only exists to the coward. As for remorse,
that is insanity or indigestion. Not even a murderer suffers
remorse as long as his mind and body are in a healthy state.
I am quoting Somerville, by the way. Give me credit for a

soul above plagiarism.—Well, old Time is still a flying, and
I must not trifle with his venerated pinions. I must have
one more talk with Somerville, and then pack my trunk.
See you again to-morrow, before I leave.”

It is distinctly visible, I suppose, that Hunter was afflicted
with moral blockheadism. Perhaps it is a disease common
to adolescence; perhaps some of the conditions of college life
tend to develope it with unusual vigor; but Hunter would
have been pretty nearly such as he was, no matter what his
age or surroundings. He was delighted to get back to his
class, notwithstanding Cicero and Catiline. The ludicrous
disgrace of the Capers' adventure had driven him from his
haunts in Rockford; and he was ill at ease at Seacliff, where
the Westervelts of late turned to him a cold shoulder. They
must have heard of his lies about the young ladies, and the
only wonder was that they did not resent them still more
sternly. Thus he fizzed out from among us quietly, like a
Chinese cracker lighted at the wrong end; so quietly that
I was disappointed, for I had expected to see such an odd
firework go off with some notable explosion. What his
social scintillations were at — will doubtless be known
when the history of college beaux and college belles comes
to be written.

To me Somerville never talked himself out freely, as he
did to Hunter, if we may believe that mendacious creature;
therefore it is that I so seldom relate his agreeable conversations,
for I am puzzled how to report him without conveying
a false impression of him. Do you remember the astonishment
of a famous ornithologist, when, after finding bird
after bird slaughtered in his aviary, he at last discovered that
his sweetest songster, the mocking-bird, was the assassin?
He would hardly believe that the same bill could chant so
mellowly and tear so murderously. No, there was nothing
characteristic in Somerville's words; they were like the reflections
of stars in a quiet lake; they expressed what was
outward and foreign, not what was inward and native.

I ceased my pursuit of the man when I came upon Miss
Westervelt sitting alone in the veranda.

“Have you seen him?” I asked, not so much because I
still wished to find him as for the sake of commencing a conversation.

“Who? Mr. Somerville? Not since tea. But I hope
that you are not going to speak to him about those letters.”

“You think I had best not, then? Well, I believe it is
my own opinion, also. In fact the interest that I take in my
unknown traducer amounts to nothing more than a little venomous
curiosity. The subject is a squeamishly nice one to
approach, and I suppose that the better way is to keep hands
off it.”

In truth the anonymous assaults upon my character seemed
to me a mere trifle, almost a joke, compared with the other
doings of the evil one who troubled Seacliff.

“But how can it be possible! How could he do such a
mean thing when he appears to be so refined and noble!”
she said presently. “His manner is always gentlemanly.”

“A mere frozen surface, Miss Westervelt. It has no more
union with his real self than the ice on a river has with the
current beneath; it is not governed by the same laws, doesn't
move with it, nor show its direction. I suppose that we are
all of us more or less skinned over;—I suppose that we
never exhibit ourselves thoroughly except in some freshet of
excitement. But I never saw any other person so smoothly
and solidly congealed as Somerville. He beats the very animals.
No fox ever formed such a surface; no cat was ever
so shod with velvet. I wish that he would forget his mask
just for once, so that we could really see him.”

She looked up at me earnestly as if she were about to
make some frank avowal; to utter, perhaps, her true judgment
of Somerville, or even to speak out concerning the mystery.
Then a suggestion of prudence, or a start of womanly
timidity checked her, and her eyes wandered while she answered
me as if she were seeking words far away from her heart.

“It is a dazzling quality,—this fine varnish,—this enamel
of character,” she said. “It is almost worth one's envy. Of
course it is not a virtue; and yet it sometimes does the work
of a virtue.”

“I don't give much moral or intellectual credit to Somerville
for possessing it,” returned I, unable to bear a word
which seemed to favor the man. “He could hardly help it;
it came to him by the accident of birth and breeding; he inherited
it from his parents, and caught it from his earliest
intimates.”

“You give him no kind of credit,” she observed, trying to
smile, as if she did not know that our conversation was a
painfully serious one.

“Yes I do;—I give him credit for a miracle. It is impossible
to get two men into one skin; to unite the soul of a
finished rascal with the bearing of a finished gentleman; but
it seems to me that he has done it. In public he is the
blandest and gentlest of creatures, whose mere demeanor is
soothing, whose voice mellows yours as he speaks to you, who
hurts no one and nothing, not even vanity. But in secret,—
oh, depend upon it that his only earnest words and deeds are
in secret. Elegant breeding sends the whole of a man's
cream to the surface; but so much the worse for what is below;
I mean in this case.”

She grew sad and silent over the subject, and I presently
dropped it for fear of annoying her. There was another on
which I could have talked quite as fluently and passionately
if I had dared, and that was the state of my feelings toward
herself. When I was at Naples, standing in one of the halls
of the gigantic Museo Borbonico, I saw an English girl of
about eighteen, staid, quaint, and Jane Eyreish in aspect, step
up to an antique copy of that beautiful boy-bust known as
the Young Augustus, kiss its forehead, and then walk quietly
away without glancing around her to see whether or not that
strange action had been noticed by the loiterers whose footsteps
echoed down the long galleries. Just so would I have

been glad to do by Miss Westervelt during the week which
followed my discovery of her in that fatal dress of autumn
colors. Could I have found her asleep, so that, I might, unseen,
have dropped a kiss, unfelt, upon that fair forehead, I
would have done it, and then left her forever, nor thought of
her more except as so much marble. So it seemed, at least;
although so it probably would not have been. But now all
that was over: she was not a cold bust in one of memory's
coldest galleries; she was as near, as human, as womanly, as
when she thanked me for saving her life.

Who has not felt at times that a single word or incident
has changed him forever, so that, whether for better or worse,
he can never more be the man that he has been? And yet
only a week has gone by, or perhaps not so much, when he
finds that the primal familiar nature has risen from the flood
of strange emotion that had submerged it seemingly for all
time. Humanity is somewhat like the face of an india-rubber
doll: you may pinch and pull it into the most grotesque grimaces;
but remove the pressure, and lo the old Adam! My
suspicions of Miss Westervelt and my flirtation with Mrs.
Van Leer had distorted me from my usual nature for a few
days, and then had passed suddenly away, leaving no impress
nor sign upon me. I cared as much for the first, and as little
for the last, as I had done a fortnight before.

“You will promise me a favor?” she asked as I rose to
leave her.

“But what is it,” I returned, although I knew perfectly
well that I should promise, whatever it might be.

“You will not speak to Mr. Somerville about those letters?”

“Do you wish him so well?” inquired I, curious to learn
her reasons for the request.

“No. But why should I wish you any ill? If you should
charge him with it, and there should be a difficulty, I should
always blame myself as the cause. Perhaps I ought not to
have shown them to you.”

“I promise,” said I, delightfully flattered with the idea
that she was anxious on my account. “And now a favor in
return. I want you to distrust this man; yes, I want you to
detest him.”

“How earnest you are!” she replied, half smiling. “It
is hard work to hate people. I am afraid that I shall do it
in this case, however; that is, unless —”

“I beg your pardon,” said a mellow voice behind us.
“Excuse me, Miss Westervelt, for interrupting you; but I
thought that you were about to say something meant for Mr.
Fitz Hugh alone.”

She bowed, colored, smiled faintly, and hastened into the
house without speaking.

“Good-night, Mr. Somerville,” I muttered, turning homeward.

“So early, Fitz Hugh? Good-night, then,” he answered
in his friendliest manner.

How much had he heard? I am sure that I did not care.
I only wished that he would quarrel with me.