University of Virginia Library

24. CHAPTER XXIV.
RESULTS OF REJECTED ADDRESSES.

HAVE you ever noticed a child whose little temper has
just been subdued, and sweetened by a sound whipping?
His eyes soft and damp with tears, his forehead
humbled, his feet noiseless, his voice gentle though with
the echo of a sob in it, he clings to his mother's knee, looks
up into her face for forgiveness, is unresentful, meek, and
tender-hearted, and goes to bed the model of an angel-boy,
too good to live long. Poor Robert Van Leer, the discarded,
the disappointed, wore just this chastened air, uncomplaining,
unreproachful, and asking nothing but pardon. I had supposed
that he would rant and rave under his affliction, or even,
perhaps, seek revenge upon Miss Westervelt by some system
of coarse persecution; but beneath his rough exterior there
was a kinder, more innocent, more childlike heart than any
of us knew of; and it had no malice, no vindictiveness, no
vulgarity of feeling stored away in those deepest depths
which had now for the first time been opened. I treated him
with the profoundest respect in those days, and I often saw
Miss Westervelt glance at him with an expression of pain
and pity.

But Mr. Westervelt was far from accepting the event in
so proper a spirit. Returning from New York the day after
the rejection, he soon gave cause to suspect that he had heard
of it, by certain mild and inarticulate symptoms of anger,

which would have been about as terrible to most people as
the wrath of a disgusted mouse. He was, of course, too
timid to attack either me or Somerville; and Mary had to
endure alone his sidelong, half-expressed whimpering fretfulness.
What he said and did was not in itself very difficult
to bear; but then she loved him with a whole-souled fervor,
which laid her quite open to his persecution; a fervor
which contrasted singularly with the feebleness and vacillation
of his own nature. She thought of every little attention
for him; her whole manner begged for a kind word or look;
but he was consistently deaf and blind to her presence. It
required very slight observation to detect his game of annoyance,
dull, lifeless, voiceless, deedless as it was, and little as I
saw them together. I am wrong, by the way, to call it a
game, for there was probably nothing planned or systematic
in his conduct, and he would have preferred, I am afraid, to
scold her outright, assert his paternal authority fiercely, play
the iron father of the good old time, and drive her into the
opulent match which he had set his faint heart upon. But
the stuff that he was made of was not stern enough for despotism,
and so his anger expressed itself in a feeble-minded
worrying, much like that of a cross child. He used to meet
her with dismal averted face; to withhold the morning
and evening kiss which he was accustomed to give her; to
fret at her awkwardness when she brought him his slippers
or did him any other gentle office; to sit glumly speechless
when she tried to interest him in her little plans and hopes;
to complain that she hurt him when she put her arm around
his neck; to quit the room when she came upon him alone;
and that was about all. A characteristic scene in this melodrama
occurred during one of my usual twilight calls at
Seacliff. Mary had taken a seat beside her father, on a
settee under the trumpet honeysuckle. The rest of the
family were scattered about the veranda, on other settees, or
in those iron chairs which made such a ponderous pretence
of rusticity. The two Van Leers were silently enjoying their
vesper cigars; for tobacco-smoke was no affront to the lares
and penates of Seacliff.

“And so, papa,” resumed Mary, when I had taken my
seat, “we shall pass the winter here very comfortably. You
can run down to New York as you do now, and Genevieve
can make the Christmas visit to grandpapa. Mamma
and I shall not be afraid to keep house alone. It will be
much less extravagant than wintering in New York; and to
me, at least, it will be just as pleasant.”

Mr. Westervelt moaned feebly, as if utterly wearied of the
subject, and then, turning to Bob, referred the whole matter
to him with an ostentatious show of deference which confused
the poor youth and amused Mrs. Van Leer.

“Robert,—I should rather say, Mr. Van Leer,—what do
you think?—or, rather, allow me to ask your opinion. I
have great confidence in your judgment, you know, Robert.”

“Oh! don't leave it to me,” deprecated Bob. “I don't
know what to say. Miss Mary knows. I think what she
said was—was first-rate. Its kind of hard, though, she
should be shut up here all winter in this lonely place. I
tell you what—no, that wouldn't do, though. Never mind
—I wasn't going to say anything particular.”

“But Robert—Mr. Van Leer—you can propose anything
you like, you know,” insisted Mr. Westervelt. “We shall
be glad of your opinion. I have no doubt we should agree
with your views entirely.”

“Yes—no—nothing,” stammered Bob. “I wasn't thinking
of anything. I don't know as I was. I guess I wasn't
going to say anything.”

Just at this moment that genial Mrs. Van Leer was seized
with something between a cough and a titter.

Robert, much disconcerted by the sound, turned a furtive
forlorn eye upon her, but showed no signs of offence in his
diffident and humbled countenance. Whatever vices of character,
whatever perversities and asperities had been implanted
in the sorrowing lad by nature and education, seemed to have

been all changed by his late disappointment into a harvest of
the meekest and bashfullest virtues. He glanced around him
to see if the laugh was general, and then dropped his head
with a sigh upon his bosom. Meantime Miss Westervelt,
leaning her cheek on her hand, sat quite still, looking at her
father with such a pleading, anxious, almost penitent expression,
that it made his sickly moroseness seem downright
cruelty.

“Papa!” she said presently, in a tone that absolutely supplicated
for his notice.

“What?” grunted papa, without suffering the light of his
countenance to fall upon her.

“You don't seem to know that I am here, papa,” she
whispered.

I could not see the tears peeping out of their nest, but I
felt sure that they were there, because she spoke with that
smothered voice which we all have when trouble changes the
countenance and dims the sight. He did not soften to her
sorrow, but gathered more waywardness from it, according
to the nature of moral cowards.

“You—you trouble me, Mary,” he said. “There! haven't
you sat by me long enough? Let your sister have the place
now. Come, Genevieve, come and sit by your father.”

Mary left her seat, but Genevieve did not occupy it.
Turning her spirited profile toward her genitor, she replied,
with a coolness which almost made me smile, “No, I thank
you, papa; I don't care for the seat at all; I am very well
as I am.”

There was a little defiant asperity in her face, and still
more in the sharp toss of her head. She evidently saw
through the system of teasing coercion which was being
practised on her sister, and sympathized with neither the
spirit nor the object of it. Perhaps she was not at all sorry
that Bob had been refused, inasmuch as it saved him for herself,
supposing she should ever want him, and also punished
him for the absurdity of lavishing his affections on another.

I do not mean to malign Jenny; I assert positively that she
was a whole-souled, generous girl; but I still think that it
annoyed her to see her sister getting two thirds of the attentions
and all the offers. She took it as a slight upon her
own attractions, and could not understand that she was only
seventeen.

Mr. Westervelt made no response of word or look to his
youngest daughter's insubordination; he bowed before Genevieve's
spunk just as readily and instinctively as he bullied
Mary's gentleness.

“Oh! you don't care about it? Well, never mind,” he
said; and, getting up with a moan, wandered moodily down
the garden. Our faces seemed brighter in the growing moonlight
as this frail, invalid, troubled, disappointed being passed
out from among us.

“I am sorry that Mr. Westervelt seems unwell,” observed
Somerville, in his well-bred fashion, too civil to see beneath
the surface.

“Yes,” sighed Mrs. Westervelt. “Business weighs heavily
on him. It is a sorrowful world,” she added, in a commonplace
way, thinking perhaps how sad it was that she
could not be a young lady and a belle, as she used to be.

“Very likely,” said Somerville. “Most people quietly
acknowledge that, sooner or later. But it is a fact of the
impertinent, disagreeable species, and I generally treat it with
silent contempt. Isn't that your way, Miss Westervelt?”

“I don't know,” she replied, wearily. “I haven't lived
long enough to have a way.”

“Oh! there you have the advantage of me,” said Somerville,
with bow and smile complimentary. “It is agreeable
to be young, and fortunate while one is young. There are
few men wise enough to wish they had been born women;
but I am one of the few. Of course, I shouldn't care to be
an ugly woman. Far from me be that misery!”

“Which of us four would you rather be?” asked Mrs.
Van Leer, slipping out her pretty foot.

“All four, if you please, one after the other,” decided
Somerville.

“Very gallant; much obliged to you,” said the lady.
“What is your choice, Mr. Fitz Hugh?”

“I don't know that I care for a change,” I responded.

“He is afraid of disappointing some young lady,” whispered
Somerville to Mrs. Van Leer.

“I don't find it so disagreeable to call myself one of the
lords of creation,” I continued. “Perhaps, however, I
should like to combine a woman's heart with a man's head.”

“Then your heart would always be quarrelling with your
head,—making a fool of it, perhaps,” said Somerville, aloud.

“Guess you never was troubled that way,” put in Bob,
with sudden energy.

Mrs. Westervelt gave Somerville a glance of singular
meaning; a glance instantly withdrawn, and of which he
took no manner of notice. Genevieve clapped her hands,
patted Bob on the back, and laughed boisterously. Robert
seemed to be quite cheered by the success of his sally, and
looked round him for a moment with the air of a man who
feels himself a match for the wittiest and wisest. It was the
one solitary intentional atticism of his life, and even to this
present he does not desist from occasionally calling it up, as
a cow does her cud, and chewing the reminiscence of it with
great vanity and satisfaction. After an evening with a party
of new acquaintances, after every other man has cracked his
joke, or told his story, Bob will begin modestly, “Well, I
never was smart but once;” and then will come an extended
history of his satirical onslaught upon Somerville, followed
by a tremendous burst of laughter, entirely his own and in
its way very superior.

This was pretty much all that occurred worthy of notice
during the evening. The reader, perhaps, inquires disdainfully
whether I consider such trifling incidents and dialogues
as these worthy of notice; and certainly my most suitable
reply seems to be a bow of humility and a shrug of deprecation.

But, after all, is it my fault that I live in a degenerate
age, when there are no dragons, nor enchanters, nor hardly
any pirates, and when fathers do not immure their recusant
daughters in sloppy dungeons? On second thoughts, moreover,
I am thankful that the incidents of my life at Seacliff
were no more melodramatic; for, externally quiet, homely,
and unadventurous as they were, they abbreviated my sleep,
reduced my weight, and kept me in a constant worry. No
man who has not been thoroughly in love, that is so far enamored
as to loathe and despise his bachelorhood, can understand
how many distresses a lover has to encounter, even
when no magician sails away with the mistress of his soul,
and when her papa is but an ordinary specimen of a well-mannered
and pretty good-natured American.

But in reality there was a secret romance, of a painful
character, within that simple country life of Seacliff. It
crept invisibly yet perceptibly, beneath all our hours of innocent
talk and laughter, like a serpent writhing unseen among
fresh grasses and flowers. It was so inaudible that it seemed
far off, inexistent, impossible, and yet it might spring upon us
at any moment, stinging some to death, and others to lifelong
anguish. The lightning is high and quiet in the clouds, but
it can reach the earth in a second, and destroy before its
thunder-footstep has been heard. I was sure that some
vague danger was muttering near, but I could not tell what
was its exact nature, nor whether it was approaching or
retreating. Have you never been surrounded by the din of
streets or of conversation, and at the same time heard music
playing far away, the sound certain but the air uncertain, a
few notes reaching your ear and then no more, and then
again a doubtful muffled burst of the distant melody? You
listen intently, trying to catch the tune, but you listen in
vain, and cannot tell whether it is a bacchanalian song or a
funeral miserere, whether it is a warlike march or a saintly
anthem. It was just so that I hearkened to the undertones
of that mystery which pervaded the life of Seacliff. That

some strange drama, or possibly tragedy was enacting, I
knew; but what it exactly was, how it would end, and when,
I could not be sure. Suspicions indeed I had, sombre and
persistent enough; but no certain knowledge that would enable
me to warn or to save.

Perhaps it will interest some persons to know that Mrs.
Van Leer finished the evening by dragging off Somerville to
walk in the garden. It was a prolonged stroll, and a merry
one, if one could judge by the lady's giggling. In the mean
time Henry Van Leer smoked cigar after cigar, staring abstractedly
at Long Island, and thinking the thoughts of an
oyster. Occasionally he turned his glance toward his wife's
white muslin, as her laughter and chatter burst more merrily
than ordinary from the deepest shadows of the garden; and
then a quiet pleasure illuminated his bovine face, as if another
moon had suddenly shone upon it, and a look of pleasure like
a star beamed from his slow brown eyes. I never knew a
heavier-moulded man, nor one more devoid of guile and suspicion.
He lovingly put his arm round his wife's waist when
she returned, flushed with romping, and elated with the delightful
consciousness that her flirting had been reciprocated.
Dull and leaden as he was, and clever as her sparkling impertinences
sometimes seemed, she was disgracefully unworthy
of him. From this evening she cultivated Somerville;
she irrigated him with her flirtations; and the affair prospered.

As I was leaving the grounds Mr. Westervelt pounced
upon me so suddenly that I suspected him of having laid wait
for me.

“Oh—ah—Mr. Fitz Hugh, is that you?” said he; “I—
I was just meditating on something that—that puzzles me,—
yes, puzzles me. By the way, it is no affair of yours, and I
ought not to trouble you with it. The fact is, I should not
trouble you with it, ha ha, but for the obligations we are
under to you. A curious reason, isn't it? You save my
daughter's life, and I bore you with our private affairs.

Well, the case is, that I am from home a good deal; and
you—you are here a good deal,—I mean occasionally,—
always very happy to have you call, of course; but perhaps,
as you are an observant man, and have had opportunities
for observation,—perhaps you could give me some light on
the subject. The truth is, Mr. Fitz Hugh, that there is
something going on in my house that I do not quite understand.”

In his embarrassment he now came to a full stop. I stood
silent also, looking away from him, puzzled and anxious, if
not fairly alarmed. Had he at last suspected the household
mystery, and was he about to question me concerning its
meaning? What did I know of it, and how could I torture
him with my mere suspicions?

“Really, I ought not to trouble you with it,” he resumed.
“But then, you remember, I made you a confidant in my
views with regard to—to the proposed alliance of our mutual
friend Robert, with—with my family, in short. And, therefore,
it seems natural that I should not conceal from you the
result of those views—or plans. The truth is, that my eldest
daughter seems to be biased against our mutual friend. You
will, of course, keep it a profound secret; but she is prejudiced,—in
fact, decidedly prejudiced. Now, Mr. Fitz Hugh,
who has been the cause of this?” (Here he tried to study
my countenance.) “Do you—allow me to ask—do you suspect
Mr. Somerville of having used any influence against our
mutual friend, Robert?” (Still looking as steadily as he
dared into my eyes, and creeping close up to me as if he
would steal into my mouth after the secret.) “If so, you
would confer a great favor by letting me know it. I should,
of course, use the information with prudence. Excuse me;
it is a bold question, I know; but then I am a father and
have my daughter's hap—” (a cough) “happiness greatly at
heart. And then this Somerville is,—well, excellent family,
to be sure, none better,—fine manners, and all that sort of
thing,—but, after all, he is not exactly the husband that I

should like to give my daughter to. Would hardly make her
happy, I am afraid.”

I had been trying to speak for some time, but he had
checked me eagerly with his forefinger. I answered crisply
and clearly now, for I felt a various and very energetic indignation.
“No, sir, I don't know that Mr. Somerville has
exercised influence for or against Robert. I don't know that
he has any influence with Miss Westervelt. I have been admitted
into neither his secrets nor Miss Westervelt's.”

“Oh!—ah,” he murmured, and slid back from me with an
air of disappointment. While he stood silent, studying out,
perhaps, some new course of cross-examination, I put in a
distracting remark about the weather, bade him a polite good-evening,
and dodged away.

I had no more private conversations with Mr. Westervelt,
for the present. He received news next day that some copper
mine had blown up on Lake Superior, and that his presence
was imperatively demanded among the falling fragments
in New York.

Is any one curious to know how I now stood with Somerville?
He made no more attacks upon me, except it were
in the form of faint insinuations, covert sneers, and ironical
compliments, so glossed over with a sheen of smiles, that I
am not sure, even at this day, that I understood them aright.
In the mean time I question whether he was profoundly comfortable,
although no billow underneath ever rocked the frozen
surface above. Day by day he must have seen more clearly
that he had no chance of winning Miss Westervelt; and
such revelations can grievously vex the vanity of a woman-killer,
even if they cannot disturb his heart. As for me, I
did not seek quarrel; I was too happy, too contented for
that; it is never the winning player who gets angry. I
hoped, or rather I dared believe that I was finding my way
back to Miss Westervelt's confidence, and that she already
looked upon me as a sure friend in time of trouble. Did I
hear this confession in her tones, or see it in her manner?

Of course I could not: a man in love is like one who carries
a lantern by night; his own form is lit up, but all at a little
distance is darkness. However, there soon came an hour
when I no longer groped alone, but saw another figure beside
me, she also bearing a lantern like mine, which illuminated
her fair face, and showed me that on her forehead was written
a new name.