 | CHAPTER XXV.
THE OLD, OLD STORY. Seacliff, or, The mystery of the Westervelts |  |
25. CHAPTER XXV.
THE OLD, OLD STORY.
IT was a still, hot midsummer twilight when Pa
Treat came home from a barn-raising which had
been accomplished some two miles distant, and told
a pitiful story of a poor, simple fellow named Warner, who
had fallen from a scaffolding and been carried home with a
broken leg.
“It's a bad business for him and his folks,” observed Pa
Treat, gravely. “I know they haint anything for a rainy
day. He's a mighty feeble, silly creetur; don't know how
to work; wife don't know how to save. Regular pair of—
blunderbusses. A whole boat-load of young 'uns, too. They'll
be hard up.”
It struck me at once that I ought to walk over to Warner's,
and see what I could do for him. In general I am a
lazy man in my charities, and would rather give a dollar to a
street beggar whom I strongly suspect of being an impostor,
than go half a dozen blocks to expend a shilling on a worthy
family; but Miss Westervelt had invigorated all my virtues,
and made me for the time an indomitable philanthropist. I
knew that she would hurry to the Warners as soon as she
learned of their distress, and I wished to have her hear
that I had been there before her. Accordingly, putting
money in my purse, and taking a basket of eatables which
Ma Treat contributed, I set off, at about half-past seven, on
flocked in the horizon; a current of fresh humid wind shot
through the sultry atmosphere; and I had not made a quarter
of a mile before I thought it prudent to go back for my
umbrella. Now came an obstacle in the way of my benignity:
the desired utensil could nowhere be discovered. Unquestionably
there is something remarkably transitory and
migratory in the character of umbrellas. Their sudden and
unlooked-for disappearances have no little air of the marvellous;
and perhaps it might be reckoned one of the great questions
of the age, where all the umbrellas go to? Innumerable
individuals have lost one, but nobody ever seems to have
found one. Whether they are subject to the mysterious and
mischievous principalities of the air, or whether they take
flight to the arctic circles in search of their whale relatives,
it would be difficult to decide; but it seems certain that
they are occasionally governed by influences not altogether
human.
My umbrella was as undiscoverable as the northwest passage.
Darkness was upon earth, the storm approaching; and
Ma Treat urged me, with motherly solicitude for my health,
to put off my philanthropy till the morrow; but I thought
of Miss Westervelt, and plunged out into the murky, gusty
evening. I walked furiously; struck across lots to shorten
the distance; came to a swamp and was obliged to go round
it; lost the road and had to inquire it at three farm-houses;
and thus was fully three quarters of an hour in going the
two miles. During the last ten minutes I travelled fast,
lighted and speeded on by streams of lightning sharp, near,
and almost continuous in their blinding succession. The final
ten rods were done at a killing pace under the first drenching
rush of the storm. As I came in front of the house, an electric
blaze lit it up with such a pale dazzling glory as the
most sumptuous palace never wore by day, transfiguring its
low, brown, dilapidated front into the similitude of a spectral,
spiritual mansion not made with hands, and worthy to shine
moonlight; greater still the terrible enchantment of lightning.
I burst into the front door without knocking, and
stood for a moment dripping in a dark entry. Then a side
door opened, letting a glimmer of light upon me; and a
shrill, disagreeable female voice called through the crack,
“Who's there?”
Bowing blandly, I announced my name and errand with
that insinuating, almost apologetical voice, which a man is
very apt to use when he is offering a charity which may not,
perhaps, be graciously received.
“Come in,” said Mrs. Warner, “flinging the door back.
“Much obleeged to ye, to be sure. Law suz, how wet ye
be! Let me take yer basket. Oh!” (with some contempt)
“cold victuals! We shall have cold victuals enough, I
reckon. Can't pay the doctor with cold victuals.”
“From Mrs. Treat,” said I, and stopped in wonder, to
stare at Miss Westervelt. There she was, in her broad hat
and linen cape, standing by the bedside of the maimed man
and nodding to me with a smile and a blush.
“You are before me, then?” I said. “Of course. Well,
what is there to be done?”
“Nothing,” she replied. “Except for Mr. Warner to lie
here patiently till his leg is well,” she added, turning to the
invalid.
“That's enough, I reckon,” he muttered in a tone half
chuckle, half whimper. “It's play for the rest of you, but
work for me. Oh, Lordy!”
“Guess I've got to work a few to get your living, old
man,” remarked the wife, snappishly. “How I'm to dew it,
and wait on you tew, the goodness gracious knows,—I don't.”
“Don't be uneasy, Mrs. Warner,” said I. “You shan't
suffer. Keep up your spirits, and things won't go so badly.”
“Well, I'm glad to hear on't,” was her gracious reply.
“But we have suffered in our time, and I wan't folks to
know it.”
“Where are the children?” I asked. “I thought you
had five or six.”
“So we have,” she responded with a grimace which did
not seem to express gratitude for the blessing. “Wall,
the two oldest is out to sarvice, finally. As for the young
'uns, one neighbor has took one, and one has took another,
till we've got rid of the whole scrape and bilin of 'em, 'cept
Polly there, who's kep to go arrants and fetch the doctor.”
I turned and surveyed a dirty, ragged, sunburnt girl of
six or seven, sitting on her heels in a corner, and staring
wistfully at her mother, who just then picked a lump of
sugar out of the basket and ate it with gusto. The child
sighed slightly, glanced at me as if to demand my interest,
and observed in a clear, pleasant, resigned voice, with perhaps
a dash of vanity in it, “I get sugar too, when I take my
gin.”
The maternal fist was shaken at her in a private way, and
the remark did not give rise to conversation.
The Warners, in short, were by no means interesting poor
people. The father was a simpleton, the mother a tartar, the
children pests to the neighborhood; and all of them drank
spirituous liquors to the utmost measure of their ability to
have and to hold. In almost every New England township
there are two or three such families, whose names are become
synonyms for hereditary vice and worthlessness, whose young
ones feed the prisons, and whose elders are buried without a
stone in the shabbiest corner of the churchyard. The breed
seems to be hopelessly bad, and its history is a monotonous
record of idleness and crime, ending with an attack of the
venerable family distemper, delirium tremens, or perchance
with a more exalted anguish in the prison court.
There was little to do at present for the relief of the Warners.
The doctor had set the limb skilfully and the injured
man was not sick enough to require a watcher. I
slipped into the entry, on pretence of looking at the weather,
but really to get a bill out of my pocket-book, wherewith
followed me and whispered, “Don't give them money.
They might spend it foolishly. Our way is to put a few dollars
to their credit at the Temperance Store in Rockford, and
let them trade it out. It keeps them from buying rum.”
I thanked her, and, reëntering the room, informed the
Warners, somewhat to their disgust, I thought, that I should
deposit ten dollars to their account in the Temperance Store.
I have sometimes wondered whether I should have given as
much as that, if Miss Westervelt had not been present and
things generally had not been pretty much as things happily
were.
“Our next business is to get home,” observed I, glancing
at the streaming windows.
“That will be easy enough,” said Miss Westervelt. “The
carriage is close by, in some shed or other. Will you
call it?”
Forgetting that my voice was water-proof, while my person
was apt to catch cold, I did not stand wisely in the entry
and halloo, but ran out in the rain to look for James. He
saw me, probably, for there was a trampling of hoofs, a rolling
of wheels, and the Seacliff barouche pulled up at the
door. An encouraging word to the sick man, a “Good-night,
ma'am,” to Mrs. Warner, a sixpence to the darling who
only got sugar when she took her gin, a helping hand to Miss
Westervelt, and I found myself buttoned up warm in the
carriage, having of course forgotten Ma Treat's eleemosynary
basket.
A slight arrangement of dress, perhaps unconscious, seemed
to tell me that I might venture to take a seat beside Miss
Westervelt. The thunder had ceased now, and the rearguard
of the rain was hurrying past us in a charge of heavy,
scattering drops; but the curtains were down and the windows
closed, so that no belated passer, nor even the coachman
could possibly see or hear us. It was the first time that I
had ever been shut away with her alone, where no eye could
from us, leaving me at liberty to speak all my thoughts; but,
in place of the world, there was a spectral hand on my throat,
strangling the words that I longed to utter. It was the same
mysterious, elfish hand that has sought to force silence on
every man that ever loved. Why was human nature so
ordained that it cannot enunciate its most earnest, most sacred
emotions, at least for the first time, except in accents that
faint and flutter like little birds taking their first flight from
the nest?
“Miss Westervelt, there is something which I must tell you,”
I said, suddenly, shaking the phantom grasp from my throat
for a moment. She made no reply, but I expected none,
waited for none, and continued, hurriedly, “Yes, I have
something to tell you; and then a question to ask you.”
I said it, I asked it, in spite of the goblin hand, in spite of
Robert and Mr. Westervelt, in spite of the mystery. I remember
the very words which faltered over my lips, like
dying waves sobbing across a bar, but I shall not write them
here, for although they were only mine, and were, perhaps,
of most commonplace nature, they still seem to me too sacred
to be flung through the world.
“Oh, Mr. Fitz Hugh! stop!” she whispered. “Please,
don't say this to me. You must not! you must not!”
“And why must I not?” said I, eagerly, the phantom
grasp all broken now. “What is there in the way? Do
you dislike me? Tell me. Do you dislike me?”
There was a “No,” whispered, oh so faintly, so unwillingly,
and yet so kindly!
“Then, why may I not talk to you so?” I urged. “Why
not ask you that? Can't you ever like me enough to be
what I wish you to be? Don't make me unhappy. Can't
you? Tell me, yes.”
Perhaps the spectre was troubling her now, for she made
no answer, except to sob gently. Of a sudden she snatched
her hand away from my lips, saying, “No no! I cannot—I
it any more.”
“But what does this mean, Mary? What is it that makes
it wrong? Are you—engaged to any one else? Is that
it?”
“No no! I am not engaged. I never have been. Oh!
I cannot tell you what it is. Please, don't ask me.”
“Is it your father? Does he dislike me? I know that he
meant you for some one else,—for Robert. It was he who
told me so; and I supposed at one time that you were certainly
to marry Robert.”
“No, it is not that. That is all over. I could never
marry Robert, and papa knows it. It is something else, that
I can never tell you; but if you should ever know it, you
would be satisfied; you would feel that I am doing right in
saying that we must never, never talk of this any more.”
“You could love me, then? and you are willing to marry
me? but you cannot?”
“Oh, no! I cannot. I must not, for your sake. You
would not wish me to do it, if you knew all. For your own
sake, you would not.”
“But, what if I do not care at all about my own sake?
What if my own sake insists on being married without the
least regard to consequences,—without the least regard to
anything, however frightful or painful, or shameful?”
“It is impossible. You talk in that way because you do
not know what I know. If I should accept you now, and
tell you this secret afterward, when it would be too late for
you to retreat, you would hate me. No, believe me that I
know best; and I know that I ought not to consent.”
In spite of the darkness and the muddy road, the driver
had made good speed, and we were now grinding through the
gravel before the front steps of Seacliff. There was just
time to give her hand a dozen kisses, and to whisper, “You
must consent; you shall consent; I will talk to you about this
to-morrow,” when the door opened, and I had to aid her into
Mrs. Westervelt had come out to meet us. She stared at my
dear companion's blushing excited face, and turned briskly
to give me a glance of scrutiny, under pretence of seeing
if I was not wet. Protesting my state of perfect drouth, I
slid into the shadow of one of the Ionic columns, made my
goodnight bow from thence, muttered something about the
pleasure of seeing her again in the morning, and skipped
away homeward. Ma Treat gave me no peace, and would
accept of none herself until I had changed all my clothes, and
scalded myself half to death with hot tea. I got away from
her as soon as possible, and locked myself into my room to
enjoy the tumultuous, tossing gladness of my heart, all as absurd,
of course, to the matter-of-fact reader as the waves of
the ocean to the stirless, voiceless rocks that look down upon
them. What these emotions were, I leave to the popular
imagination, conscious that I have already been night upon
wearisome in my confessions, and that I have hazarded a bold
stroke in relating a love-scene to this turtle-blooded century.
There are two periods in the life of a male human creature
when he is apt to undervalue, or even to despise love-making.
The first arrives in his extreme youth, before the mental and
moral toga has been conferred on him; the second in his old
age, after all the strength and fire of his noble prime have
burned to cinders, and been dusted away by the wings of
Time. As is the life of an individual, so, say the philosophers,
is the life of a people. In which of these two periods
our present sociality may be, whether in that of passionless
childhood, or in that of exhausted senescence, I will not
attempt to decide, although I greatly fear that we are very
old, and, morally speaking, shall never see ninety again.
I felt no timidity, no doubts, no uneasiness, no repentance,
nothing but gayety, happiness, and triumph, when I went up
to Seacliff the next morning. I did not care a straw for her
“must-nots” and “cannots,” her hesitations and refusals. I
knew what she meant by them all; I knew that she alluded
did not care for the shame, and I would not have cared for it
had it stood already unveiled to the world; or rather, I longed
to bear it with her, since it must be borne, and to put my own
shoulders, instead of hers, beneath the burden. It was in the
garden, on the bench of the grape arbor, that I found her.
She looked very sad, thinking over her “must-nots” and
“cannots,” I suppose; but started up at sight of me, with a
bright blush and a tremulous smile, such as greet a dear
friend rather than an enemy.
“I have come to talk to you again about it, as I told you
I should,” said I.
She shook her head gravely, but did not speak, although
her lips half parted.
“I could not say, last evening, half the things that I wanted
to say,” I went on. “But tell me one thing, Mary, before
all others. What is that great obstacle?”
“Oh, don't ask me! I can really never tell you that.
Don't force me!” she pleaded. “You would never ask me
that question again if you knew how unhappy I am,—and
have been.” The tears started quickly, but she brushed
them away with her hand, and quelled herself. “It is enough
that I know what it is,” she added, calmly, “and that I know
it to be sufficient.”
“But, suppose that I too know what it is, and that I don't
consider it by any means sufficient,” said I.
“But you don't know,—you can't know,” she responded,
excitedly.
“But I do know, Mary; at least I think I do. Is it not
something connected with Mr. Somerville?”
The blood all left her cheeks, and she stared at me quietly,
silently, as a corpse might stare.
“I am sure that it is,” I went on. “I know so much, at least.
But, listen,—don't be alarmed,—I know very little more. He
is spinning some wicked web here;—I am sure of that,
perfectly sure;—but that is all that I am sure of. Never
But, I must say this one thing further. Whatever he has
done, whatever he is doing or may do, it makes no difference
with me. No difference? I will care for you all the more.
Remember, now:—I shall not change my feelings or wishes
because of Somerville;—I am still determined to ask for
you; still determined to —”
Well, I will not repeat all that long conversation which it
cost me to silence her scruples and quiet her anxieties.
| CHAPTER XXV.
THE OLD, OLD STORY. Seacliff, or, The mystery of the Westervelts | |