University of Virginia Library

27. CHAPTER XXVII.
OPEN PLEASURES AND SECRET SORROWS.

AN hour of the next morning was consecrated to the
selection of a diamond ring. How difficult I was to
suit, and how fearful that the one I decided upon was
not handsome enough, was not fashionable, would not please
her! The little talisman made the journey short, and made
all things among which I passed invisible, so that I seemed
to arrive at Seacliff swifter than thought, unconscious of the
cars, of the stations, of the landscape, or of any fellow-traveller
beside the ticket-seeking conductor. At Rockford a
change came over my enchantment in the shape of an ancient,
jolting hack, which transported me with more noise
than speed to the house of Pa Treat, where I awoke with
some difficulty to the realities of washing and dressing.

At the garden gate of Seacliff I met Bob Van Leer.
I was about to pass him with a customary nod, when I was
arrested by the intense expression which transfigured his
usually torpid visage. If the languid moon had suddenly
shone out with the dazzling strength of the sun, I could
hardly have been more surprised than I was to see in his
face such a passion of reproach, and grief, and anger. I
felt like a monstrous hypocrite when I asked him, with an
assumption of innocence, “Bob, what's the matter?”

At first he did not speak, probably because he could not,
for a tide of blood set into his cheeks and his features worked

violently, like the waters of a disturbed sea. He glanced
successively at my feet, at the Sound, at the sky; then tore
off a rose-branch and pulled it in pieces; then burst out on
me in capitals.

“Oh! YOU don't know what's the matter. You're mighty
ignorant, all at once. I know what it is. What do you
think? It's her.” (With a wild fling of his hand toward the
house.) “You know that it's about her. What else do I care
for? You've got her. So that's what you've been staying
here for! Why didn't you tell me so before, and not
let me go on making a fool of myself? Oh, it's precious
mean!”

Here his strong voice sank struggling down, like a dying
gladiator while the tears forced their way through his thick
eyelashes. Let us have pity for the simple souls that cannot
adequately plead their own cause and utter their own sufferings,
but stand before us with blind weeping or mere dumb,
anguished silence. How little sympathy we are apt to accord
them when they need and therefore deserve so much!
Often since that moment has the woe-begone face which poor
Robert wore risen up to haunt my hours of serenest content,
and obtained a compassion which just then I could not afford.
It is an accusing face, and seems to demand that I should
render some stern verdict against myself, although in my
heart I know that I am not guiltily the cause of its sorrow.

“Not mean, Bob!” said I. “You can't be in earnest
there. Come, you forget that you gave me liberty to ask for
her; that you begged me to save her from Somerville,” I
added, trying to smile it off.

“Oh! it's mighty pretty to bring that up,” he replied, not
in the least mitigated. “That's mighty cunning, that is.
But it don't signify. No use talking. I'm going. I shan't
stay here. Take her and keep her. I shall quit this blasted
place forever.”

He flung away from me and marched down the hill with
great strides, not once looking back. I watched him for ten

seconds; it was all that I could grant to his grief in the
selfishness of my joy; then I hurried into the house.

Miss Westervelt sat by a window, her face bent over a
trifle of embroidery, her long eyelashes pencilling her cheek
with little halos of fine shadow, and her blonde hair made
golden by splashes of sunlight which fell upon it through the
interstices of fluttering vine-leaves. She looked more than
ever like a girlish Madonna, except that as I entered she
blushed into a beauty beyond the possibilities of any pictured
Mary. A smile and a little nod was all the salutation that
I got or wanted. Seating myself on an ottoman near her,
I watched her in silence until she looked up with another
smile, half amused, half embarrassed, and asked, “Well, how
do you do this afternoon? Is that what you are waiting for
me to say?”

“I have seen your grandpapa,” said I. “I have had a
talk with Westervelt, senior.”

“I hope you liked him,” she replied, trying to laugh, but
not succeeding well.

“He treated me very badly,” I went on. “He seems to
be a man of the severest character.”

The color flew into her face, but she made no answer, and
resumed her embroidery with an appearance of great industry
and absorption.

“But he came round,” I added. “I finally had to admit
that he is the tenderest-hearted old gentleman that ever lived.”

She threw down her work and burst into a fit of laughter
that was almost convulsive; the blue veins in her neck and
temples swelled, and the rosy blood bloomed from chin to
forehead; she leaned back in her chair and tried to hide her
face in her tiny, trembling fingers.

“He was obliged to have recourse to his handkerchief
before I left him,” I continued.

“Oh, don't make me laugh so!” she begged. “I can't
help it; it's so ridiculous! Please don't cut jokes on my
grandpapa.”

“Well, listen then. I'll tell you every word that was said;
every word that I said to him, and every word that he said
to me.”

“No, no! don't do that!” she exclaimed, blushing again.
“I won't hear all; no, not every word.”

Little by little, however, I got out the whole story, very
much as things actually happened. As any other woman
would have done, she listened eagerly to the end, sometimes
flushing as I recounted my confessions and declarations, sometimes
laughing irrepressibly at her grandfather's granitic responses.
In my masculine inexperience and stupidity, I did
not then comprehend that this merriment was more than half
hysterical, and could not guess that, as soon as I left her, she
would shut herself up in her room and give way to that
necessity of over-excited womanhood, a hearty cry.

“I had just finished my tale when a servant brought in a
large letter, enveloped in business-like drab, addressed to
Miss Westervelt.

“Let me take the letter,” I said, when she had read it
twice over and was about to put it away in her pocket.

“No, no! It is from grandpapa; it is private. I musn't
give it to you.”

Whether she gave it to me or not, I soon had it, and here
it is.

“A remarkably sensible letter,” said I; “although the first
half sounds as if it must have been written at the counting-house.”

“One of the kindest letters,—the very kindest,—that we
ever got from grandpapa,” she murmured, looking happy and
grateful.

I quietly imprisoned the hand that was extended to receive
the bit of paper; and before she could withdraw it, the ring,
the jewelled circlet of promise, was on the engagement finger.

“How resolved you are!” she tried to speak, but could
only whisper. “Oh! I hope you will never repent of it.”

It never once occurred to me as singular that we should be
left alone for two hours or more, until a noise of wheels and
voices announced that the rest of the family had returned
from some excursion.

“They have been to the fair at Rockford,” explained
Mary.

“Why didn't you go!” I inquired, smiling, perhaps conceitedly.

“You are very saucy. You think that I stayed because

I expected you,” she replied, blushing. “I wanted to finish
this work, you see.”

“Oh! how glad I am that you didn't lose the fair on my
account,” I observed.

“Are you offended?” she asked, raising her eyes quickly.
“I will tell you why I stayed, some day.”

“But the ring,” said I, remembering that she had not
once looked at it. “Does it please you? I will exchange
it.”

“Oh, no! don't exchange it,” she answered, glancing at it
hastily as if frightened to see it there. “It is beautiful. One
large stone. I like it a great deal better than a cluster. It
is such a pretty ring.”

I fancy that almost every young man is anxious about the
style of his engagement ring, and that every true-hearted,
loving girl admires hers, no matter what its fashion.

Mrs. Westervelt seemed to divine our secret immediately
that she entered the room, notwithstanding that I saluted her
with a solemn politeness which I thought the perfection of
dissimulation. Perhaps she caught a glimpse of the telltale
ring, for women are quick in spying out objects of that nature.
Giving me a slight pressure of the hand in passing,
she advanced smilingly to Mary, kissed her, and then, without
a word, tripped out of the parlor. Her cheek grew
girlish again with color, and the weary expression so common
on her face gave way to a look of happy sympathy, which
seemed to lift ten years off her forehead and much sin off her
soul.

Genevieve showed the same instinctive recognition of what
had happened, but in a different way. She gave us a side
glance through the door as she passed it, but turned quickly
when Mary raised her eyes toward her, and hurried up stairs
without nodding or speaking. I believe that most young and
impressible natures dread to exchange the first look with a
loved familiar face which has just been touched, and, as it
were, transformed by a new and mighty emotion, a solemn

and eternal vow. Let no one wonder that the two girls cried
together before they went to sleep; for love had made them
one ever since they were children; and here, suddenly, was
something which divided them, so that they could never more
be to each other all that they had been.

Next came Mrs. Van Leer; bold, self-possessed, gay, flippant;
the feminine impersonation of sounding brass and
tinkling cymbals; never had her low-necked conversation
and manner struck me so disagreeably. Entering with flirt
and flutter of ostentatiously displayed embroidery, she made
us a low mock courtesy, and then, handing her parasol to
Somerville, sank languishingly on the sofa, while the wrought
skirts were artistically disordered. Next it was, “I am dy—
ing of heat. Do fan me, Mr. Somerville. Why isn't my
hus—band here to do it. Mr. Fitz Hugh, if you ever should
marry, do try to love your wife better than your hor—ses.”

She threw off her scarf presently, exposing her neck and
shoulders. She had a passion for low dresses, which she
gratified on every occasion sanctioned by fashion, and to the
most dizzying verge of propriety. Hoydenish, thoughtless,
vain, and knowing well, I suppose, that her form was handsomer
than her face, she could not be contented unless the
world had at least a suspicion of the grace which a cruel
civilization insisted on obscuring. She leaned her head on
her hand now, and her elbow on a scroll of the sofa, regardless
of the position and glances of Somerville. He stood
near her, almost touching her bare arm, plying the fan with
an air of assiduous politeness, but bending on her a long
steady stare, so sensual and at the same time so contemptuous,
that if she had seen it, I think she would have drawn
away from him in both fear and anger. Probably Mary
did not understand what I understood, but fearing that she
might, and wishing to release her from such a scene, I bade
them all good evening.

It was not till the next morning that I saw Mr. Westervelt.
He walked out to the garden gate to meet me, and

shook both my hands with an earnestness which really seemed
a little like good-will. “Well!” he smiled, “I find that
everything is settled. I am most happy to welcome you as a
member of my family. I am satisfied—that is to say, gratified
with the course things have taken; though, as you
perhaps perceived, it was at first a surprise to me. But
walk in, sir, walk in; you will find them all there.”

He was willing to be polite to me, it seems, for lack of
ability to get rid of me. Had Westervelt, senior, bribed him
for me with a loan or an indorsement, or had he drifted over
to my side on the languid, timorous current of his own feebleness?

Henry Van Leer was smoking his three consecutive after-breakfast
cigars in the veranda. The others were in the
parlor; the two married ladies discussing the figures of a
quadrille; Somerville talking Ruskin to Mary, who listened
unresponsively, and as if at a great distance; Robert
seeking revenge for his rejection, according to the immemorial
stupid custom of disappointed lovers, by paying
loud and ostentatious court to Genevieve. At sight of
me seating myself beside Mary, the poor fellow's assumed
bravery departed, his fine bass voice faltered into silence,
and he unobservedly melted from our presence. He had
fallen from his paradise, poor Robert; the flaming swords
were shining in the gate; and he must wander away. In
the last afternoon train of that day he took his eternal
departure from Seacliff, carrying with him, I doubt not, a
portmanteau of sorrows, big enough to fill any baggage-car
of any supposable spiritual railroad. How many people pass
us daily in the world, laden with heavy burdens which few
can see and none can unloose! Of all his fellow passengers,
was there one who, glancing over the young fellow's
expressionless broad face and burly frame, divined that
under his gray travelling waistcoat of latest fashion there
lay a heart of which the pulsations were like the throbs of
a wound?

“I'm bound for Europe,” said he, wofully smiling at us
from the carriage. “I don't know as I shall ever see any
of you again. Good-bye, all. Good-bye, Mary.”

He was so sad, so humble, so forgiving, when he thus put
out his hand for the last time, that she turned pale and looked
conscience-stricken as if she had done him some wrong. I
know that after him went forth soft wings of pity, which
would have veiled his past and borne him into some happy
future, if kindness were omnipotence. When he disappeared
beneath the brow of the hill, she glided soberly into the house
alone. I did not follow her immediately, but stopped to talk
with Genevieve, who, having seen Robert off with extreme
indifference, was about to take a course of novel-reading in
one of the grape-arbors. She could look me in the face now,
and she began gayly upon the engagement.

“Come in, brother Louis. So you have got my sister at
last? Don't you think it was mean in you to cut out poor
Robert? Why didn't you ask for me, who had no beau?”

“Because you don't want a beau. Because you are too
young for such things.”

“Young? Nonsense! I am not so much younger than
Mary. I am seventeen, and she is only nineteen. You
think then that I am too young to love, or to be loved, by a
man of your prodigious maturity?”

“Exactly; just my humble opinion; don't you agree to it?”

“No, sir!” she answered with amusing indignation. “I
am old enough to appreciate,—yes, to love,—a man of twice
your years and brains.”

My old suspicion that she was interested in Somerville
returned, at least to my memory.

“It is no compliment to your own brains if you are doing
it,” I said, watching her closely.

“What do you mean by that?” she asked, while the spirit
of Westervelt, senior, flashed out of her blue-gray eyes,
“Do you mean to say that I am in love with any person
much older than you? You are not my brother-in-law yet.

You have no right to pry into my secrets,—supposing I have
any.”

“Genevieve, I do not pry into them. If they come to my
knowledge, it is because you expose them by your own actions.
You cast them before me,—like pearls before swine,
I suppose you would say.”

“No, no! I don't do that, do I?” she replied hastily.
“You don't mean to say that people suspect me of being
—?”

“Of being fascinated with Somerville?” I concluded the
sentence for her.

“No, not that!” she said, scowling as if at something repulsive.
“You don't mean seriously to say that you suspect
me of that?”

“Genevieve, I don't mean to say anything unkind to you.
I like you very much, and wish you every happiness. I dislike
Somerville excessively, and believe him to be a wicked
man. I did once suspect you of being influenced by him,
and I want you to make me happy by telling me that I was
mistaken.”

“Look here,” she said, with childlike simplicity, as if she
were about to take her heart out of her breast and show it
to me. “When Mr. Somerville first began to visit us here,
before you came, I used to like him very well. Why, it was
quite natural. He is a handsome man and a very fascinating
man; and, although he is thirty-seven, he does not look thirty.
Then too, there was no one else to think about. Poor Robert
was dead in love with sister, and besides, he was not clever
enough to suit me, though he is a good soul and I am sorry
for him. So it was to be expected that I should fancy the
society of Mr. Somerville, and should think him a very attractive
gentleman. But that is all gone by; yes, long ago;
two months, three months ago. Mary beat it out of me.
She could not bear him, and could not bear to have me talk
to him. Mary is wonderfully clever, I can tell you: wise as
a serpent, if she is harmless as a dove: you needn't think

that you have got a simpleton whom you can twist around
your finger. She has helped me out of many little scrapes;
and she kept me from getting into this big one. So you may
be perfectly tranquil about me on the score of Mr. Somerville.
I know a great deal more about him than you do, and
I dislike him worse than you possibly can. If I were papa,”
she added, nodding her head repeatedly and emphatically,
“if I were papa, I would not have such a man here; I
would put him out of the house before night, bag and baggage.”

“I am much obliged to you, dear Genevieve,” said I, giving
her hand a brotherly kiss. “You are very kind in being
so frank to me.”

“Well, go along now and talk to sister.—Console her for
the loss of Robert,” she called as I mounted the steps.

Poor Robert! By the next evening I was installed in
that very room where he had so often listened with drowsy
delight to the indistinct murmur of Mary's voice in the opposite
chamber.

Now came two or three days during which Mrs. Van Leer
and Somerville flirted perpetually. It was a wonder to me
that her husband did not notice it; but he was doubly shielded
from suspicion by a good conscience and a stupid brain.
Mrs. Westervelt watched the two triflers gravely at times,
but not with a seeming of jealousy. The suspicion crossed
my mind that she had got wearied of Somerville's influence,
whatever its nature might be, and was glad to see him diverted
from herself, at no matter what cost to others. Mary
and Genevieve treated him with a daily increasing coldness,
which he pretended not to notice. His bearing toward the
girls had changed greatly since my arrival at Seacliff; then
he was polite, indeed, but blandly patronizing and almost
parental: now he affected profound respect and the very
humility of gallantry. With Mrs. Westervelt he rarely
talked much in the house, but occasionally walked with her
in the garden, always apart, glancing around to see if any

one were near, gentle in tone and gesture, but with transient
gleams of cruelty in his look. So full of pain and fear and
desperation was her face as she listened, that at times she
could not compose it to meet us, but had to leave him and
hurry off alone.

Amid all this earnestness of inexpressible passion, this
love and hatred and despair and woe, Mrs. Van Leer continued
her unmeaning, purposeless, doll-like coquetries.
Twenty-seven years old as she was, the woman's heart had
not yet reached the age of puberty. But the current of
emotion which was flowing stronger and stronger, daily
through the family life, influenced even her so far as to make
her show forth one feeling of respectable vigor; a sarcastic
pettishness toward Mary and myself began to flavor her soda-water
conversation. I had never given her thin, frothy
character credit for possessing such a body of spleen, such
a rich bouquet of sauce. Whether her spiteful manner resulted
from the malicious incitations of Somerville, or from
personal indignation at me, because I had left the shrine
where her plump shoulders and neat ankles demanded worship,
I would not dare to decide.

One morning Mary was confined to her room by a violent
headache, and therefore my stay in the parlor had been wearisome
dulness and abstraction. We were a divided family
now, with separate secrets, separate suspicions and purposes,
responding to no common sympathy, and always failing when
we tried to open a general conversation. Mrs. Westervelt
was in the veranda with her cousin Henry; Mrs. Van Leer
giggled and chattered infinite platitudes to Somerville on the
sofa in the front parlor; Genevieve sat near me, embroidering
soberly, and only now and then disturbing my languor
with some torpid, dreamy reminiscence of Europe.
Thus I journeyed for more than an hour in one of those
subjective accommodation-trains that we call a revery, gazing
idly out of the windows of my spirit car, and conscious
occasionally that my eyes had rested for a good while on Mrs.

Van Leer. She, too, seemed to notice it, and exchanged several
whispers with Somerville, intermixed with quick defiant
glances at me. Finally he left her, came smilingly to Genevieve,
and asked if she would do him the favor to take a turn
with him in the veranda.

“No, thank you,” was her cool reply. “I must go and sit
with Mary. Good-night, Louis.”

She went up stairs directly, and he sauntered away alone.
As soon as the room was clear of listeners, Mrs. Van Leer
came at me with a look which was quite equivalent to a box
on the ear.

“Mr. Fitz Hugh,” she said, sneeringly, “you behave a
little too much like a police detective. You have been watching
me all this evening.”

“Not at all,” replied I, indignant at the charge. “I shall
leave that arduous duty to your husband.”

“He has no need of watching me,” she whispered, reddening
from chin to forehead. “How gallant you are! I really
must compliment you on your stock of impudence.”

“Oh, Madame!” said I, “and I am so far your inferior!”

She tried to reply, but her anger choked her into a fit of
coughing; and at last, turning short, she rustled out of the
parlor and away to her bedroom. From that hour Mrs. Van
Leer and I were on terms of the most intimate disagreement.
She could never keep her feeble anger to herself, but, like all
shallow saucepans, boiled over, stormy with steam and bubble,
on the slightest provocation.

In the mean time I knew, although I saw them not, that
there were plenty of secret tears in the life of Seacliff. Have
you never walked in early morning through summer woods,
and heard dew-drops fall, one by one, separately, slowly, behind
you, on either side, before you, without seeing one in its
descent, nor being able to note the bough from which it
parted? Or have you not heard a mournful soughing of
wind among the tree-tops in a particular spot, and, on reaching
it, found the branches all stiffened again, and the leaves

motionless? There are passings without footsteps; invisible
presences and audible vanishings; voices which, when you listen
to them turn to silence. You think almost that there are
spirits in the air who mock you, or who long to communicate
with you and cannot. Just so vague and transitory were the
signs of misery that I could detect in the existence around me.
In distant rooms I heard tones sharp with anger or broken with
dejection, but could not tell positively whose they were, nor
why they thus thrilled with passion. The lids that drooped
at my approach, as if to hide tears, were raised in a moment
from eyes full of calmness and seeming merriment. People
who walked slowly, pensively, and sadly together, quickened
their footsteps at the sound of mine, and, smiling in my face,
gathered bouquets for me. I could see all this now that I
knew the mystery, although, before, the same things had
passed athwart my vision invisible.

At last I resolved that I had a right to question Mary concerning
this miserable secret, and learn its exact nature, so
that I might go to work advisedly to break its cruel hold upon
the family. She admitted that there was a mystery, but she
implored me earnestly not to ask her to reveal it; and when
I insisted, she calmly told me that just now she could do me
only one kindness, and that was to free me. Of course I got
quite indignant at this offer; and so she laid her head against
my shoulder and cried. I had just begged a reconciliation
and tranquillized her, when we heard wheels and a voice that
sounded like Robert's.

“Is it possible?” I laughed. “Has Bob's eternity ended?”

We ran to the window and looked down the pathway.
There, sure enough, was Bob, waving his Kossuth hat toward
us, and trying to hide some little shame at his faint-hearted
return under a bravado of cheery running and shouting. His
full chest had not hollowed perceptibly, nor had his broad face
shrunk, nor his thick, brown locks whitened. Behind him
came a hackman and his subaltern, staggering under the two
enormous trunks which a week before had been so solemnly

and laboriously packed for a residence of a cycle or two in
Europe.

“Hullo!” exclaimed Bob, beaming upon us with mingled
joy and sheepishness, like the sun shining through a fog.
“How d'ye do, Mary? How are you, old feller? Well,
I couldn't go it, nohow. I had to come back. I s'pose you
an't glad to see me, though.”

“Oh, yes we are, Robert,” said Mary, shaking both his
hands, and laughing kindly in his anxious face. “I am delighted
to see you, and so will the rest be. We missed you,
Robert.”

“That's you, Mary! that's you. You are a real good girl,
you are, and it's very kind of you,—God bless you, Mary!”

The tears came into the big brown eyes again; and he
stood staring at her with the fond look of a good dog who
watches his master; not a particle of egotistic reserve in it,
but all humility, adoration, and self-sacrifice. After paying
the hack over-generously, he dropped into a chair and told
his story, so brief, so melancholy, so laughable! He had taken
passage for Liverpool, in a packet, hoping to prevent consumption
by the long voyage; but had lost his courage off
Sandy Hook, forfeited his money, and returned to New York
in the tug-boat. The next morning, unable to keep away
from Seacliff any longer, he had, as he phrased it, “come
back to make friends with us all, and ask pardon for his foolishness.”
He presently brought out a handsome set of Neapolitan
corals for Mary, and then made her laugh and blush
together by begging that he might be one of her bridesmaids
—no, confound it! groomsmen. His square jaw dropped a
quarter of an inch when he learned that I had taken his
room, but he would not hear to my leaving it, and immediately
set about installing himself in my old apartment at Pa
Treat's.