University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER I.
THE HOUSE OF SEACLIFF.

IT was exactly a year since I had said good-bye to Mr.
and Mrs. Westervelt, and to the two Misses Westervelt,
in Switzerland.

I had left them on the summit of the Righi at sunrise,
leaning over the awful outlying brink of the alp, and looking
downward upon an ocean of clouds dazzling-white, surging,
billowy, and cleft in fleecy chasms, through which appeared
the gleam of many lakes, and the stony or snowy brows of
many mountains. Around us sightseers from various lands
were clustered in silent companies, earnest in gaze and reverently
wonder-stricken. A revelation, like that of an immaculate
Righi sunrise, is not received lightly by the majority of
intelligent creatures, nor passes away without making memorable
some of those who stand with us on the mount and
behold the glory. Now, as I drove up to the country-house
of the Westervelts, I called to mind distinctly the grouping
of their four figures on the bald, breezy Swiss summit. The
painting was so clear before me that I half glanced around to
see the infinite alpine mist, the shadowy valleys, the seamed
and gray precipices, the far-off flash of glaciers, the solemn,
unconquerable, cruel snows of the everlasting mountain

heads. There was nought but green New England hillocks,
the white dwelling half hidden by trees, and beyond it a
shimmer of sunny sea.

The house stood in one of the southwesterly townships of
Connecticut, crowning a bluff which fronted sharply upon the
narrow arm of ocean, called Long Island Sound. The
grounds, varied and full of character by Nature's gift, gayly
toned with bright hillocks and little dells of shadow, or
wrought into stronger relief of ledge and leafage, were well
adapted to the modern style of landscape gardening after
which they had lately been remodelled. No reflection was
there here of Versailles Vandalism, laid out stiff and stark
by grim undertaker Le Notre. The general appearance of
the two or three acres was already agreeable and tending
toward the picturesque, although no one feature of the landscape
was surprising or in the least suggestive of alpine sublimities.
The dwelling itself was far from worthy of an
environment so tasteful. The work doubtless of some predecessor
to the present proprietor, it bespoke those dark ages
of American country architecture previous to Downing, and
seemed to assert, with all the force of its snobbish individuality,
that it had no sympathy with the natural graces which
surrounded it. It was one of those mock Parthenons, beloved
of our fathers thirty years ago; a temple of brick and
mortar, coated over with stucco veined and lined in shabby
imitation of marble; breaking out toward the south in a
staring, shameless pediment, and Ionic columns which shaded
Yankee windows; and flanked on either side by modern
wings, built solely for convenience, in abrupt disregard of the
sham classicism of the edifice. On each side of the main
body there was a slight one-story veranda, running forward
from the wing and joining the heavy front portico. Altogether
the building reminded me of a clumsy translation from
the Greek, eked out with modern supplement, appendix, and
commentaries. Partial amends were made for these absurdities
by the beautiful outlook of the house, standing as it did

on a prominent turfy hillock, and facing the mid-day sun, the
shining sheet of the Sound, and, far away, the green and yellow
belts of the Long Island shore.

In approaching from the neighboring village I had left the
highway and trotted my hired buggy along the slowly ascending
curve of a private road which stopped at the eastern gate
of the grounds. Tying my horse at a post, under shelter of
a thicket of trimmed cedars, I walked up a broad, winding
path to the make-believe majesty of the portico. The door
was open, giving me a glance down a narrow hall which ran
through the mansion. That heavy shouldered, long armed,
brief nosed Hibernian maiden, who ministers so generally to
the domestic comfort or discomfort of New England family
life, was passing at the moment on some errand of cleanliness,
made manifest by her dustpan and duster. Handing
her my card, with a request to see the ladies, I stepped flurriedly
into the untenanted parlor and waited. Now was the
time for an elfin mob of reminiscences and anticipations,
doubts and hopes, to assail me. Happily for human manners
and morals, a certain amount of diffidence comes to most persons
by birthright, and an average man must see a great
deal of the world before he can dissipate his entire legacy of
bashfulness. It is a circumstance that we all complain of at
times; but we may feel sure that if it were not for the best, it
would not be so. How many blunders, how many exhibitions
of bad taste, how much impertinence and brutality, how
many ruinous follies and crimes even, are we saved from in
our years of youthful indiscretion by a decent hamper of
youthful diffidence. Show me a youngster with a brow unblushing,
and I will show you one of the devil's adopted
children. Notwithstanding a city breeding, flirtations with
boarding-school belles, and two years of pleasuring in Europe,
I had not yet, at the age of twenty-four, turned all my
native gold of modesty into current social brass, and therefore
my heart beat sensibly under its glossy shirt-bosom, as I listened
for the advance of female drapery along the flooring of

the hall. The Misses Westervelt were beautiful girls; it was
a matter of wide dispute which was the most beautiful; as
the Bernesque poets express it, each was fairer than the
other. My susceptible southern friend, Boynton, used to reproach
me with being an unloving man, incapable of earnest
affection for woman, and unworthy of what he, in his sentimental
way, styled the highest, purest duty and privilege of
manhood—marriage. Boynton was engaged himself; on probation
for the time being, and, as a matter of course, mightily
enamored; his face set toward the altar, like Christian's
toward the Holy City. Greatly was I affected by the utterances
of his enthusiasm, notwithstanding the somewhat ludicrous
earnestness of his pale lovelorn face, and the chanting
southern accent with which he enunciated his prose poetry.
To the depths of my soul I felt his reproach, and wished that
it were false, while I feared that it was true. But Boynton
would have been inclined to absolve me from that bitter accusation
of emotional barrenness, had he known the tremors
with which I used to meet the Misses Westervelt, one or
both of them, I could not for a long time tell which. American
women charm American men easily at home, but still
more easily in a foreign land. Many are the love-affairs
which blossom in Europe, to ripen into marriage in America.
All along the course of the grand tour, in every mouldering
ruin, in every famed cathedral, by every irised cascade, on
every alpine summit, are there invisible altars to Hymen,
where incipient husbands have bowed, and vowed, and sacrificed.

Hat in hand, I stood for two or three minutes by the front
windows; and then, as no one came, I paced slowly to the
other end of the room, led on by a straggling line of pictures.
There was a landscape of no significance; a modern half-length,
clearly a portrait; a Madonna which looked like a
Carlo Dolci; and a fair copy of Guido's terrible Beatrice
Cenci. Beautiful that pale calm face is, beyond the beauty
of Grecian goddesses, but terrible also, in its grief that is unutterable,

its remorse that is yet not penitence, and its despair
that is as placid as sleep. As I looked, I was suddenly impressed
with a likeness in the woful girlish countenance to
the younger Miss Westervelt. The discovery was a doubly
noticeable one, because it explained a mystery. Very often,
as I sat, or walked, or rode by the side of Genevieve, particularly
when the moonlight fell on her features, making them
paler and more pensive than their wont, the idea had crossed
me that, somewhere or other, at some important moment, in
some agitating circumstance, I had seen and watched her
with the profoundest pity and sympathy. The feeling was a
vivid one, although I could not connect it with anything in
my memory; it made me regard her with an interest which I
should not otherwise have accorded to a precocious girl of
sixteen; it wrought an atmosphere of romance around her,
and seemed to connect her, not only with my past, but with
my future; it was the only thing, perhaps, which withheld
me from sacrificing all my attention and admiration to the
sweet, Madonna-like face and being of her sister Mary. The
illusion was cornered now, and robbed of the wings of mystery
with which it had haunted me. It retreated within the
square, gilded prison of the picture-frame, resolved itself into
the well-known features of the Beatrice, and became a mere
interesting fact without a particle of poetic power. “Ah,
Genevieve!” whispered I to myself, “you have lost by it.”

The interest of this reverie held me so close, that for a
while I did not notice a murmur of conversation which arose
in a back room connecting by a door with the end of the parlor
where I stood. I was recalled to myself by hearing a
man's voice utter these strange words: “I tell you I have
no pity!”

I turned and stared at the door with just that simple surprise
which most mortals would have felt under the circumstances.
The voice was a full, fine and commanding one,
although muffled by the panels, and deepened by anger into an
utterance much like that of one of those stage ruffians whom

we Americans call actors. Good heavens! thought I, what
unmerciful individual is that? Can Mr. Westervelt be lecturing
his wife in such a fierce fashion? I never thought him
a hard husband. But perhaps he is correcting one of the
Misses Westervelt. Nonsense! he is probably admonishing
a thievish servant.

While I stood dumfounded, the answer to the threat
came; an answer in womanish tones, pleading and tearful,
though I distinguished no words. Stifled and stern the masculine
utterance retorted: “Quick then! or I will expose you
and myself together!”

What a hypocritical old ruffian! I meditated. Is it possible
that quiet, creamy Mr. Westervelt talks in that style to
women? Well, I must get away from here;—I shall have
the air of an eavesdropper.

I turned hurriedly, and set off on tiptoe for the opposite
end of the deep parlor. Dumas's heroes, pinks of courtesy
and spotless lilies of chivalry as he represents them, are
never ashamed to gain information by the frailty of a wainscot,
or to dive into family secrets through a keyhole; but
our American education is stupid compared with the Parisian,
and, instead of rejoicing in my discovery, I felt horribly
annoyed. It was clear that my entrance, unheralded as
it was by the door-bell, had not become known to the household
at large; and that some members of it, supposing this
back room to be for the present a place of the strictest privacy,
had repaired thither to fight out an old quarrel. What
if they should come in upon me and discover in my face that
I had been an ear-witness of their squabbles! I felt that I
should need all the refined brass of Dumas's shabby gentlemen,
to be equal to such an emergency. I was still squeaking
across the room on my patent-leather toes, when I heard
a scuffling behind the door, followed in quick succession by a
click of the lock, a creak of the hinge, a hasty justle of
woman's raiment and a stifled exclamation as of surprise and
alarm. Instinctively, and altogether against my very honorable

intentions, I looked backward over my shoulder. No
face was visible, but I caught a glimpse of a plaid silk of
dead-leaf colors disappearing from the opening, as its wearer
retreated and hurriedly pulled to the door. The voices
hushed their muffled altercation, and the mysterious threatener
had evidently concluded not to expose himself just at
present.

“What a reception!” I muttered. “Is nobody coming, so
that I can make my compliments and be off? I wonder if I
shall see the Misses Westervelt at all. I wonder if either of
them will wear a plaid silk of dead-leaf colors. I wonder
what is the matter in the family. I wouldn't marry into it
for a million.”