University of Virginia Library

13. CHAPTER XIII.
CURIOSITY.

People will talk. Ciascun lo dice is a tune
that is played oftener than the national air of
this country or any other.

“That's what they say. Means to marry her,
if she is his cousin. Got money himself, — that's
the story, — but wants to come and live in the
old place, and get the Dudley property by-and-by.”
— “Mother's folks was wealthy.” — “Twenty-three
to twenty-five year old.” — “He a'n't
more'n twenty, or twenty-one at the outside.”
— “Looks as if he knew too much to be only
twenty year old.” — “Guess he's been through
the mill, — don't look so green, anyhow, — hey?
Did y' ever mind that cut over his left eyebrow?”

So they gossipped in Rockland. The young
fellows could make nothing of Dick Venner.
He was shy and proud with the few who made
advances to him. The young ladies called him
handsome and romantic, but he looked at them
like a many-tailed pacha who was in the habit
of ordering his wives by the dozen.

“What do you think of the young man over
there at the Venners'?” said Miss Arabella
Thornton to her father.

“Handsome,” said the Judge, “but dangerous-looking.
His face is indictable at common law.
Do you know, my dear, I think there is a blank
at the Sheriff's office, with a place for his name
in it?”

The Judge paused and looked grave, as if he
had just listened to the verdict of the jury and
was going to pronounce sentence.

“Have you heard anything against him?” said
the Judge's daughter.

“Nothing. But I don't like these mixed bloods
and half-told stories. Besides, I have seen a good
many desperate fellows at the bar, and I have a
fancy they all have a look belonging to them.
The worst one I ever sentenced looked a good
deal like this fellow. A wicked mouth. All our
other features are made for us; but a man makes
his own mouth.”

“Who was the person you sentenced?”

“He was a young fellow that undertook to
garrote a man who had won his money at
cards. The same slender shape, the same cunning,
fierce look, smoothed over with a plausible
air. Depend upon it, there is an expression
in all the sort of people who live by their wits
when they can, and by worse weapons when
their wits fail them, that we old law-doctors
know just as well as the medical counsellors

know the marks of disease in a man's face. Dr.
Kittredge looks at a man and says he is going to
die; I look at another man and say he is going
to be hanged, if nothing happens. I don't say so
of this one, but I don't like his looks. I wonder
Dudley Venner takes to him so kindly.”

“It's all for Elsie's sake,” said Miss Thornton;
“I feel quite sure of that. He never does anything
that is not meant for her in some way. I
suppose it amuses her to have her cousin about
the house. She rides a good deal since he has
been here. Have you seen them galloping about
together? He looks like my idea of a Spanish
bandit on that wild horse of his.”

“Possibly he has been one, — or is one,” said
the Judge, — smiling as men smile whose lips
have often been freighted with the life and death
of their fellow-creatures. “I met them riding the
other day. Perhaps Dudley is right, if it pleases
her to have a companion. What will happen,
though, if he makes love to her? Will Elsie be
easily taken with such a fellow? You young
folks are supposed to know more about these
matters than we middle-aged people.”

“Nobody can tell. Elsie is not like anybody
else. The girls who have seen most of her think
she hates men, all but `Dudley,' as she calls her
father. Some of them doubt whether she loves
him. They doubt whether she can love anything
human, except perhaps the old black woman who
has taken care of her since she was a baby. The

village people have the strangest stories about her:
you know what they call her?”

She whispered three words in her father's ear.
The Judge changed color as she spoke, sighed
deeply, and was silent as if lost in thought for
a moment.

“I remember her mother,” he said, “so well!
A sweeter creature never lived. Elsie has something
of her in her look, but those are not her
mother's eyes. They were dark, but soft, as in
all I ever saw of her race. Her father's are dark
too, but mild, and even tender, I should say. I
don't know what there is about Elsie's, — but
do you know, my dear, I find myself curiously
influenced by them? I have had to face a good
many sharp eyes and hard ones, — murderers'
eyes and pirates', — men who had to be watched
in the bar, where they stood on trial, for fear
they should spring on the prosecuting officers like
tigers, — but I never saw such eyes as Elsie's;
and yet they have a kind of drawing virtue or
power about them, — I don't know what else to
call it: have you never observed this?”

His daughter smiled in her turn.

“Never observed it? Why, of course, nobody
could be with Elsie Venner and not observe it.
There are a good many other strange things about
her: did you ever notice how she dresses?”

“Why, handsomely enough, I should think,”
the Judge answered. “I suppose she dresses as
she likes, and sends to the city for what she

wants. What do you mean in particular? We
men notice effects in dress, but not much in detail.”

“You never noticed the colors and patterns of
her dresses? You never remarked anything curious
about her ornaments? Well! I don't believe
you men know, half the time, whether a
lady wears a ninepenny collar or a thread-lace
cape worth a thousand dollars. I don't believe
you know a silk dress from a bombazine one. I
don't believe you can tell whether a woman is in
black or in colors, unless you happen to know
she is a widow. Elsie Venner has a strange
taste in dress, let me tell you. She sends for
the oddest patterns of stuffs, and picks out the
most curious things at the jeweller's, whenever
she goes to town with her father. They say
the old Doctor tells him to let her have her way
about all such matters. Afraid of her mind, if
she is contradicted, I suppose. — You've heard
about her going to school at that place, — the
`Institoot,' as those people call it? They say
she's bright enough in her way, — has studied
at home, you know, with her father a good deal,
— knows some modern languages and Latin, I
believe: at any rate, she would have it so, — she
must go to the `Institoot.' They have a very
good female teacher there, I hear; and the new
master, that young Mr. Langdon, looks and talks
like a well-educated young man. I wonder what
they'll make of Elsie, between them!”

So they talked at the Judge's, in the calm,
judicial-looking mansion-house, in the grave, still
library, with the troops of wan-hued law-books
staring blindly out of their titles at them as they
talked, like the ghosts of dead attorneys fixed
motionless and speechless, each with a thin,
golden film over his unwinking eyes.

In the mean time, everything went on quietly
enough after Cousin Richard's return. A man
of sense, — that is, a man who knows perfectly
well that a cool head is worth a dozen warm
hearts in carrying the fortress of a woman's affections,
(not yours, “Astarte,” nor yours, “Viola,”)
— who knows that men are rejected by women
every day because they, the men, love them, and
are accepted every day because they do not, and
therefore can study the arts of pleasing, — a man
of sense, when he finds he has established his
second parallel too soon, retires quietly to his
first, and begins working on his covered ways
again. [The whole art of love may be read in
any Encyclopædia under the title Fortification,
where the terms just used are explained.] After
the little adventure of the necklace, Dick retreated
at once to his first parallel. Elsie loved riding, —
and would go off with him on a gallop now
and then. He was a master of all those
strange Indian horseback-feats which shame the
tricks of the circus-riders, and used to astonish
and almost amuse her sometimes by disappearing
from his saddle, like a phantom horseman,

lying flat against the side of the bounding creature
that bore him, as if he were a hunting leopard
with his claws in the horse's flank and flattening
himself out against his heaving ribs.
Elsie knew a little Spanish too, which she had
learned from the young person who had taught
her dancing, and Dick enlarged her vocabulary
with a few soft phrases, and would sing her a
song sometimes, touching the air upon an ancient-looking
guitar they had found with the
ghostly things in the garret, — a quaint old instrument,
marked E. M. on the back, and supposed
to have belonged to a certain Elizabeth
Mascarene, before mentioned in connection with
a work of art, — a fair, dowerless lady, who
smiled and sung and faded away, unwedded, a
hundred years ago, as dowerless ladies, not a
few, are smiling and singing and fading now,
— God grant each of them His love, — and one
human heart as its interpreter!

As for school, Elsie went or stayed away as
she liked. Sometimes, when they thought she
was at her desk in the great school-room, she
would be on The Mountain, — alone always.
Dick wanted to go with her, but she would never
let him. Once, when she had followed the zigzag
path a little way up, she looked back and caught
a glimpse of him following her. She turned and
passed him without a word, but giving him a look
which seemed to make the scars on his wrist tingle,
went to her room, where she locked herself

up, and did not come out again till evening, —
Old Sophy having brought her food, and set it
down, not speaking, but looking into her eyes
inquiringly, like a dumb beast trying to feel out
his master's will in his face. The evening was
clear and the moon shining. As Dick sat at his
chamber-window, looking at the mountain-side,
he saw a gray-dressed figure flit between the trees
and steal along the narrow path which led upward.
Elsie's pillow was unpressed that night,
but she had not been missed by the household, —
for Dick knew enough to keep his own counsel.
The next morning she avoided him and went off
early to school. It was the same morning that
the young master found the flower between the
leaves of his Virgil.

The girl got over her angry fit, and was pleasant
enough with her cousin for a few days after
this; but she shunned rather than sought him.
She had taken a new interest in her books, and
especially in certain poetical readings which the
master conducted with the elder scholars. This
gave Master Langdon a good chance to study her
ways when her eye was on her book, to notice the
inflections of her voice, to watch for any expression
of her sentiments; for, to tell the truth, he
had a kind of fear that the girl had taken a fancy
to him, and, though she interested him, he did not
wish to study her heart from the inside.

The more he saw her, the more the sadness of
her beauty wrought upon him. She looked as if

she might hate, but could not love. She hardly
smiled at anything, spoke rarely, but seemed to
feel that her natural power of expression lay all in
her bright eyes, the force of which so many had
felt, but none perhaps had tried to explain to
themselves. A person accustomed to watch the
faces of those who were ailing in body or mind,
and to search in every line and tint for some underlying
source of disorder, could hardly help analyzing
the impression such a face produced upon
him. The light of those beautiful eyes was like
the lustre of ice; in all her features there was
nothing of that human warmth which shows that
sympathy has reached the soul beneath the mask
of flesh it wears. The look was that of remoteness,
of utter isolation. There was in its stony
apathy, it seemed to him, the pathos which we
find in the blind who show no film or speck over
the organs of sight; for Nature had meant her to
be lovely, and left out nothing but love. And yet
the master could not help feeling that some instinct
was working in this girl which was in some
way leading her to seek his presence. She did
not lift her glittering eyes upon him as at first. It
seemed strange that she did not, for they were
surely her natural weapons of conquest. Her
color did not come and go like that of young girls
under excitement. She had a clear brunette complexion,
a little sun-touched, it may be, — for the
master noticed once, when her necklace was
slightly displaced, that a faint ring or band of a
little lighter shade than the rest of the surface encircled
her neck. What was the slight peculiarity
of her enunciation, when she read? Not a lisp,
certainly, but the least possible imperfection in
articulating some of the lingual sounds, — just
enough to be noticed at first, and quite forgotten
after being a few times heard.

Not a word about the flower on either side. It
was not uncommon for the school-girls to leave a
rose or pink or wild flower on the teacher's desk.
Finding it in the Virgil was nothing, after all; it
was a little delicate flower, which looked as if it
were made to press, and it was probably shut in
by accident at the particular place where he found
it. He took it into his head to examine it in a
botanical point of view. He found it was not
common, — that it grew only in certain localities,
— and that one of these was among the rocks of
the eastern spur of The Mountain.

It happened to come into his head how the
Swiss youth climb the sides of the Alps to find
the flower called the Edelweiss for the maidens
whom they wish to please. It is a pretty fancy,
that of scaling some dangerous height before the
dawn, so as to gather the flower in its freshness,
that the favored maiden may wear it to church on
Sunday morning, a proof at once of her lover's
devotion and his courage. Mr. Bernard determined
to explore the region where this flower was
said to grow, that he might see where the wild
girl sought the blossoms of which Nature was so
jealous.

It was on a warm, fair Saturday afternoon that
he undertook his land-voyage of discovery. He
had more curiosity, it may be, than he would have
owned; for he had heard of the girl's wandering
habits, and the guesses about her sylvan haunts,
and was thinking what the chances were that he
should meet her in some strange place, or come
upon traces of her which would tell secrets she
would not care to have known.

The woods are all alive to one who walks
through them with his mind in an excited state,
and his eyes and ears wide open. The trees are
always talking, not merely whispering with their
leaves, (for every tree talks to itself in that way,
even when it stands alone in the middle of a pasture,)
but grating their boughs against each other,
as old horn-handed farmers press their dry, rustling
palms together, dropping a nut or a leaf or a
twig, clicking to the tap of a woodpecker, or rustling
as a squirrel flashes along a branch. It was
now the season of singing-birds, and the woods
were haunted with mysterious, tender music.
The voices of the birds which love the deeper
shades of the forest are sadder than those of the
open fields: these are the nuns who have taken
the veil, the hermits that have hidden themselves
away from the world and tell their griefs to the
infinite listening Silences of the wilderness, — for
the one deep inner silence that Nature breaks
with her fitful superficial sounds becomes multiplied
as the image of a star in ruffled waters.

Strange! The woods at first convey the impression
of profound repose, and yet, if you watch their
ways with open ear, you find the life which is in
them is restless and nervous as that of a woman:
the little twigs are crossing and twining and separating
like slender fingers that cannot be still;
the stray leaf is to be flattened into its place like a
truant curl; the limbs sway and twist, impatient
of their constrained attitude; and the rounded
masses of foliage swell upward and subside from
time to time with long soft sighs, and, it may
be, the falling of a few rain-drops which had lain
hidden among the deeper shadows. I pray you,
notice, in the sweet summer days which will soon
see you among the mountains, this inward tranquillity
that belongs to the heart of the woodland,
with this nervousness, for I do not know what
else to call it, of outer movement. One would
say, that Nature, like untrained persons, could not
sit still without nestling about or doing something
with her limbs or features, and that high breeding
was only to be looked for in trim gardens, where
the soul of the trees is ill at ease perhaps, but their
manners are unexceptionable, and a rustling
branch or leaf falling out of season is an indecorum.
The real forest is hardly still except
in the Indian summer; then there is death in the
house, and they are waiting for the sharp shrunken
months to come with white raiment for the
summer's burial.

There were many hemlocks in this neighborhood,

the grandest and most solemn of all the
forest-trees in the mountain regions. Up to a
certain period of growth they are eminently beautiful,
their boughs disposed in the most graceful
pagoda-like series of close terraces, thick and dark
with green crystalline leaflets. In spring the tender
shoots come out of a paler green, finger-like,
as if they were pointing to the violets at their
feet. But when the trees have grown old, and
their rough boles measure a yard and more
through their diameter, they are no longer beautiful,
but they have a sad solemnity all their own,
too full of meaning to require the heart's comment
to be framed in words. Below, all their
earthward-looking branches are sapless and shattered,
splintered by the weight of many winters'
snows; above, they are still green and full of life,
but their summits overtop all the deciduous trees
around them, and in their companionship with
heaven they are alone. On these the lightning
loves to fall. One such Mr. Bernard saw, — or
rather, what had been one such; for the bolt had
torn the tree like an explosion from within, and
the ground was strewed all around the broken
stump with flakes of rough bark and strips and
chips of shivered wood, into which the old tree
had been rent by the bursting rocket from the
thunder-cloud.

— The master had struck up The Mountain
obliquely from the western side of the Dudley
mansion-house. In this way he ascended until

he reached a point many hundred feet above the
level of the plain, and commanding all the country
beneath and around. Almost at his feet he
saw the mansion-house, the chimney standing out
of the middle of the roof, or rather, like a black
square hole in it, — the trees almost directly over
their stems, the fences as lines, the whole nearly
as an architect would draw a ground-plan of the
house and the inclosures round it. It frightened
him to see how the huge masses of rock
and old forest-growths hung over the home below.
As he descended a little and drew near
the ledge of evil name, he was struck with the
appearance of a long narrow fissure that ran
parallel with it and above it for many rods, not
seemingly of very old standing, — for there were
many fibres of roots which had evidently been
snapped asunder when the rent took place, and
some of which were still succulent in both separated
portions.

Mr. Bernard had made up his mind, when he
set forth, not to come back before he had examined
the dreaded ledge. He had half persuaded
himself that it was scientific curiosity. He
wished to examine the rocks, to see what flowers
grew there, and perhaps to pick up an adventure
in the zoölogical line; for he had on a
pair of high, stout boots, and he carried a stick
in his hand, which was forked at one extremity,
so as to be very convenient to hold down a
crotalus with, if he should happen to encounter

one. He knew the aspect of the ledge from a
distance; for its bald and leprous-looking declivities
stood out in their nakedness from the
wooded sides of The Mountain, when this was
viewed from certain points of the village. But
the nearer aspect of the blasted region had something
frightful in it. The cliffs were water-worn,
as if they had been gnawed for thousands of
years by hungry waves. In some places they
overhung their base so as to look like leaning
towers which might topple over at any minute.
In other parts they were scooped into niches or
caverns. Here and there they were cracked in
deep fissures, some of them of such width that
one might enter them, if he cared to run the
risk of meeting the regular tenants, who might
treat him as an intruder.

Parts of the ledge were cloven perpendicularly,
with nothing but cracks or slightly projecting
edges in which or on which a foot could
find hold. High up on one of these precipitous
walls of rock he saw some tufts of flowers, and
knew them at once for the same that he had
found between the leaves of his Virgil. Not
there, surely! No woman would have clung
against that steep, rough parapet to gather an
idle blossom. And yet the master looked round
everywhere, and even up the side of that rock,
to see if there were no signs of a woman's footstep.
He peered about curiously, as if his eye
might fall on some of those fragments of dress

which women leave after them, whenever they
run against each other or against anything else,
— in crowded ballrooms, in the brushwood after
picnics, on the fences after rambles, scattered
round over every place which has witnessed an
act of violence, where rude hands have been
laid upon them. Nothing. Stop, though, one
moment. That stone is smooth and polished,
as if it had been somewhat worn by the pressure
of human feet. There is one twig broken
among the stems of that clump of shrubs. He
put his foot upon the stone and took hold of
the close-clinging shrub. In this way he turned
a sharp angle of the rock and found himself on
a natural platform, which lay in front of one of
the wider fissures, — whether the mouth of a cavern
or not he could not yet tell. A flat stone
made an easy seat, upon which he sat down, as
he was very glad to do, and looked mechanically
about him. A small fragment splintered from
the rock was at his feet. He took it and threw
it down the declivity a little below where he sat.
He looked about for a stem or a straw of some
kind to bite upon, — a country-instinct, — relic,
no doubt, of the old vegetable-feeding habits of
Eden. Is that a stem or a straw? He picked it
up. It was a hair-pin.

To say that Mr. Langdon had a strange sort
of thrill shoot through him at the sight of this
harmless little implement would be a statement
not at variance with the fact of the case. That

smooth stone had been often trodden, and by
what foot he could not doubt. He rose up from
his seat to look round for other signs of a woman's
visits. What if there is a cavern here, where
she has a retreat, fitted up, perhaps, as anchorites
fitted their cells, — nay, it may be, carpeted and
mirrored, and with one of those tiger-skins for a
couch, such as they say the girl loves to lie on?
Let us look, at any rate.

Mr. Bernard walked to the mouth of the cavern
or fissure and looked into it. His look was
met by the glitter of two diamond eyes, small,
sharp, cold, shining out of the darkness, but gliding
with a smooth, steady motion towards the
light, and himself. He stood fixed, struck dumb,
staring back into them with dilating pupils and
sudden numbness of fear that cannot move, as in
the terror of dreams. The two sparks of light
came forward until they grew to circles of flame,
and all at once lifted themselves up as if in angry
surprise. Then for the first time thrilled in Mr.
Bernard's ears the dreadful sound that nothing
which breathes, be it man or brute, can hear
unmoved, — the long, loud, stinging whirr, as the
huge, thick-bodied reptile shook his many-jointed
rattle and adjusted his loops for the fatal stroke.
His eyes were drawn as with magnets toward the
circles of flame. His ears rung as in the overture
to the swooning dream of chloroform. Nature
was before man with her anæsthetics: the
cat's first shake stupefies the mouse; the lion's

first shake deadens the man's fear and feeling;
and the crotalus paralyzes before he strikes. He
waited as in a trance, — waited as one that longs
to have the blow fall, and all over, as the man who
shall be in two pieces in a second waits for the
axe to drop. But while he looked straight into
the flaming eyes, it seemed to him that they were
losing their light and terror, that they were growing
tame and dull; the charm was dissolving, the
numbness was passing away, he could move once
more. He heard a light breathing close to his
ear, and, half turning, saw the face of Elsie Venner,
looking motionless into the reptile's eyes,
which had shrunk and faded under the stronger
enchantment of her own.