University of Virginia Library

20. CHAPTER XX.
FROM WITHOUT AND FROM WITHIN.

There were not wanting people who accused
Dudley Venner of weakness and bad judgment
in his treatment of his daughter. Some were of
opinion that the great mistake was in not “breaking
her will” when she was a little child. There
was nothing the matter with her, they said, but
that she had been spoiled by indulgence. If they
had had the charge of her, they'd have brought
her down. She'd got the upperhand of her father
now; but if he'd only taken hold of her in
season! There are people who think that everything
may be done, if the doer, be he educator or
physician, be only called “in season.” No doubt,
— but in season would often be a hundred or
two years before the child was born; and people
never send so early as that.

The father of Elsie Venner knew his duties
and his difficulties too well to trouble himself
about anything others might think or say. So
soon as he found that he could not govern his
child, he gave his life up to following her and
protecting her as far as he could. It was a stern

and terrible trial for a man of acute sensibility,
and not without force of intellect and will, and
the manly ambition for himself and his family-name
which belonged to his endowments and
his position. Passive endurance is the hardest
trial to persons of such a nature.

What made it still more a long martyrdom
was the necessity for bearing his cross in utter
loneliness. He could not tell his griefs. He
could not talk of them even with those who
knew their secret spring. His minister had the
unsympathetic nature which is common in the
meaner sort of devotees, — persons who mistake
spiritual selfishness for sanctity, and grab at the
infinite prize of the great Future and Elsewhere
with the egotism they excommunicate in its hardly
more odious forms of avarice and self-indulgence.
How could he speak with the old physician and
the old black woman about a sorrow and a terror
which but to name was to strike dumb the lips of
Consolation?

In the dawn of his manhood he had found that
second consciousness for which young men and
young women go about looking into each other's
faces, with their sweet, artless aim playing in
every feature, and making them beautiful to
each other, as to all of us. He had found his
other self early, before he had grown weary in the
search and wasted his freshness in vain longings:
the lot of many, perhaps we may say of most,
who infringe the patent of our social order by intruding

themselves into a life already upon half-allowance
of the necessary luxuries of existence.
The life he had led for a brief space was not only
beautiful in outward circumstance, as old Sophy
had described it to the Reverend Doctor. It was
that delicious process of the tuning of two souls
to each other, string by string, not without little
half-pleasing discords now and then when some
chord in one or the other proves to be over-strained
or over-lax, but always approaching
nearer and nearer to harmony, until they become
at last as two instruments with a single
voice. Something more than a year of this blissful
doubled consciousness had passed over him
when he found himself once more alone, — alone,
save for the little diamond-eyed child lying in the
old black woman's arms, with the coral necklace
round her throat and the rattle in her hand.

He would not die by his own act. It was not
the way in his family. There may have been
other, perhaps better reasons, but this was
enough; he did not come of suicidal stock.
He must live for this child's sake, at any rate;
and yet, — oh, yet, who could tell with what
thoughts he looked upon her? Sometimes her
little features would look placid, and something
like a smile would steal over them; then all his
tender feelings would rush up into his eyes, and
he would put his arms out to take her from the
old woman, — but all at once her eyes would
narrow and she would throw her head back;

and a shudder would seize him as he stooped
over his child, — he could not look upon her, —
he could not touch his lips to her cheek; nay,
there would sometimes come into his soul such
frightful suggestions that he would hurry from
the room lest the hinted thought should become
a momentary madness and he should lift his
hand against the hapless infant which owed him
life.

In those miserable days he used to wander all
over The Mountain in his restless endeavor to
seek some relief for inward suffering in outward
action. He had no thought of throwing himself
from the summit of any of the broken cliffs, but
he clambered over them recklessly, as having no
particular care for his life. Sometimes he would
go into the accursed district where the venomous
reptiles were always to be dreaded, and court
their worst haunts, and kill all he could come
near with a kind of blind fury which was strange
in a person of his gentle nature.

One overhanging cliff was a favorite haunt
of his. It frowned upon his home beneath in
a very menacing way; he noticed slight seams
and fissures that looked ominous; — what would
happen, if it broke off some time or other and
came crashing down on the fields and roofs
below? He thought of such a possible catastrophe
with a singular indifference, in fact with
a feeling almost like pleasure. It would be such
a swift and thorough solution of this great problem

of life he was working out in ever-recurring
daily anguish! The remote possibility of such
a catastrophe had frightened some timid dwellers
beneath The Mountain to other places of residence;
here the danger was most imminent, and
yet he loved to dwell upon the chances of its
occurrence. Danger is often the best counter-irritant
in cases of mental suffering; he found
a solace in careless exposure of his life, and
learned to endure the trials of each day better
by dwelling in imagination on the possibility
that it might be the last for him and the home
that was his.

Time, the great consoler, helped these influences,
and he gradually fell into more easy and
less dangerous habits of life. He ceased from
his more perilous rambles. He thought less of
the danger from the great overhanging rocks and
forests; they had hung there for centuries; it was
not very likely they would crash or slide in his
time. He became accustomed to all Elsie's
strange looks and ways. Old Sophy dressed
her with ruffles round her neck, and hunted up
the red coral branch with silver bells which the
little toothless Dudleys had bitten upon for a
hundred years. By an infinite effort, her father
forced himself to become the companion of this
child, for whom he had such a mingled feeling,
but whose presence was always a trial to him
and often a terror.

At a cost which no human being could estimate,

he had done his duty, and in some degree
reaped his reward. Elsie grew up with a kind of
filial feeling for him, such as her nature was capable
of. She never would obey him; that was not
to be looked for. Commands, threats, punishments,
were out of the question with her; the
mere physical effects of crossing her will betrayed
themselves in such changes of expression and
manner that it would have been senseless to attempt
to govern her in any such way. Leaving
her mainly to herself, she could be to some extent
indirectly influenced, — not otherwise. She called
her father “Dudley,” as if he had been her brother.
She ordered everybody and would be ordered by
none.

Who could know all these things, except the
few people of the household? What wonder,
therefore, that ignorant and shallow persons laid
the blame on her father of those peculiarities
which were freely talked about, — of those darker
tendencies which were hinted of in whispers?
To all this talk, so far as it reached him, he was
supremely indifferent, not only with the indifference
which all gentlemen feel to the gossip of
their inferiors, but with a charitable calmness
which did not wonder or blame. He knew that
his position was not simply a difficult, but an impossible
one, and schooled himself to bear his destiny
as well as he might, and report himself only
at Headquarters.

He had grown gentle under this discipline.

His hair was just beginning to be touched with
silver, and his expression was that of habitual
sadness and anxiety. He had no counsellor, as
we have seen, to turn to, who did not know either
too much or too little. He had no heart to rest
upon and into which he might unburden himself
of the secrets and the sorrows that were aching in
his own breast. Yet he had not allowed himself
to run to waste in the long time since he was left
alone to his trials and fears. He had resisted the
seductions which always beset solitary men with
restless brains overwrought by depressing agencies.
He disguised no misery to himself with the
lying delusion of wine. He sought no sleep from
narcotics, though he lay with throbbing, wide-open
eyeballs through all the weary hours of the night.

It was understood between Dudley Venner and
old Doctor Kittredge that Elsie was a subject of
occasional medical observation, on account of certain
mental peculiarities which might end in a
permanent affection of her reason. Beyond this
nothing was said, whatever may have been in the
mind of either. But Dudley Venner had studied
Elsie's case in the light of all the books he could
find which might do anything towards explaining
it. As in all cases where men meddle with medical
science for a special purpose, having no previous
acquaintance with it, his imagination found
what it wanted in the books he read, and adjusted
it to the facts before him. So it was he came to
cherish those two fancies before alluded to: that

the ominous birth-mark she had carried from infancy
might fade and become obliterated, and that
the age of complete maturity might be signalized
by an entire change in her physical and mental
state. He held these vague hopes as all of us
nurse our only half-believed illusions. Not for
the world would he have questioned his sagacious
old medical friend as to the probability or possibility
of their being true. We are very shy of
asking questions of those who know enough to
destroy with one word the hopes we live on.

In this life of comparative seclusion to which
the father had doomed himself for the sake of his
child, he had found time for large and varied
reading. The learned Judge Thornton confessed
himself surprised at the extent of Dudley Venner's
information. Doctor Kittredge found that
he was in advance of him in the knowledge of
recent physiological discoveries. He had taken
pains to become acquainted with agricultural
chemistry; and the neighboring farmers owed him
some useful hints about the management of their
land. He renewed his old acquaintance with the
classic authors. He loved to warm his pulses
with Homer and calm them down with Horace.
He received all manner of new books and periodicals,
and gradually gained an interest in the
events of the passing time. Yet he remained almost
a hermit, not absolutely refusing to see his
neighbors, nor ever churlish towards them, but on
the other hand not cultivating any intimate relations
with them.

He had retired from the world a young man,
little more than a youth, indeed, with sentiments
and aspirations all of them suddenly extinguished.
The first had bequeathed him a single huge sorrow,
the second a single trying duty. In due
time the anguish had lost something of its poignancy,
the light of earlier and happier memories
had begun to struggle with and to soften its thick
darkness, and even that duty which he had confronted
with such an effort had become an endurable
habit.

At a period of life when many have been living
on the capital of their acquired knowledge and
their youthful stock of sensibilities until their
intellects are really shallower and their hearts
emptier than they were at twenty, Dudley Venner
was stronger in thought and tenderer in soul
than in the first freshness of his youth, when he
counted but half his present years. He had entered
that period which marks the decline of men
who have ceased growing in knowledge and
strength: from forty to fifty a man must move
upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of
life will carry him rapidly downward. At this
time his inward nature was richer and deeper
than in any earlier period of his life. If he could
only be summoned to action, he was capable of
noble service. If his sympathies could only find
an outlet, he was never so capable of love as
now; for his natural affections had been gathering
in the course of all these years, and the traces

of that ineffaceable calamity of his life were softened
and partially hidden by new growths of
thought and feeling, as the wreck left by a mountain-slide
is covered over by the gentle intrusion
of the soft-stemmed herbs which will prepare it
for the stronger vegetation that will bring it
once more into harmony with the peaceful slopes
around it.

Perhaps Dudley Venner had not gained so
much in worldly wisdom as if he had been more
in society and less in his study. The indulgence
with which he treated his nephew was, no doubt,
imprudent. A man more in the habit of dealing
with men would have been more guarded with a
person with Dick's questionable story and unquestionable
physiognomy. But he was singularly
unsuspicious, and his natural kindness was an
additional motive to the wish for introducing
some variety into the routine of Elsie's life.

If Dudley Venner did not know just what he
wanted at this period of his life, there were a
great many people in the town of Rockland who
thought they did know. He had been a widower
long enough, — night twenty year, wa'n't it?
He'd been aout to Spraowles's party, — there
wa'n't anything to hender him why he shouldn't
stir raound l'k other folks. What was the reason
he didn't go abaout to taown-meetin's 'n' Sahbathmeetin's,
'n' lýceums, 'n' school-'xaminations, 'n'
s'prise-parties, 'n' funerals, — and other entertainments
where the still-faced two-story folks were in

the habit of looking round to see if any of the
mansion-house gentry were present? — Fac' was,
he was livin' too lonesome daown there at the
mansion-haouse. Why shouldn't he make up to
the Jedge's daughter? She was genteel enough
for him and — let's see, haow old was she?
Seven-'n'-twenty, — no, six-'n'-twenty, — born the
same year we buried aour little Anny Marí'.

There was no possible objection to this arrangement,
if the parties interested had seen fit to
make it or even to think of it. But “Portia,” as
some of the mansion-house people called her, did
not happen to awaken the elective affinities of the
lonely widower. He met her once in a while, and
said to himself that she was a good specimen of
the grand style of woman; and then the image
came back to him of a woman not quite so large,
not quite so imperial in her port, not quite so incisive
in her speech, not quite so judicial in her
opinions, but with two or three more joints in her
frame, and two or three soft inflections in her
voice, which for some absurd reason or other drew
him to her side and so bewitched him that he told
her half his secrets and looked into her eyes all
that he could not tell, in less time than it would
have taken him to discuss the champion paper of
the last Quarterly with the admirable “Portia.”
Heu, quanto minus! How much more was that
lost image to him than all it left on earth!

The study of love is very much like that of
meteorology. We know that just about so much

rain will fall in a season; but on what particular
day it will shower is more than we can tell. We
know that just about so much love will be made
every year in a given population; but who will
rain his young affections upon the heart of whom
is not known except to the astrologers and fortune-tellers.
And why rain falls as it does, and
why love is made just as it is, are equally puzzling
questions.

The woman a man loves is always his own
daughter, far more his daughter than the female
children born to him by the common law of life.
It is not the outside woman, who takes his name,
that he loves: before her image has reached the
centre of his consciousness, it has passed through
fifty many-layered nerve-strainers, been churned
over by ten thousand pulse-beats, and reacted
upon by millions of lateral impulses which bandy
it about through the mental spaces as a reflection
is sent back and forward in a saloon lined with
mirrors. With this altered image of the woman
before him, his preëxisting ideal becomes blended.
The object of his love is in part the offspring of
her legal parents, but more of her lover's brain.
The difference between the real and the ideal objects
of love must not exceed a fixed maximum.
The heart's vision cannot unite them stereoscopically
into a single image, if the divergence passes
certain limits. A formidable analogy, much
in the nature of a proof, with very serious consequences,
which moralists and match-makers

would do well to remember! Double vision
with the eyes of the heart is a dangerous physiological
state, and may lead to missteps and
serious falls.

Whether Dudley Venner would ever find a
breathing image near enough to his ideal one, to
fill the desolate chamber of his heart, or not, was
very doubtful. Some gracious and gentle woman,
whose influence would steal upon him as the
first low words of prayer after that interval of
silent mental supplication known to one of our
simpler forms of public worship, gliding into his
consciousness without hurting its old griefs, herself
knowing the chastening of sorrow, and subdued
into sweet acquiescence with the Divine will,
— some such woman as this, if Heaven should
send him such, might call him back to the world
of happiness, from which he seemed forever exiled.
He could never again be the young lover
who walked through the garden-alleys all red with
roses in the old dead and buried June of long ago.
He could never forget the bride of his youth,
whose image, growing phantom-like with the
lapse of years, hovered over him like a dream
while waking and like a reality in dreams. But
if it might be in God's good providence that this
desolate life should come under the influence of
human affections once more, what an ecstasy of
renewed existence was in store for him! His life
had not all been buried under that narrow ridge
of turf with the white stone at its head. It

seemed so for a while; but it was not and could
not and ought not to be so. His first passion
had been a true and pure one; there was no spot
or stain upon it. With all his grief there blended
no cruel recollection of any word or look he
would have wished to forget. All those little differences,
such as young married people with any
individual flavor in their characters must have, if
they are tolerably mated, had only added to the
music of existence, as the lesser discords admitted
into some perfect symphony, fitly resolved, add
richness and strength to the whole harmonious
movement. It was a deep wound that Fate had
inflicted on him; may, it seemed like a mortal
one; but the weapon was clean, and its edge was
smooth. Such wounds must heal with time in
healthy natures, whatever a false sentiment may
say, by the wise and beneficent law of our being.
The recollection of a deep and true affection is
rather a divine nourishment for a life to grow
strong upon than a poison to destroy it.

Dudley Venner's habitual sadness could not be
laid wholly to his early bereavement. It was
partly the result of the long struggle between natural
affection and duty, on one side, and the involuntary
tendencies these had to overcome, on
the other, — between hope and fear, so long in
conflict that despair itself would have been like
an anodyne, and he would have slept upon some
final catastrophe with the heavy sleep of a bankrupt
after his failure is proclaimed. Alas! some

new affection might perhaps rekindle the fires of
youth in his heart; but what power could calm
that haggard terror of the parent which rose with
every morning's sun and watched with every evening
star, — what power save alone that of him
who comes bearing the inverted torch, and leaving
after him only the ashes printed with his footsteps?