University of Virginia Library

16. CHAPTER XVI.
VICTORY.

IT seems probable enough that Myrtle's whole spiritual
adventure was an unconscious dramatization of a few
simple facts which her imagination tangled together into a
kind of vital coherence. The philosopher who goes to the
bottom of things will remark that all the elements of her
fantastic melodrama had been furnished her while waking.
Master Byles Gridley's penetrating and stinging caution
was the text, and the grotesque carvings and the portraits
furnished the “properties” with which her own mind had
wrought up this scenic show.

The philosopher who goes to the bottom of things might
not find it so easy to account for the change which came
over Myrtle Hazard from the hour when she clasped the
bracelet of Judith Pride upon her wrist. She felt a sudden
loathing of the man whom she had idealized as a saint.
A young girl's caprice? Possibly. A return of the natural
instincts of girlhood with returning health? Perhaps
so. An impression produced by her dream? An effect
of an influx from another sphere of being? The working
of Master Byles Gridley's emphatic warning? The magic
of her new talisman?

We may safely leave these questions for the present.
As we have to tell, not what Mrytle Hazard ought to have
done, and why she should have done it, but what she did
do, our task is a simpler one than it would be to lay bare
all the springs of her action. Until this period, she had

hardly thought of herself as a born beauty. The flatteries
she had received from time to time were like the chips and
splinters under the green wood, when the chill women pretended
to make a fire in the best parlor at The Poplars,
which had a way of burning themselves out, hardly warming,
much less kindling, the fore-stick and the back-log.

Myrtle had a tinge of what some call superstition, and
she began to look upon her strange acquisition as a kind
of amulet. Its suggestions betrayed themselves in one of
her first movements. Nothing could be soberer than the
cut of the dresses which the propriety of the severe household
had established as the rule of her costume. But the
girl was no sooner out of bed than a passion came over her
to see herself in that less jealous arrangement of drapery
which the Beauty of the last century had insisted on as
presenting her most fittingly to the artist. She rolled up
the sleeves of her dress, she turned down its prim collar
and neck, and glanced from her glass to the portrait, from
the portrait back to the glass. Myrtle was not blind nor
dull, though young, and in many things untaught. She
did not say in so many words, “I too am a beauty,” but
she could not help seeing that she had many of the attractions
of feature and form which had made the original of
the picture before her famous. The same stately carriage
of the head, the same full-rounded neck, the same more
than hinted outlines of figure, the same finely-shaped arms
and hands, and something very like the same features
startled her by their identity in the permanent image of
the canvas and the fleeting one of the mirror.

The world was hers then, — for she had not read romances
and love-letters without finding that beauty governs
it in all times and places. Who was this middle-aged

minister that had been hanging round her and talking to
her about heaven, when there was not a single joy of earth
that she had as yet tasted? A man that had been saying
all his fine things to Miss Susan Posey, too, had he, before
he had bestowed his attentions on her? And to a dozen
other girls, too, nobody knows who!

The revulsion was a very sudden one. Such changes of
feeling are apt to be sudden in young people whose nerves
have been tampered with, and Myrtle was not of a temperament
or an age to act with much deliberation where a
pique came in to the aid of a resolve. Master Gridley
guessed sagaciously what would be the effect of his revelation,
when he told her of the particular attentions the minister
had paid to pretty Susan Posey and various other
young women.

The Rev. Mr. Stoker had parted his hair wonderfully
that morning, and made himself as captivating as his professional
costume allowed. He had drawn down the shades
of his windows so as to let in that subdued light which is
merciful to crow's-feet and similar embellishments, and
wheeled up his sofa so that two could sit at the table and
read from the same book.

At eleven o'clock he was pacing the room with a certain
feverish impatience, casting a glance now and then at the
mirror as he passed it. At last the bell rang, and he himself
went to answer it, his heart throbbing with expectation
of meeting his lovely visitor.

Myrtle Hazard appeared by an envoy extraordinary, the
bearer of sealed despatches. Mistress Kitty Fagan was
the young lady's substitute, and she delivered into the hand
of the astonished clergyman the following missive: —

The Rev. Mr. Stoker uttered a cry of rage as he finished
this awkwardly written, but tolerably intelligible letter.
What could he do about it? It would hardly do to stab
Myrtle Hazard, and shoot Byles Gridley, and strangle
Mrs. Hopkins, every one of which homicides he felt at the
moment that he could have committed. And here he was
in a frantic paroxysm, and the next day was Sunday, and
his morning's discourse was unwritten. His savage medi

æval theology came to his relief, and he clutched out of a
heap of yellow manuscripts his well-worn “convulsion-fit”
sermon. He preached it the next day as if it did his
heart good, but Myrtle Hazard did not hear it, for she
had gone to St. Bartholomew's with Olive Eveleth