University of Virginia Library

21. CHAPTER XXI.
MADNESS?

MR. CLEMENT LINDSAY returned to the city
and his usual labors in a state of strange mental
agitation. He had received an impression for which he
was unprepared. He had seen for the second time a
young girl whom, for the peace of his own mind, and for
the happiness of others, he should never again have looked
upon until Time had taught their young hearts the lesson
which all hearts must learn, sooner or later.

What shall the unfortunate person do who has met with
one of those disappointments, or been betrayed into one of
those positions, which do violence to all the tenderest feelings,
blighting the happiness of youth, and the prospects of
after years?

If the person is a young man, he has various resources.
He can take to the philosophic meerschaum, and nicotize
himself at brief intervals into a kind of buzzing and blurry
insensibility, until he begins to “color” at last like the
bowl of his own pipe, and even his mind gets the tobacco
flavor. Or he can have recourse to the more suggestive
stimulants, which will dress his future up for him in shining
possibilities that glitter like Masonic regalia, until the
morning light and the waking headache reveal his illusion.
Some kind of spiritual anæsthetic he must have, if he holds
his grief fast tied to his heart-strings. But as grief must
be fed with thought, or starve to death, it is the best plan
to keep the mind so busy in other ways that it has no time

to attend to the wants of that ravening passion. To sit
down and passively endure it, is apt to end in putting all
the mental machinery into disorder.

Clement Lindsay had thought that his battle of life was
already fought, and that he had conquered. He believed
that he had subdued himself completely, and that he was
ready, without betraying a shadow of disappointment, to
take the insufficient nature which destiny had assigned
him in his companion, and share with it all of his own
larger being it was capable, not of comprehending, but of
apprehending.

He had deceived himself. The battle was not fought
and won. There had been a struggle, and what seemed to
be a victory, but the enemy — intrenched in the very citadel
of life — had rallied, and would make another desperate
attempt to retrieve his defeat.

The haste with which the young man had quitted the
village was only a proof that he felt his danger. He
believed that, if he came into the presence of Myrtle Hazard
for the third time, he should be no longer master of his
feelings. Some explanation must take place between
them, and how was it possible that it should be without
emotion? and in what do all emotions shared by a young
man with such a young girl as this tend to find their last
expression?

Clement determined to stun his sensibilities by work.
He would give himself no leisure to indulge in idle dreams
of what might have been. His plans were never so carefully
finished, and his studies were never so continuous as
now. But the passion still wrought within him, and, if he
drove it from his waking thoughts, haunted his sleep until
he could endure it no longer, and must give it some manifestation.

He had covered up the bust of Liberty so
closely, that not an outline betrayed itself through the
heavy folds of drapery in which it was wrapped. His
thoughts recurred to his unfinished marble, as offering the
one mode in which he could find a silent outlet to the
feelings and thoughts which it was torture to keep imprisoned
in his soul. The cold stone would tell them, but
without passion; and having got the image which possessed
him out of himself into a lifeless form, it seemed as if he
might be delivered from a presence which, lovely as it was,
stood between him and all that made him seem honorable
and worthy to himself.

He uncovered the bust which he had but half shaped,
and struck the first flake from the glittering marble. The
toil, once begun, fascinated him strangely, and after the
day's work was done, and at every interval he could snatch
from his duties, he wrought at his secret task.

“Clement is graver than ever,” the young men said at
the office. “What 's the matter, do you suppose? Turned
off by the girl they say he means to marry by and by?
How pale he looks too! Must have something worrying
him: he used to look as fresh as a clove pink.”

The master with whom he studied saw that he was
losing color, and looking very much worn, and determined
to find out, if he could, whether he was not overworking
himself. He soon discovered that his light was seen burning
late into the night, that he was neglecting his natural
rest, and always busy with some unknown task, not called
for in his routine of duty or legitimate study.

“Something is wearing on you, Clement,” he said. “You
are killing yourself with undertaking too much. Will you
let me know what keeps you so busy when you ought to be

asleep, or taking your ease and comfort in some way or
other?”

Nobody but himself had ever seen his marble or its
model. He had now almost finished it, laboring at it with
such sleepless devotion, and he was willing to let his master
have a sight of his first effort of the kind, — for he was
not a sculptor, it must be remembered, though he had
modelled in clay, not without some success, from time to
time.

“Come with me,” he said.

The master climbed the stairs with him up to his modest
chamber. A closely shrouded bust stood on its pedestal in
the light of the solitary window.

“That is my ideal personage,” Clement said. “Wait
one moment, and you shall see how far I have caught the
character of our uncrowned queen.”

The master expected, very naturally, to see the conventional
young woman with classical wreath or feather head-dress,
whom we have placed upon our smallest coin, so
that our children may all grow up loving Liberty.

As Clement withdrew the drapery that covered his work,
the master stared at it in amazement. He looked at it
long and earnestly, and at length turned his eyes, a little
moistened by some feeling which thus betrayed itself, upon
his scholar.

“This is no ideal, Clement. It is the portrait of a very
young but very beautiful woman. No common feeling
could have guided your hand in shaping such a portrait
from memory. This must be that friend of yours of whom
I have often heard as an amiable young person. Pardon
me, for you know that nobody cares more for you than
I do, — I hope that you are happy in all your relations

with this young friend of yours. How could one be
otherwise?”

It was hard to bear, very hard. He forced a smile.
“You are partly right,” he said. “There is a resemblance,
I trust, to a living person, for I had one in my
mind.”

“Did n't you tell me once, Clement, that you were attempting
a bust of Innocence? I do not see any block in
your room but this. Is that done?”

“Done with!” Clement answered; and, as he said it,
the thought stung through him that this was the very stone
which was to have worn the pleasant blandness of pretty
Susan's guileless countenance. How the new features had
effaced the recollection of the others!

In a few days more Clement had finished his bust.
His hours were again vacant to his thick-coming fancies.
While he had been busy with his marble, his hands had
required his attention, and he must think closely of every
detail upon which he was at work. But at length his task
was done, and he could contemplate what he had made of
it. It was a triumph for one so little exercised in sculpture.
The master had told him so, and his own eye could
not deceive him. He might never succeed in any repetition
of his effort, but this once he most certainly had succeeded.
He could not disguise from himself the source
of this extraordinary good fortune in so doubtful and
difficult an attempt. Nor could he resist the desire of contemplating
the portrait bust, which — it was foolish to talk
about ideals — was not Liberty, but Myrtle Hazard.

It was too nearly like the story of the ancient sculptor:
his own work was an over-match for its artist. Clement
had made a mistake in supposing that by giving his dream

a material form he should drive it from the possession of
his mind. The image in which he had fixed his recollection
of its original served only to keep her living presence
before him. He thought of her as she clasped her arms
around him, and they were swallowed up in the rushing
waters, coming so near to passing into the unknown world
together. He thought of her as he stretched her lifeless
form upon the bank, and looked for one brief moment on
her unsunned loveliness, — “a sight to dream of, not to
tell.” He thought of her as his last fleeting glimpse had
shown her, beautiful, not with the blossomy prettiness that
passes away with the spring sunshine, but with a rich
vitality of which noble outlines and winning expression
were only the natural accidents. And that singular impression
which the sight of him had produced upon her, —
how strange! How could she but have listened to him,
— to him, who was, as it were, a second creator to her,
for he had brought her back from the gates of the unseen
realm, — if he had recalled to her the dread moments
they had passed in each other's arms, with death, not
love, in all their thoughts. And if then he had told her
how her image had remained with him, how it had colored
all his visions, and mingled with all his conceptions, would
not those dark eyes have melted as they were turned
upon him? Nay, how could he keep the thought away,
that she would not have been insensible to his passion,
if he could have suffered its flame to kindle in his heart?
Did it not seem as if Death had spared them for Love,
and that Love should lead them together through life's
long journey to the gates of Death?

Never! never! never! Their fates were fixed. For
him, poor insect as he was, a solitary flight by day, and

a return at evening to his wingless mate! For her — he
thought he saw her doom.

Could he give her up to the cold embraces of that passionless
egotist, who, as he perceived plainly enough, was
casting his shining net all around her? Clement read
Murray Bradshaw correctly. He could not perhaps have
spread his character out in set words, as we must do for
him, for it takes a long apprenticeship to learn to describe
analytically what we know as soon as we see it; but he
felt in his inner consciousness all that we must tell for
him. Fascinating, agreeable, artful, knowing, capable of
winning a woman infinitely above himself, incapable of
understanding her, — O, if he could but touch him with
the angel's spear, and bid him take his true shape before
her whom he was gradually enveloping in the silken
meshes of his subtle web! He would make a place for
her in the world, — O yes, doubtless. He would be
proud of her in company, would dress her handsomely,
and show her off in the best lights. But from the very
hour that he felt his power over her firmly established,
he would begin to remodel her after his own worldly
pattern. He would dismantle her of her womanly ideals,
and give her in their place his table of market-values.
He would teach her to submit her sensibilities to her
selfish interest, and her tastes to the fashion of the moment,
no matter which world or half-world it came from.
“As the husband is, the wife is,” — he would subdue her
to what he worked in.

All this Clement saw, as in apocalyptic vision, stored
up for the wife of Murray Bradshaw, if he read him rightly,
as he felt sure he did, from the few times he had seen
him. He would be rich by and by, very probably. He

looked like one of those young men who are sharp
and hard enough to come to fortune. Then she would
have to take her place in the great social exhibition where
the gilded cages are daily opened that the animals may
be seen, feeding on the sight of stereotyped toilets and
the sound of impoverished tattle. O misery of semi-provincial
fashionable life, where wealth is at its wit's end to
avoid being tired of an existence which has all the labor
of keeping up appearances, without the piquant profligacy
which saves it at least from being utterly vapid! How
many fashionable women at the end of a long season
would be ready to welcome heaven itself as a relief from
the desperate monotony of dressing, dawdling, and driving!

This could not go on so forever. Clement had placed
a red curtain so as to throw a rose-bloom on his marble,
and give it an aspect which his fancy turned to the semblance
of life. He would sit and look at the features his
own hand had so faithfully wrought, until it seemed as if
the lips moved, sometimes as if they were smiling, sometimes
as if they were ready to speak to him. His companions
began to whisper strange things of him in the
studio, — that his eye was getting an unnatural light, —
that he talked as if to imaginary listeners, — in short, that
there was a look as if something were going wrong with
his brain, which it might be feared would spoil his fine
intelligence. It was the undecided battle, and the enemy,
as in his noblest moments he had considered the growing
passion, was getting the better of him.

He was sitting one afternoon before the fatal bust which
had smiled and whispered away his peace, when the postman
brought him a letter. It was from the simple girl

to whom he had given his promise. We know how she
used to prattle in her harmless way about her innocent
feelings, and the trifling matters that were going on in her
little village world. But now she wrote in sadness.
Something, she did not too clearly explain what, had
grieved her, and she gave free expression to her feelings.
“I have no one that loves me but you,” she said; “and
if you leave me I must droop and die. Are you true to
me, dearest Clement, — true as when we promised each
other that we would love while life lasted? Or have you
forgotten one who will never cease to remember that she
was once your own Susan?”

Clement dropped the letter from his hand, and sat a long
hour looking at the exquisitely wrought features of her
who had come between him and honor and his plighted
word.

At length he arose, and, lifting the bust tenderly from
its pedestal, laid it upon the cloth with which it had been
covered. He wrapped it closely, fold upon fold, as the
mother whom man condemns and God pities wraps the
child she loves before she lifts her hand against its life.
Then he took a heavy hammer and shattered his lovely
idol into shapeless fragments. The strife was over.