 | CHAPTER XXIX. Paul Fane, or, Parts of a life else untold |  |
29. CHAPTER XXIX.
With the invalid return of the artist to Florence, the
next morning, the first sitting of Miss Ashly for her portrait
reverted to its original place of appointment, the
apartment of her Aunt Winifred; and, as Paul was likely
to have the earliest knowledge of the arrival of the
reserved spinster from Rome, the family at Casa G—
were to depend on him for their news and for the arrangement
of their visits to town. Looking forward with some
dread at present, to any fresh trial of his nerves—(such as
full control over his pencil would be, in the united presence
of the aunt and her niece, and probably Miss Paleford)—
he was very glad of the respite given him by a few days
of unaccountable delay. Miss Ashly neither came nor
wrote to countermand her engaged apartments. Sitting
over his coffee, one morning, however, and giving reins to
his sensitive imagination—wondering whether the eccentric
return to England, or started to refresh her content
with single blessedness by a visit to the Orient and Lady
Hester Stanhope—perhaps taken ill with the malaria at
Rome, perhaps gone into a convent, perhaps attacked by
the banditti in the mountains—Paul was relieved of his
uncertainty by a fresh surprise. The servant whom he had
sent to the post, returned with the following letter from
her:—
I presume it will somewhat startle you to see the signature
to this letter—(“Winifred Tetherly,” if, before arriving at the
bottom of the page where I am to write it, I do not first awake from
a dream)—though, for what is but a prompt following of your
advice, you have no very reasonable ground for surprise. To help
a lady to a husband you will think, is as easy as to pass the salt—
so easy, and for one who thought herself the most difficult woman
in the world, that I am not yet fully persuaded of it myself. But I
must at least, tell you the story of an event which (according to
my present strong impression and belief), has prevented me from
keeping my appointment with you as Miss Ashly.
I may confess to having felt somewhat offended at your proposal
of Mr. Tetherly to me, in your reply to my first letter. It was partly
a disparagement of yourself to think another could take your place
so easily, but it was still more an unflattering comment on my
readiness for a lover. When his card was brought to me with
your note of introduction, ten days ago, I presumed there was a
receiving his visit altogether, but that I was not willing to betray
that I had taken offence.
With the discovery (which I made almost immediately) that
you had not only kept my secret, but had breathed nothing to him
of your own foreshadowing of his destiny, Mr. Tetherly, of course,
was put upon the ground of a simply well introduced new acquaintance.
And I did not, at first, particularly fancy him. His features
and bearing struck me as not being of a very patrician cast, and his
voice seemed to lack the indefinable semitone which forms the
cadence of high-breeding. Then he was not distinguished for
anything—a proud woman's strongest objection to a man. My
faith in the hidden qualities of any character with which you have
exchanged a friendship, alone kept my judgment suspended after
this first unfavorable impression.
You know how full Rome is of common idling ground. We
met at the Coliseum—we met at the galleries and studios—we met
in St. Peter's wildernesses of aisles and chapels—always accidentally,
I thought. There was a certain pleasure, which I did not
analyze at first, in what there was of you in his mere presence—
having come from you so recently—and I looked into his eyes as
he talked, with the interest I should feel in a mirror that had just
reflected you. And so began, not my liking of him, but my
understanding of him; for I found that he saw with your peculiar
eyes, and thought and felt with (how shall I describe it?) your
peculiar religion of appreciation. There was in his sincere deference—his
sweet and hallowing reverence of look and tone—a something
better and nobler than the stamp of high-breeding which I
had missed—the unsandalled feet, as it were, which my artificial
eyes had found so bare, being but the acknowledgment of holy
approached as sacred! And in his earnest seriousness of attention,
and the subdued and unwavering completeness of his belief in me,
and worship of the heart I had to bestow, there was a persuasion
against which my pride-barriers were weak. I began to listen to
him as I thought I should never listen to mortal voice again.
This was ten days ago, and I am now—married! Time, I
believe, is of all degrees of compressibility—“a year in a day,”
common, at least, in the almanac of the heart. I feel as if had
known Mr. Tetherly from the time when I might have known him
—the time when we might have loved—if we had met, that is to
say, with the removal of our masks by your magician's wand. He
would never have seen my heart but by your pencil's portrayal of
it, I am very sure. His own would have been certainly misinterpreted
by me but for your reading of it. And, even as it was, I
should not have been “in tune” for loving him, I fear, but that I
had played the symphony to you!
We have married suddenly. It was not merely because neither
of us had any time to waste (as the world will say), but there might
have been difficulties if it had not been put at once past interference
by relatives and friends. And this brings me to a request I have
to make of your kindness. My niece is with the Palefords. Will
you announce my marriage to her, and with your own estimate of
my husband? The habits of reserve in our family would prevent
me from making any explanation of what they were not prepared
to appreciate. You have doubtless, by this time, brought your
magnetism of influence to bear upon Mildred, and she will take,
from you, the opinion of Mr. Tetherly which, it is very necessary,
should await us at home. As the coolnesses in our Ashly blood are
life-long, you may thus do the family a timely service, the value of
But, ah! if the magnetism you are thus to exercise over my niece
could be warmed into love! If Mildred (who has never yet felt a
tenderness for mortal man, I believe) could feel the wave of your
magician's wand, and, while endeared to you by being under your
spell, win you to add one more flower—yourself—to our family tree!
Tetherly tells me it is a childish attachment which at present binds
you, and which, he thinks, will not end in marriage. Mildred has
a heart's current, strong and warm, beneath her surface of ice.
Will you not look at her with your discerning and tender eyes?
The citadel I thus propose for your conquest is proud and strong, I
know. For any passing knight-errant, with a stranger's crest and
plume, it would be hopelessly impregnable. But you have a friend
within the gates—a shield you have already pierced hanging broken
in Ashly hall! Mildred would be half your captive, even when
sounding her first defiance.
My pen was just lifted to erase these few sentences last written.
What I am thus proposing to you—like what I have proposed to
you before—is against all rules of love in books, as it is most
signally against all my previous nurture and instincts. I simply
know that I am still natural and true—though, like the butterfly,
on his new wings, with only his memory as a worm, I am surprised
that the air should sustain me.
Yet why should I not own that I have loved you? Why may I
not desire, since I could not have your love, to have your life passed
near me, with the love left out? For that much of a mind and
heart that is made one's own by wedlock is but a small part of what
was loved in the lover—hardly lessening what is to be lived with in
the friend. The heaven where they “neither marry nor are given
and soul are quite content—may be foreshadowed in this world.
What I might daily and freely share, were you married to one of
my kindred—your looks, your thoughts, your words, your presence,
your genius, with all its gifts of insight and appreciation—would be
making you bountifully mine! And with Tetherly's partaking, too;
for he loves you—that much—as well as I.
We shall follow close upon this letter to Florence, and you will
please retain for me, therefore, the apartments already engaged.
The remaining sittings for my portrait can thus be taken with the
same light. (Shall I look to you the same?) Mildred is to sit to
you there, also, I understand. And of course you will see the need
of immediateness in your announcement of my marriage to her.
It will be a carefully woven woof of tact and kindness, I well know
—but will you not broider upon it, also, a flower for yourself?”
“Ah, what a letter this is—from me to any man! I could not
write so to Tetherly—quite yet! But, my dear Mr. Fane, the
grating of my heart's long-locked convent cell let you in like the
sunshine. Though my veil is just thrown aside that I may come
out, you are less a stranger than the open day which meets me at
the door.
May God bless you—whether you are to be the light of our dark
Ashly eyes or not!
It was fortunate for Paul that immediate and comparatively
simple action (the visit to Casa G—) was
his first duty after the reading of this letter. He was
it called upon him to realize. He mechanically went
about his preparations for a day in the country, with
the Palefords. And in another hour, he was whirling
over the bridge of the Arno, the once-more strangely
thoughtful and silent passenger in the vetturino of his
friend Giuseppe.
| CHAPTER XXIX. Paul Fane, or, Parts of a life else untold | |