University of Virginia Library

33. CHAPTER XXXIII.

The company at Raven-Park was principally a family-gathering.
Tetherly gave a list of the guests and their
peculiar points of character, before leaving Paul in his
room to dress for dinner; and, as he closed the door, Paul
fell to wondering how he had so mechanically consented to
be brought where he was, and, particularly, how he had
given in, ever so tacitly and reluctantly, to Mrs. Tetherly's
improbable scheme. The approaching meeting with Miss
Ashly, he felt, was to cost him an effort, inestimably as he
had prized the confession of preference and esteem for him
which she had made to her aunt. But, had the removal
of that long festering sting from his heart left it more
impressible? Would the victory of his pride warm into
love? The colder judgment, sitting in the background of
his troubled thoughts, said “no;” while, so utterly adrift
and unloved did he feel in the world, since the marriage
of Sybil Paleford, that even this vague semblance of happiness
looked attractive. To turn over the blotted leaf of

his heart, and forget it if he could, but to offer the next
blank page as a tablet whereon Fate was free to write, was
the resolve plucked at the last moment from the perplexities
of his thoughts, as he descended to the drawing-room.

The greeting from Miss Ashly, as she stood among eight
or ten of her relatives, all strangers to Paul, was, of course,
only a friendly cordiality. He intended to approach again
the hand that pressed his so warmly, but his presentations,
right and left, by his host, Sir John Morford, were scarce
ended, when the door of the dining-room was thrown open,
and he took his chance of neighborhood at dinner by giving
his arm to the nearest lady.

But, with Mrs. Tetherly on the right hand of Sir John,
and engrossed of course—Tetherly between two aunts on
the same side of the table with himself—Miss Ashly
directly opposite, and to be talked to, if at all, with an
audience of five or six indifferent listeners—and himself
between two profiles, which his artistic eye discovered, at a
glance, to belong to two wooden and well-bred mediocrities
—Paul ate his soup with small promise of pleasure. The
usual refuge would have been easy. He could have taken
his thoughts into his own brain—(serving out the dried
raisins of well-preserved commonplaces, instead of fresh
grapes plucked from the vine of the present moment)—but
that his old pride-wound was still sensitive, though healed.
Miss Ashly's cold grey eyes were seeing him in a new

light, and trying him, inevitably and for the first time, by
the standards among which she had been brought up. He
was piqued, not only to appear to advantage, but contentedly
at his ease.

Master of appearances, as Paul constitutionally was,
however, he was not master of his own nervous susceptibility.
The respective estimate which he formed of himself
and those around him, did not at all agree with their
respective estimate of themselves and him; and this difference,
which, under ordinary circumstances, would simply
have amused him, acted upon him, while so much was at
stake, with the republicanism of Nature. He was outvoted.
It was perfectly evident to him that his neighbors
were eating their dinner under the full impression of their
social superiority to both Tetherly and his friend the
American artist—and in the very small minority of his
own opinion to the contrary, there was no consciousness of
power. While he talked with a most voluble and successfully
affected brilliancy, therefore, he was secretly writhing
under the sense of being condescended to by those whom
he amused.

And, even in the very natural blindness of Miss Ashly to
the torture of his position, there was an aggravation of it.
She was evidently looking at him with nothing but approbation—having
been relieved, at first, of some little uneasiness,
from awkwardness anticipated, but, when this was

removed, charmed with his ease and agreeableness. Her
smile across the table was as genial and kindly as it was
any way capable of being. Yet why should she not see
(Paul's pride insisted on asking), that there was insult and
contemptuous injustice for him, in the very different sort
of kindness—the condescending toleration—of the manner
of her relatives? He tried in vain to still the gnawing of
it. He remembered over and over again, that, for the two
years he had been in England, he had associated almost
only with those who, by court standards, were the superiors
of her family—made quite at home, by his genius, in
houses of the more exclusive nobility where the lesser aristocrats
around him never set foot—yet the thought was of
no avail. They were Ashlys—of the blood of the proud
woman who had given the first life-sting to his pride—and
by that silly yet ineffaceable memory of his boyhood's
mortification, they had the power to humiliate him.

The dinner seemed interminable to Paul; but the ladies
at last left the table; and, with Miss Ashly's disappearance,
the “amusing American artist,” as her uncles and cousins
had all thought him, became suddenly silent. With the
silver fruit-knife for a pencil, he wrote or sketched, very
absently, on the bottom of his plate, his eyes sheltered
with the hand that supported his forehead. His friend
Tetherly was deep in politics, with their host, at the other
end of the table. How he could ever have consented for

an instant to think of marrying Miss Ashly—binding himself
to breathe, even for a second time in his whole life, the
hell of such an atmosphere of relationship—was working
the curl of Paul's lip into something like a smile of bitterness,
when, suddenly, along the gravel-path under the window,
came the quick rattle and pull-up of a post-carriage,
silencing the conversation all around.

The butler entered presently, and leaned over with an
audible whisper:

“Mr. and Mrs. Ashly, from Florence, Sir John! They
have been to dinner, and will have the pleasure of meeting
you at tea.”

Sir John nodded. Tetherly gave his friend a look that
he meant should be congratulatory of a mutually pleasant
surprise. The guests fell to discussing how long Arthur
could have been in coming from Switzerland, where he
had been passing his honey-moon—whether he would take
to hunting or politics, now that he had brought his wife to
England for a permanency, and was to reside at Ashly
Hall—when “Mrs. Arthur” would probably be presented
at court, and what a talk her beauty would undoubtedly
make—whether their first son would be named after the
Morford or Ashly branch, and how the Paleford and Ashly
blood would cross, as to features and character. The presence
of the still silent American was quite forgotten by the

half dozen gentlemen at his end of the table, as they sat,
with a fresh family topic, over their wine.

Paul felt his eyes grow hot and blind, with the burning
flush to his brain and temples. Sybil Paleford under the
same roof—a wife—and to be met with the unbetraying
politeness of indifference, in a drawing-room, and before
strangers! The clenched fingers with which he almost
broke in two the knife in his hand—the bloodless lips of
the face bent low to the table—told the effort that it cost
him for self-control. To rush from the sight of those
around him—to fly from the house and escape the agony
of that meeting—was the wild, fierce impulse of heart and
brain.

He thanked God that no one spoke to him—that he
could be silent and alone with his anguish, though in the
presence of unsympathizing men—that there was time to
rally, and grow calm, and nerve for the bitter trial now
inevitable—the trial of congratulating her upon her marriage!
Sybil Ashly, the woman he loved most on earth, a
bride—nay, a wife, and scarce a bride any longer, but
already accustomed to the happiness of that new name,
and now to be seen presently by him, and watched for
hours in the familiar interchange of endearments with
another!

And yet the secret of what he was to suffer was between

herself and him. Miss Ashly, it was true, knew the sacrifice
he had made to leave that matchless girl for another's
winning; but she did not know the proof of Sybil's love
for him, hidden (still wordless and scarce believed) in the
very depths of his soul—those swift, warm kisses on his
eyes, as he lay (she thought, insensible!) in the twilight
of that day too trying! Tetherly and his wife had known
little or nothing of his passion for Sybil. Ashly, the husband,
had looked upon it as a caprice of girlish attachment,
which he had only to make serious love to overcome—even
Colonel Paleford having concealed from him
the critical improbability of his success, and the full depth
of Paul's magnanimity of relinquishment.

And what was the story of that wooing? How was
she—Sybil Paleford, into whose willing eyes he had
poured such glowing devotion from his own, under Italy's
love-kindling sunsets, dreamy moonlights, and calm, sweet
mornings—how was she persuaded to forget him? That
it was not a resentment, and not because his motives were
misunderstood, he was certain. Colonel Paleford was a
man of too high honor not to have done him full justice
in the farewell of which he was the bearer to his daughter.
And there would have been some show of reason for the
acceptance of Mr. Ashly, too, if the wealth of which she
thus became the mistress, were necessary for the support
of her father—but, with his moderate competency, he had

preferred to remain in Italy, and end his days in that
milder climate; his daughter and her husband to pass the
winters with him there. Was Paul's romance of belief in
woman's unworldliness of love to be thus shaken? Had
the girlhood, so independent of a court, and so disinterested
in the manifestation of a persevering preference for a poor
artist, passed into a womanhood of selfishness—a taste
only for luxury and display? On this one wild dream he
had built, unconsciously, but wholly and believingly, his
hope of inspiring the passion pictured in his ideal. By
Sybil Paleford, or never in this world, he had thought to
be romantically loved. This was the life-enigma, stored
away—hidden in his inmost heart—but, with all its uncertainty,
most fondly and resistlessly trusted.

It was well for Paul, that, in the hour of unobserved
self-absorption given him by the gentlemens' remaining at
table, his crowding thoughts had time to traverse their
tumultuous circle and come round again to his composure
of disappointment. Upon the sad misgiving that Sybil
was, after all, more like others than he had dreamed her
to be—that she had loved him when near, and soon forgot
him for another when he was gone—he once more became
self-possessed, and calm outwardly. His love-dream for
life was over, but, with the certainty of that, he could at
least entomb its wreck in his own memory. It was in the
past, and he could hide it from the world.

The long windows to the floor were all open, for it was
a warm October night, with a brilliant moon; and, as the
guests followed Sir John into the drawing-room by the
folding-doors, Paul stepped out upon the long piazza that
ran the length of the house. The formidableness of a
deliberate approach, to give, with the other gentlemen, his
welcome to the new arrivals, rather staggered his courage.
If he could enter at the side, by one of the windows opening
upon the lawn, and speak to the bride—to Mrs. Ashly
—when the attention of the company was less concentrated
upon her, he thought the embarrassment might be
less. At least, he might bathe his hot eyes in the fresh,
calm air of night, and, from the stars, familiar to his happier
hours, get a thought, perhaps, to help build the barrier
that he needed.

The brilliant flood of light, from the windows of the
drawing-room, made the foliage of the low-hanging trees
upon the lawn too golden for even the moonlight to be
perceptible; and the stars, up through the glow of the
atmosphere immediately around the house, were scarce
visible at all. Paul leaned over the railing for a moment;
but the concentration of the light and the sound of voices
drew him insensibly onward, and, passing one or two pillars
of the colonnade, he came suddenly upon the window
commanding a full view of the company within.

A sense of alarm—a staggering of the brain-poise for a

moment—but he remembered that he was still outside, in
the darkness. He was not within the four walls which
bounded the light for those in her presence. He was not
visible, to her! But she, to him, through that open win
dow!—oh God, how beautiful she once more beamed, a
wonder, upon his eyes! Had he forgotten how surpassing
was that beauty! Or had Sybil, with her new happiness
—her happiness as Ashly's wife—grown more fair? Fairer
she certainly seemed to him, even than he had dreaded,
with his artist's memory and poet's imagination, that, as a
bride, she would appear. Her type of beauty—(he marvelled
as his eyes refused to see, but still saw it!)—was
completer than when he loved her. It was higher beauty,
now, than when she had turned from court homage to
think only of him—higher beauty, in England and as an
Ashly, than, under the passionate sky of Italy, giving a
joyous girl's first heart-waking to Paul Fane! She was
paler, now, and more calmly and strangely noble.

Waiting his opportunity to speak to her, without all
eyes upon the unsuspected trial of his courage, he still
stood, an unobserved spectator of the scene, by the column
of the piazza. The tribute to Mrs. Ashly's remarkable
loveliness was universal. In her white evening dress as a
bride, and with a coronet of costly pearls circling the
shadow of her golden hair — her exquisitely moulded
shoulders and arms fairly dazzling with their glowing

and fine-grained whiteness, in the light, and her completed
fullness of figure as a woman without a fault, either of
sculpture-line or queenliness of mien—she sat at a slight
angle of turn from the window where Paul stood, but, by
the next window, apparently, when not occupied with conversation,
looking out upon the lawn. Around her chair,
more or less distant, but with their eyes fixed upon her,
stood the gentlemen who had just been presented—Sir
John at the right arm of her fauteuil, and the bridegroom
leaning upon its carved back, looking down upon her as
she sat beneath him. Paul gave to the happy man one
look of his practised and searching eye! He had studied
that face too well as an artist to misread it now. The
Ashly iciness of repose had come uppermost again. With
his cold and habitual contemptuousness, the bridegroom
was blest! He was secure in his freely-acknowledged
happiness! But, even on the torturing throe of uncontrollable
envy and jealousy, which Paul was guilty of feeling,
for the moment, there was a gleam of wicked light.
In that circle of men—the well-dressed, well-mannered,
unexceptionably aristocratic gentlemen who now stood
around her—her relatives and intimates for life—there
was not one, who, by the instinct of her nature, would ever
seem her equal. They were her inferiors—nay—thank
God! they were even his! With the husband who stood
behind her, there, in lordly possession—however he might
now be enriched, beyond all possibility of being again
reached or mated, for value of life by a poor artist—he
had once compared himself and felt worthier than an
Ashly of her love.

A step approached from behind, as this dark thought
gave place to nobler feelings; and Tetherly, coming in
from his cigar upon the lawn, slipped his arm into Paul's,
to have his company at the tea-table. Mrs. Tetherly
presided at the urn in the corner; but, on their way,
the two gentlemen together gave their first greeting to
the bride—the anticipated embarrassment, and scarce controllable
emotion of Paul, being fortunately and wholly
veiled under the confusion of that double welcome.
Tetherly was constitutionally ceremonious. Paul took
the tone of his manner, and was ceremonious, too. He
noticed that Mrs. Ashly's voice did not utter his name
audibly, though her lips moved. The pressure of her
hand was uncertain. She replied to his one question
of her father's health, with a tone that, to him, seemed
forced and mechanical, but in no way likely to seem
other than commonplace to those around; and, feeling
Mr. Ashly's eye very steadily fixed upon him, Paul shook
hands with the bridegroom, and, echoing his friend's
welcome of him to England, passed on. The ordeal was
over—he scarce knew when, or how!

“My dear Paul!” said Mrs. Tetherly, in an under-tone,

as she handed him a cup of tea, “thank God for the old
magnetism, as strong as ever! She loves you!”

Paul had but one image in his bewildered thoughts, and
he looked at his friend in dumb amazement.

“I have been talking with Mildred,” she continued,
“and she confesses to having wholly disparaged you,
even with her already confessed, but hitherto measured
preference. The comparison with our dull kinsfolk, to-day,
has revealed to her your better clay.”

“My dear friend!” exclaimed Paul, with the expostulatory
tone of mere politeness, but scarce collecting his
scattered senses sufficiently to comprehend the meaning of
his zealous and partial friend.

“For her, a full confession—let me assure you!” added
Mrs. Tetherly, with a look over her shoulder as she rose
(for Sir John had taken her hand at the moment to lead
her to the piano), “but au revoir! and more of it by-and-by.
She is alone, at this moment,” she added, pointing to
her niece, sitting thoughtfully at an open window.

But Paul was not equal even to the ordinary effort of
conversation—much less to the difficult exercise of tact
and delicacy which would be required by his present
position toward Miss Ashly. His mind and heart, in
spite of all struggle of judgment and principle against
it, were now full of burning thoughts of another. To
escape from looking longer upon that peerless bride was

the present prompting of his conscience—the cruel need
of his weakness and passion. That he should take an
early and unceremonious leave, with the morrow's morning—never
again to see Sybil Paleford—Sybil Ashly—if
it were possible to be avoided—he resolved, of course;
but, for that evening, he was to breathe the air of
bewildering nearness to her, and to be included in the
same hospitality; and, that night, he was to pass, under
the same roof with her glorious beauty, in all its enchantment—ay,
in all its happiness! And, with this torture
of thought crowding on soul and brain, with anguish too
intolerable to be concealed, he needed darkness around
him. The unwitnessing or unrevealing stars were the only
company he could bear.

Like a far-extended floor of the drawing-room, the
closely-shaven lawn of Raven-Park extended away, its
limits lost in the wilderness of thickets and noble trees;
and, from shadow to shadow of the leafy breaks in the
moonlight, Paul now wandered, thanking God to be alone.
The night was soft and breathlessly still. The music of
the electric fingers of his friend, pouring from the open
windows, was audible in its mellowed and best effect
throughout the grounds. He was conscious, at last, of
being soothed by this continued and unseen ministration;
and seating himself upon the railing of a bridge over a
serpentine stream—the outlet to a sheet of artificial water

on the edge of the lawn—he gave his thoughts up to the
music.

But, a sudden fear began to take possession of Paul's
nervously excited brain. Surely she would not play that
romance! Would not common pity—would not instinct
—would not the guardian angels on the watch—Sybil's
mother—Heaven in its mercy—prevent the wakening of
that, now?

She who was at this moment bewitching the formal
air of Raven-Park, was no ordinary player. Paul had
caught, for her portrait, the expression of the rapt genius
that found its way to the ivory keys through her nervous
and pliant fingers. But her inspiration did not find vent
alone in following the music-thoughts of the great masters.
She was an improvisatrice upon the instrument—the pulses
of her brain not more effortless than the strings, in the life
they drew from her. Her playing was usually capricious.
For indifferent listeners it would be oftenest a mélange—
the airs of operas, old songs, waltzes, and any chance-remembered
compositions, woven together. To those she
loved, however, and to whom she played confidentially,
it was a pouring out of her own heart in an irregular
improvisation—varying, according to her mood, but
oftenest rising, toward the close, into the most passionate
utterance of the feeling so long chained within her.

The overflowing heart, locked and frozen for half a life
under the ice of her reserve, thus found a voice.

But she would sometimes take a theme—giving the
hint of a story, she would tell it afterwards in music. And
of this more sympathetic and descriptive improvisation,
both Paul and Sybil Paleford had been exceedingly fond,
in the days they had passed together at Florence—one
strange romance, particularly, possessing for them a singular
fascination, though it was seldom given but at the last
hour by the excited player, and with feelings wholly abandoned
to the theme. It represented a love, timid in its
waking, but strengthening without the chance for an
avowal, and growing, by suppression, into madness—based
upon a German story of great wildness and beauty. The
exchange of feeling that had never been made in words,
by Paul and Sybil, had been passed and repassed between
them, on that music's electric magnetism, in eloquence of
fire!

The player, as Paul now recognized, was becoming
gradually unconscious of listeners. By the flitting forms
passing to and fro between himself and the windows, he
could see that the company had been enticed out upon the
lawn by the loveliness of the night; and Mrs. Tetherly,
left alone in the room, had probably abandoned herself
to the witchery of the instrument. It was changefully

expressive of reverie—sad for a moment or two, then
strong or brilliant; but, at last (and it was this which had
startled Paul with such sudden alarm), hovering with
evident absent-mindedness over the commencement of the
German story. To the touching and melancholy air that
ran through it she made a dreamer's capricious approaches,
now rushing upon it by an unmistakable note or two, then
turning off with some whim of variation, as if abruptly
forgetful of what she had thought to play. Would she,
indeed, venture upon it? Would she not remember that
there might be a heart beating within sound of those ivory
keys, whose secret, whose dumb sad prisoner, it would
drive wild in its cell?

But, as Paul stood, risen to his feet, and listening with
the alarm of nervous expectation, a flowing figure in white
came with uncertain movement toward the shadow of the
gigantic willow overhanging the bridge. At the step with
which she crossed the line of shade made upon the broad
lawn by the clump of trees nearest to him—emerging suddenly
into the radiant light of the clear full moon—he
saw that it was the bride. She came alone. Yet how
unlike herself, as he had seen her in that drawing-room, a
half hour before! Her head was bent low, as if to be
blind to the bright night around her, and, with fingers
tightly interlocked, the palms of her hands were turned
downwards with convulsive struggle before her. The air

of stateliness and repose was no longer there. With
shoulders drawn forward, and face unseen in its depressed
turning from the moon, there was only her bridal wreath
with its glittering pearls, to make certain that it was
she.

Hid, himself, in the dark shadow of the drooping
branches that fell like a curtain around him, Paul checked
the impulse to speak and warn her of his neighborhood—
but, on that instant of stillness, burst suddenly the clear
melody of the dreaded romance! It began with a mournful
and sustained sweetness—a love-telling which they had
both declared wholly irresistible. The bride started and
looked back. Imploringly and tenderly the wondrous wail
of the lover's unheard prayer rose upon the stillness. She
lifted her head more eagerly to listen. Another advancing
step, to place her hand upon the railing of the bridge, and
Paul's voice broke the silence. It was her name only—
her new name—uttered with the instinctive impulse that
he had no right to leave her longer unaware of his presence.
But, with a single start of surprise, and a syllable—
the one sweet syllable he had never thought to hear from
her lips again—his own familiar name—the step with
which he was about to pass and leave her to her solitude
was arrested.

She looked into his face for one moment—the wild
notes rose upon the air with the despairing madness of the

lover—the madness of which they had both learned to
interpret the musical intensity of expression—and, with a
short quick scream, but with terrible suddenness and
vehemence, she flung her arms about his neck. One close
clasp—one more utterance, each of the other's name—and
the form within his bewildered hold began to weigh upon
his arms. The head fell aside insensibly. Approaching
feet told him that the scream had been heard over the
lawn. A fleck of moonlight streamed down through the
branches upon the pale features and closed eyes. One
long look—one maddening, clinging kiss to her insensible
lips—and, laying her gently down where the coming
friends would find her, Paul fled into the darkness. The
grove and its deep shadows, beyond the lawn, received
him. He could not, even for aid to her, meet human
faces. To be alone—alone, with his own wicked, but oh!
delirious joy of madness—out-frenzying, in its passionate
intensity, even the madness of the music—he felt to be his
thirst, with that kiss upon his lips. The night was short.
The moon set upon the woods of Raven-Park, and the sun
rose, in what, to that wondering guest, were but successive
moments.

With the opening of the doors by the servants, Paul
passed to his room; and, leaving a hurried note of apology
and farewell, which Tetherly would make acceptable to
their host, but promising to his friend a better explanation

of his sudden departure when they should meet, he was, in
a few minutes, alone on his way to London.