University of Virginia Library

11. XI.
DESCENSUS AVERNI.

MALBONE stood one morning on the
pier behind the house. A two days'
fog was dispersing. The southwest breeze
rippled the deep blue water; sailboats, blue,
red, and green, were darting about like white-winged
butterflies; sloops passed and repassed,
cutting the air with the white and slender
points of their gaff-topsails. The liberated
sunbeams spread and penetrated everywhere,
and even came up to play (reflected from the
water) beneath the shadowy, overhanging
counters of dark vessels. Beyond, the atmosphere
was still busy in rolling away its vapors,
brushing the last gray fringes from the low
hills, and leaving over them only the thinnest
aerial veil. Farther down the bay, the pale
tower of the crumbling fort was now shrouded,
now revealed, then hung with floating lines of
vapor as with banners.

Hope came down on the pier to Malbone,
who was looking at the boats. He saw with

surprise that her calm brow was a little clouded,
her lips compressed, and her eyes full of
tears.

“Philip,” she said, abruptly, “do you love
me?”

“Do you doubt it?” said he, smiling, a little
uneasily.

Fixing her eyes upon him, she said, more
seriously: “There is a more important question,
Philip. Tell me truly, do you care about
Emilia?”

He started at the words, and looked eagerly
in her face for an explanation. Her expression
only showed the most anxious solicitude.

For one moment the wild impulse came up
in his mind to put an entire trust in this truthful
woman, and tell her all. Then the habit of
concealment came back to him, the dull hopelessness
of a divided duty, and the impossibility
of explanations. How could he justify
himself to her when he did not really know
himself? So he merely said, “Yes.”

“She is your sister,” he added, in an explanatory
tone, after a pause; and despised himself
for the subterfuge. It is amazing how
long a man may be false in action before he
ceases to shrink from being false in words.

“Philip,” said the unsuspecting Hope, “I
knew that you cared about her. I have seen
you look at her with so much affection; and
then again I have seen you look cold and
almost stern. She notices it, I am sure she
does, this changeableness. But this is not
why I ask the question. I think you must
have seen something else that I have been
observing, and if you care about her, even for
my sake, it is enough.”

Here Philip started, and felt relieved.

“You must be her friend,” continued Hope,
eagerly. “She has changed her whole manner
and habits very fast. Blanche Ingleside
and that set seem to have wholly controlled
her, and there is something reckless in all her
ways. You are the only person who can help
her.”

“How?”

“I do not know how,” said Hope, almost
impatiently. “You know how. You have
wonderful influence. You saved her before,
and will do it again. I put her in your
hands.”

“What can I do for her?” asked he, with a
strange mingling of terror and delight.

“Everything,” said she. “If she has your

society, she will not care for those people, so
much her inferiors in character. Devote yourself
to her for a time.”

“And leave you?” said Philip, hesitatingly.

“Anything, anything,” said she. “If I do
not see you for a month, I can bear it. Only
promise me two things. First, that you will
go to her this very day. She dines with Mrs.
Ingleside.”

Philip agreed.

“Then,” said Hope, with saddened tones,
“you must not say it was I who sent you.
Indeed you must not. That would spoil all.
Let her think that your own impulse leads
you, and then she will yield. I know Emilia
enough for that.”

Malbone paused, half in ecstasy, half in dismay.
Were all the events of life combining to
ruin or to save him? This young girl, whom
he so passionately loved, was she to be thrust
back into his arms, and was he to be told to
clasp her and be silent? And that by Hope,
and in the name of duty?

It seemed a strange position, even for him
who was so eager for fresh experiences and
difficult combinations. At Hope's appeal he
was to risk Hope's peace forever; he was to

make her sweet sisterly affection its own executioner.
In obedience to her love he must
revive Emilia's. The tender intercourse which
he had been trying to renounce as a crime
must be rebaptized as duty. Was ever a man
placed, he thought, in a position so inextricable,
so disastrous? What could he offer
Emilia? How could he explain to her his
position? He could not even tell her that
it was at Hope's command he sought her.

He who is summoned to rescue a drowning
man, knowing that he himself may go down
with that inevitable clutch around his neck, is
placed in some such situation as Philip's. Yet
Hope had appealed to him so simply, had
trusted him so nobly! Suppose that, by any
self-control, or wisdom, or unexpected aid of
Heaven, he could serve both her and Emilia,
was it not his duty? What if it should prove
that he was right in loving them both, and
had only erred when he cursed himself for
tampering with their destinies? Perhaps,
after all, the Divine Love had been guiding
him, and at some appointed signal all these
complications were to be cleared, and he and
his various loves were somehow to be ingeniously
provided for, and all be made happy
ever after.

He really grew quite tender and devout
over these meditations. Phil was not a conceited
fellow, by any means, but he had been
so often told by women that their love for him
had been a blessing to their souls, that he
quite acquiesced in being a providential agent
in that particular direction. Considered as a
form of self-sacrifice, it was not without its
pleasures.

Malbone drove that afternoon to Mrs. Ingleside's
charming abode, whither a few ladies
were wont to resort, and a great many gentlemen.
He timed his call between the hours
of dining and driving, and made sure that
Emilia had not yet emerged. Two or three
equipages beside his own were in waiting at the
gate, and gay voices resounded from the house.
A servant received him at the door, and taking
him for a tardy guest, ushered him at once into
the dining-room. He was indifferent to
this, for he had been too often sought as a
guest by Mrs. Ingleside to stand on any ceremony
beneath her roof.

That fair hostess, in all the beauty of her
shoulders, rose to greet him, from a table
where six or eight guests yet lingered over
flowers and wine. The gentlemen were smoking,

and some of the ladies were trying to
look at ease with cigarettes. Malbone knew
the whole company, and greeted them with
his accustomed ease. He would not have
been embarrassed if they had been the Forty
Thieves. Some of them, indeed, were not so
far removed from that fabled band, only it was
their fortunes, instead of themselves, that lay
in the jars of oil.

“You find us all here,” said Mrs. Ingleside,
sweetly. “We will wait till the gentlemen
finish their cigars, before driving.”

“Count me in, please,” said Blanche, in her
usual vein of frankness. “Unless mamma
wishes me to conclude my weed on the Avenue.
It would be fun, though. Fancy the
dismay of the Frenchmen and the dowagers!”

“And old Lambert,” said one of the other
girls, delightedly.

“Yes,” said Blanche. “The elderly party
from the rural districts, who talks to us about
the domestic virtues of the wife of his youth.”

“Thinks women should cruise with a broom
at their mast-heads, like Admiral somebody in
England,” said another damsel, who was rolling
a cigarette for a midshipman.

“You see we do not follow the English

style,” said the smooth hostess to Philip.
“Ladies retiring after dinner! After all, it
is a coarse practice. You agree with me,
Mr. Malbone?”

“Speak your mind,” said Blanche, coolly.
“Don't say yes if you'd rather not. Because
we find a thing a bore, you've no call to say
so.”

“I always say,” continued the matron, “that
the presence of woman is needed as a refining
influence.”

Malbone looked round for the refining influences.
Blanche was tilted back in her chair,
with one foot on the rung of the chair before
her, resuming a loud-toned discourse with
Count Posen as to his projected work on
American society. She was trying to extort
a promise that she should appear in its pages,
which, as we all remember, she did. One of
her attendant nymphs sat leaning her elbows
on the table, “talking horse” with a gentleman
who had an undoubted professional claim to a
knowledge of that commodity. Another, having
finished her manufactured cigarette, was
making the grinning midshipman open his
lips wider and wider to receive it. Mrs. Ingleside
was talking in her mincing way with a

Jew broker, whose English was as imperfect
as his morals, and who needed nothing to
make him a millionnaire but a turn of bad
luck for somebody else. Half the men in the
room would have felt quite ill at ease in any
circle of refined women, but there was not one
who did not feel perfectly unembarrassed
around Mrs. Ingleside's board.

“Upon my word,” thought Malbone, “I
never fancied the English after-dinner practice,
any more than did Napoleon. But if
this goes on, it is the gentlemen who ought to
withdraw. Cannot somebody lead the way to
the drawing-room, and leave the ladies to finish
their cigars?”

Till now he had hardly dared to look at
Emilia. He saw with a thrill of love that she
was the one person in the room who appeared
out of place or ill at ease. She did not glance
at him, but held her cigarette in silence and
refused to light it. She had boasted to him
once of having learned to smoke at school.

“What's the matter, Emmy?” suddenly
exclaimed Blanche. “Are you under a cloud,
that you don't blow one?”

“Blanche, Blanche,” said her mother, in
sweet reproof. “Mr. Malbone, what shall I

do with this wild girl? Such a light way of
talking! But I can assure you that she is
really very fond of the society of intellectual,
superior men. I often tell her that they are,
after all, her most congenial associates. More
so than the young and giddy.”

“You'd better believe it,” said the unabashed
damsel. “Take notice that whenever
I go to a dinner-party I look round for a clergyman
to drink wine with.”

“Incorrigible!” said the caressing mother.
“Mr. Malbone would hardly imagine you had
been bred in a Christian land.”

“I have, though,” retorted Blanche. “My
esteemed parent always accustomed me to
give up something during Lent, — champagne,
or the New York Herald, or something.”

The young men roared, and, had time and
cosmetics made it possible, Mrs. Ingleside
would have blushed becomingly. After all,
the daughter was the better of the two. Her
bluntness was refreshing beside the mother's
suavity; she had a certain generosity, too,
and in a case of real destitution would have
lent her best ear-rings to a friend.

By this time Malbone had edged himself to
Emilia's side. “Will you drive with me?” he
murmured in an undertone.

She nodded slightly, abruptly, and he withdrew
again.

“It seems barbarous,” said he aloud, “to
break up the party. But I must claim my
promised drive with Miss Emilia.”

Blanche looked up, for once amazed, having
heard a different programme arranged. Count
Posen looked up also. But he thought he
must have misunderstood Emilia's acceptance
of his previous offer to drive her; and as he
prided himself even more on his English than
on his gallantry, he said no more. It was no
great matter. Young Jones's dog-cart was at
the door, and always opened eagerly its arms
to anybody with a title.