University of Virginia Library

13. XIII.
DREAMING DREAMS.

SO short was the period between Emilia's
betrothal and her marriage, that Aunt
Jane's sufferings over trousseau and visits did
not last long. Mr. Lambert's society was the
worst thing to bear.

“He makes such long calls!” she said, despairingly.
“He should bring an almanac
with him to know when the days go by.”

“But Harry and Philip are here all the
time,” said Kate, the accustomed soother.

“Harry is quiet, and Philip keeps out of the
way lately,” she answered. “But I always
thought lovers the most inconvenient thing
about a house. They are more troublesome
than the mice, and all those people who live
in the wainscot; for though the lovers make
less noise, yet you have to see them.”

“A necessary evil, dear,” said Kate, with
much philosophy.

“I am not sure,” said the complainant.
“They might be excluded in the deed of a

house, or by the terms of the lease. The
next house I take, I shall say to the owner,
`Have you a good well of water on the premises?
Are you troubled with rats or lovers?'
That will settle it.”

It was true, what Aunt Jane said about
Malbone. He had changed his habits a good
deal. While the girls were desperately busy
about the dresses, he beguiled Harry to the
club, and sat on the piazza, talking sentiment
and sarcasm, regardless of hearers.

“When we are young,” he would say, “we
are all idealists in love. Every imaginative
boy has such a passion, while his intellect is
crude and his senses indifferent. It is the
height of bliss. All other pleasures are not
worth its pains. With older men this ecstasy
of the imagination is rare; it is the senses
that clutch or reason which holds.”

“Is that an improvement?” asked some
juvenile listener.

“No!” said Philip, strongly. “Reason is
cold and sensuality hateful; a man of any
feeling must feed his imagination; there must
be a woman of whom he can dream.”

“That is,” put in some more critical auditor,
“whom he can love as a woman loves a man.”

“For want of the experience of such a passion,”
Malbone went on, unheeding, “nobody
comprehends Petrarch. Philosophers and sensualists
all refuse to believe that his dream of
Laura went on, even when he had a mistress
and a child. Why not? Every one must
have something to which his dreams can cling,
amid the degradations of actual life, and this
tie is more real than the degradation; and if
he holds to the tie, it will one day save him.”

“What is the need of the degradation?”
put in the clear-headed Harry.

“None, except in weakness,” said Philip.
“A stronger nature may escape it. Good
God! do I not know how Petrarch must
have felt? What sorrow life brings! Suppose
a man hopelessly separated from one
whom he passionately loves. Then, as he
looks up at the starry sky, something says to
him: `You can bear all these agonies of privation,
loss of life, loss of love, — what are
they? If the tie between you is what you
thought, neither life nor death, neither folly
nor sin, can keep her forever from you.'
Would that one could always feel so! But
I am weak. Then comes impulse, it thirsts
for some immediate gratification; I yield, and

plunge into any happiness since I cannot obtain
her. Then comes quiet again, with the
stars, and I bitterly reproach myself for needing
anything more than that stainless ideal.
And so, I fancy, did Petrarch.”

Philip was getting into a dangerous mood
with his sentimentalism. No lawful passion
can ever be so bewildering or ecstatic as an
unlawful one. For that which is right has
all the powers of the universe on its side, and
can afford to wait; but the wrong, having all
those vast forces against it, must hurry to its
fulfilment, reserve nothing, concentrate all its
ecstasies upon to-day. Malbone, greedy of
emotion, was drinking to the dregs a passion
that could have no to-morrow.

Sympathetic persons are apt to assume that
every refined emotion must be ennobling. This
is not true of men like Malbone, voluptuaries
of the heart. He ordinarily got up a passion
very much as Lord Russell got up an appetite,
— he, of Spence's Anecdotes, who went out
hunting for that sole purpose and left the
chase when the sensation came. Malbone
did not leave his more spiritual chase so soon,
— it made him too happy. Sometimes, indeed,
when he had thus caught his emotion,

it caught him in return, and for a few moments
made him almost unhappy. This he
liked best of all; he nursed the delicious pain,
knowing that it would die out soon enough,
there was no need of hurrying it to a close.
At least, there had never been need for such
solicitude before.

Except for his genius for keeping his own
counsel, every acquaintance of Malbone's
would have divined the meaning of these
reveries. As it was, he was called whimsical
and sentimental, but he was a man of sufficiently
assured position to have whims of
his own, and could even treat himself to an
emotion or so, if he saw fit. Besides, he
talked well to anybody on anything, and was
admitted to exhibit, for a man of literary
tastes, a good deal of sense. If he had engaged
himself to a handsome schoolmistress,
it was his fancy, and he could afford it. Moreover
she was well connected, and had an air.
And what more natural than that he should
stand at the club-window and watch, when his
young half-sister (that was to be) drove by
with John Lambert? So every afternoon he
saw them pass in a vehicle of lofty description,
with two wretched appendages in dark

blue broadcloth, who sat with their backs
turned to their masters, kept their arms
folded, and nearly rolled off at every corner.
Hope would have dreaded the close neighborhood
of those Irish ears; she would rather
have ridden even in an omnibus, could she
and Philip have taken all the seats. But then
Hope seldom cared to drive on the Avenue at
all, except as a means of reaching the ocean,
whereas with most people it appears the appointed
means to escape from that spectacle.
And as for the footmen, there was nothing
in the conversation worth their hearing or
repeating; and their presence was a relief
to Emilia, for who knew but Mr. Lambert
himself might end in growing sentimental?

Yet she did not find him always equally
tedious. Their drives had some variety. For
instance, he sometimes gave her some lovely
present before they set forth, and she could
feel that, if his lips did not yield diamonds and
rubies, his pockets did. Sometimes he conversed
about money and investments, which
she rather liked; this was his strong and commanding
point; he explained things quite
clearly, and they found, with mutual surprise,
that she also had a shrewd little brain for

those matters, if she would but take the
trouble to think about them. Sometimes he
insisted on being tender, and even this was
not so bad as she expected, at least for a
few minutes at a time; she rather enjoyed
having her hand pressed so seriously, and
his studied phrases amused her. It was
only when he wished the conversation to be
brilliant and intellectual, that he became intolerable;
then she must entertain him, must
get up little repartees, must tell him lively anecdotes,
which he swallowed as a dog bolts a
morsel, being at once ready for the next. He
never made a comment, of course, but at the
height of his enjoyment he gave a quick,
short, stupid laugh, that so jarred upon her
ears, she would have liked to be struck deaf
rather than hear it again.

At these times she thought of Malbone,
how gifted he was, how inexhaustible, how
agreeable, with a faculty for happiness that
would have been almost provoking had it not
been contagious. Then she looked from her
airy perch and smiled at him at the club-window,
where he stood in the most negligent of
attitudes, and with every faculty strained in
observation. A moment and she was gone.

Then all was gone, and a mob of queens might
have blocked the way, without his caring to
discuss their genealogies, even with old General
Le Breton, who had spent his best (or
his worst) years abroad, and was supposed
to have been confidential adviser to most of
the crowned heads of Europe.

For the first time in his life Malbone found
himself in the grasp of a passion too strong
to be delightful. For the first time his own
heart frightened him. He had sometimes
feared that it was growing harder, but now
he discovered that it was not hard enough.

He knew it was not merely mercenary motives
that had made Emilia accept John Lambert;
but what troubled him was a vague
knowledge that it was not mere pique. He
was used to dealing with pique in women, and
had found it the most manageable of weaknesses.
It was an element of spasmodic conscience
that he saw here, and it troubled him.

Something told him that she had said to
herself: “I will be married, and thus do my
duty to Hope. Other girls marry persons
whom they do not love, and it helps them to
forget. Perhaps it will help me. This is a
good man, they say, and I think he loves me.”

“Think?” John Lambert had adored her
when she had passed by him without looking
at him; and now when the thought came over
him that she would be his wife, he became
stupid with bliss. And as latterly he had
thought of little else, he remained more or
less stupid all the time.

To a man like Malbone, self-indulgent
rather than selfish, this poor, blind semblance
of a moral purpose in Emilia was a great embarrassment.
It is a terrible thing for a lover
when he detects conscience amidst the armory
of weapons used against him, and faces the
fact that he must blunt a woman's principles
to win her heart. Philip was rather accustomed
to evade conscience, but he never liked
to look it in the face and defy it.

Yet if the thought of Hope at this time
came over him, it came as a constraint, and
he disliked it as such; and the more generous
and beautiful she was, the greater the constraint.
He cursed himself that he had allowed
himself to be swayed back to her,
and so had lost Emilia forever. And thus
he drifted on, not knowing what he wished
for, but knowing extremely well what he
feared.