 | The amber gods, and other stories |  |
Midsummer and May.
I.
PROBABLY you never saw such a superb
creature, — if that word, creature, does not
endow her with too much life: a Semiramis,
without the profligacy, — an Isis, without the
worship, — a Sphinx, yes, a Sphinx, with her desert, who
long ago despaired of having one come to read her riddle,
strong, calm, patient perhaps. In this respect she seemed
to own no redundant life, just enough to eke along existence,
— not living, but waiting.
I say, all this would have been one's impression; and
one's impression would have been incorrect.
I really cannot state her age; and having attained to
years of discretion, it is not of such consequence as it is
often supposed to be, whether one be twenty or sixty.
You would have been confident, that, living to count her
hundreds, she would only have bloomed with more immortal
freshness; but such a thought would not have occurred
to you at all, if you had not already felt that she
was no longer young, — she possessed so perfectly that
certain self-reliance, self-understanding, aplomb, into which
little folk crystallize at an early age, but which is not to
be found with those whose identities are cast in a larger
experience.
That Mrs. Laudersdale was the technical magnificent
woman, I need not reiterate. I wish I knew some name
gorgeous enough in sound and association for that given
her at christening; but I don't. It is my opinion that
she was born Mrs. Laudersdale, that her coral-and-bell
was marked Mrs. Laudersdale, and that her name stands
golden-lettered on the recording angel's leaf simply as
Mrs. Laudersdale. It is naturally to be inferred, then,
that there was a Mr. Laudersdale. There was. But
not by any means a person of consequence, you assume?
Why, yes, of some, — to one individual at least. Mrs.
Laudersdale was so weak as to regard him with complacency;
she loved — adored her husband. Let me have
the justice to say that no one suspected her of it. Of
course, then, Mr. Roger Raleigh had no business to fall in
love with her.
Well, — but he did.
At the time when Mrs. Laudersdale had become somewhat
more than a reigning beauty, and held her sceptre
with such apparent indifference that she seemed about
abandoning it forever, she no longer dazzled with unventured
combinations of colors and materials in dress. She
wore most frequently, at this epoch, black velvet that suppled
about her well-asserted contours; and the very trail
of her skirt was unlike another woman's, for it coiled and
bristled after her with a life and motion of its own, like a
serpent. Her hair, of too dead a black for gloss or glister,
was always adorned with a nasturtium-vine, whose
vivid flames seemed like some personal emanation, and
whose odor, acrid and single, dispersed a character about
her; and the only ornaments she condescended to assume
intricate in workmanship. It is evident she was a
poet in costume, and had at last en règle acquired a manner.
But thirteen years ago she apparelled herself otherwise,
and thirteen years ago it was that Mr. Roger Raleigh
fell in love with her. This is how it was.
Among the many lakes in New Hampshire, there is one
of extreme beauty, — a broad, shadowy water, some nine
miles in length, with steep, thickly wooded banks, and
here and there, as if moored on its calm surface, an island
fit for the Bower of Bliss. At one spot along its shore
was, and still is, an old country-house, formerly used as a
hotel, but whose patrons, always pleasure-seekers from the
neighboring towns, had been drawn away by the erection
of a more modern and satisfactory place of entertainment
at the other extremity of the lake, and it had now been
for many years closed. There were no dwellings of any
kind in its vicinity, so that it reigned over a solitude of a
half-dozen miles in every direction. Once in a while the
gay visitors in the more prosperous regions stretched their
sails and skimmed along till they saw its white porticos
and piazzas gleaming faintly up among the trees; once
in a while a belated traveller tied his horse at the gate,
and sought admittance in vain, at the empty house, of the
shadows who may have kept it. It was not pleasant to
see so goodly a mansion falling to ruin for want of fit occupancy,
truly; and just as the walls had grown gray with
rain and time, the chimneys choked and the casements
shrunken, a merry company of friends and families, from
another portion of the country, consolidated themselves
into a society for the pursuit of happiness, rented the old
place, put in carpenters and masons and glaziers, and,
when the last tenants vacated the premises, took possession
not theirs; the matron and her servants alone received
such guests; the long summer-days were to come and
go with them as joyously as with Bacchus and his
crew.
Behold the party domesticated a fortnight at the Bawn,
as it was afterward dubbed. Mr. Laudersdale had returned
to New York that morning, and his wife had not
been met since. Now, at about five o'clock, her white
robe floated past the door, and she was seen moving up
and down the long piazza and humming a faint little tune
to herself. Just then a flock of young women, married
and single, fluttered through door and windows to join
her; and just then Mrs. Laudersdale stepped down from
the end of the piazza and floated up the garden-path and
into the woods that skirted the lake-shore and stretched
far back and away. Thus abandoned, the others turned
their attention to the expanse before and below them; and
one or two made their way down to the brink, unhooked a
boat, ventured in, and, lifting the single pair of oars, were
soon laboring gayly out and creating havoc on the placid
waters.
As Mrs. Laudersdale continued to walk, the path which
she followed slowly descended to the pebbly rim, rich in
open spaces, slopes of verdure just gilding in the declining
sun, and coverts of cool, deep shadow. As she advanced
leisurely, involved in pleasant fancy, something
caught her eye, an unusual object, certainly, lying in a
duskier recess; she drew nearer and hung a moment
above it. Some fallen statue among rank Roman growth,
some marble semblance of a young god, overlaced with a
vine and plunged in tall ferns and beaded grasses? And
she, bending there, — was it Diana and Endymion over
and Roger Raleigh. Only while one might have
counted sixty did she linger to take the real beauty of the
scene: the youth, adopted as it were, to Nature's heart
by the clustering growth that sprang up rebounding under
the careless weight that crushed it; an attitude of complete
and unconscious grace, — one arm thrown out beneath
the head, the other listlessly fallen down his side,
while the hand still detained the straw hat; the profile,
by no means classic, but in strong relief, the dark hair
blowing in the gentle wind, the flush of sleep that went
and came almost perceptibly with the breath, and the
sunbeam that slanting round suddenly suffused the whole.
“Pretty boy!” thought Mrs. Laudersdale. Beautiful
picture!” and she flitted on. But Roger Raleigh was
not a boy, although sleep, that gives back, to all, stray
glimpses of their primal nature, endowed him peculiarly
with a look of childlike innocence unknown to his waking
hours.
Startled, perhaps, by the intruding step, for it was no
light one, a squirrel leaped from the bough to the grass,
and, leaping, woke the sleeper. He himself now unperceived,
saw a vision in return, — this woman, young and
rare, this queenly, perfect thing, floating on and vanishing
among the trees. Whence had she come, and who was
she? And hereupon he remembered the old Bawn and
its occupants. Had she seen him? Unlikely; but yet,
unimportant as it was, it remained an interesting and
open question in his mind. Bringing down the hair so
ruffled in the idle breeze, he crowded his hat over it with
a determined air, half ran, half tumbled, down the bank,
sprang into his boat, and, shaking out a sail, went flirting
over the lake as fast as the wind could carry him. Leaving
Raleigh skimmed along the skin of ripples, and, in order
to avoid a sound of shrill voices, skirted the angle of an
island, and found himself deceived by the echo and in the
midst of them.
Mrs. McLean, Miss Helen Heath, and Miss Mary
Purcell, who had embarked with a single pair of oars,
were now shipwrecked on the waters wide, as Helen
said; for one of their means of progress, she declared,
had been snatched by the roaring waves and was floating
in the trough of the sea, just beyond their reach. None
of the number being acquainted with the process of sculling,
they considered it imperative to secure the truant
tool, unless they wished to perish floating about unseen;
and having weighed the expediency of rigging Helen into
a jury-mast, they were now using their endeavors to regain
the oar, — Mary Purcell whirling them about like a
maelström with the remaining one, and Mrs. McLean
with her two hands grasping Helen's garments, while the
latter half stood in the boat and half lay recumbent on the
lake, tipping, slipping, dipping, till her head resembled a
mermaid's; while they all three filled the air with more
exclaim, shrieking, and laughter than could have been
effected by a large-lunged mob.
“Bedlam let loose,” thought the intruder, “or all the
Naiads up for a frolic?” And as he shot by, a hush fell
upon the noisy group, — Helen pausing and erecting herself
from her ablutions, Mary's frantic efforts sending them
as a broadside upon the Arrow and nearly capsizing it, and
Mrs. McLean, ceasing merriment, staring from both her
eyes, and saying nothing. Mr. Raleigh seized the oar in
passing, and directly afterward had placed it in Helen's
hands. Receiving it with a profusion of thanks, she
a few seconds, Mr. Raleigh observed that the exhausted
rowers had made scarcely a yard's distance. He had no
inclination for gallantry, his eyes and thoughts were full
of his late vision in the woods, he wished to reach home
and dream; but in a moment he was again beside them,
had taken their painter with a bow and an easy sentence,
but neither with empressement nor heightened color, and,
changing his course, was lending them a portion of the
Arrow's swiftness in flight towards the Bawn. It seemed
as if the old place sent its ghosts out to him this afternoon.
Bearing close upon the flat landing-rock, and hooking the
painter therein, he sheered off, lifting his hat, and was
gone.
“Roger! Roger Raleigh!” cried Mrs. McLean, from
the shore, “come back!”
Obeying her with an air of puzzled surprise, the person
so unceremoniously addressed was immediately beside
her again.
“A cool proceeding, sir!” said she, extending both her
hands. “How long would you know your Cousin Kate
to be here, and refuse to spare her an hour?”
“Upon my honor,” said her cousin, bending very low
over the hands, “I but this moment learn her presence
in my neighborhood.”
“Ah, sir! and what becomes of my note sealed with
sky-blue wax and despatched to you ten days ago?”
“It is true such a note lies on my table at this moment,
and it is still sealed with sky-blue wax.”
“And still unread?”
“You will not force me to confess such delinquency?”
“And still unread?”
“Ten thousand pardons! Shall I go home and read
evident, as he raised it.
“No. But is that the way to serve a lady's communications?
Fie, for a gallant! I must take you in hand.
These are your New Hampshire customs?”
“`O Kate, nice customs curtsy to nice kings!'”
“So I 've heard, when curtsying was in fashion; but
that is out of date, together with a good many other nice
things, — caring for one's friends, for instance. Why
don't you ask how all your uncles and aunts are, sir?”
“How are all my uncles and aunts, Miss?”
“Oh, don't you know? I thought you did n't. There 's
another billet, enclosing a bit of pasteboard, lying on your
table now unopened too, I 'll warrant. Don't you read
any of your letters?”
“Alphabetical or epistolary?”
“Answer properly, yes or no.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I know no one that has authority to write to me, as
half a reason.”
“Thank you, for one, sir. And what becomes of your
Uncle Reuben?”
“Not included in the category.”
“Then you 're not aware that I 've changed my estate?
You don't know my name now, do you?”
But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom.'”
“Nonsense! What an exasperating boy! Just the
same as ever! Well, it explains itself. Here comes a
recent property unto me appertaining. McLean! My
husband, Mr. John McLean, — my cousin, Mr. Roger
Raleigh.”
The new-comer was one of those “sterling men” always
to be relied on, generally to be respected, and safely
and appropriately leading society and subscription-lists.
He was not very imaginative, and he understood at a
glance as much of the other as he ever would understand.
And the other, feeling instantly that only coin of the
king's stamp would pass current here, turned his own
counter royal side up, and met his host with genuine
cordiality. Shortly afterward, Mrs. McLean withdrew
for an improvement in her toilet, and soon returning,
found them comparing notes as to the condition of the
country, tender bonds of the Union, and relative merits
of rival candidates, for all which neither of them cared a
straw.
“How do you find me, sir?” she asked of her cousin.
“Radiant, rosy, and rarely arrayed.”
“I see that your affections are to be won, and I proceed
accordingly, by making myself charming, in the first
place. And now, will you be cheered, but not inebriated,
here under the trees, in company with dainty cheese-cakes
compounded by these hands, and jelly of Helen Heath's
moulding, and automatic trifles that caught an ordaining
glimpse of Mrs. Laudersdale's eye and rushed madly together
to become almond-pasty?”
“With a method in their madness, I hope.”
“Yes, all the almonds not on one side.”
“In company with cheese-cakes, jelly, and pasty, simply,
— I should have claret and crackers at home, Capua
willing. Will it pay?”
“You shall have Port here, when Mrs. Laudersdale
comes.”
“Not old enough to be crusty yet, Kate,” said her husband.
“Very good, for you, John!”
“Mrs. Laudersdale is your housekeeper?” asked her
cousin.
“Mrs. Laudersdale? That is rich! But I should
never dare to tell her. Our housekeeper? Our cynosure!
She is our argent-lidded Persian Girl, — our serene,
imperial Eleänore; —
The Samian Here rises, and she speaks
A Memnon smitten with the morning sun.'”
“Oh, indeed! And this is a conventicle of young matrimonial
victims to practise cookery in seclusion, upon
which I have blundered?”
“If the fancy pleases you, yes. There they are.”
And hereon followed a series of necessary introductions.
Mr. Roger Raleigh sat with both arms leaning on the
table before him, and wondering which of the ladies, half
whose names he had not heard, was the Samian Here, —
if any of them were, — and if, — and if, — and here Mr.
Roger Raleigh's reflections went wandering back to the
lake-side path and its vision. Not inopportunely at this
moment, a white garment, which, it is unnecessary to say,
he had long ago seen advancing, fluttered down the opposite
path, and she herself approached.
“Ah! Al fresco?” said the pleasantest voice in the
world.
“And is n't it charming?” asked Mrs. McLean. “Imagine
us with tables spread outside the door in Fifth Avenue,
in Chestnut Street, or on the Common!”
“Even then the arabesque would be wanting,” said
she, trailing a long branch of the wild grape-vine, with
its pale and delicately fragrant blooms, along the snowy
board. “Are the cheese-cakes a success, Mrs. McLean?
at last heard from your cousin,” she added, in an undertone.
“Yes; let me pre — Roger!”
Quickly frustrating any such presentation, Mr. Roger
Raleigh half turned, and, bowing, said, —
“I believe I have had the pleasure of meeting Mrs.
Laudersdale before.”
Her haughtiness would have frozen any one else. She
bent with the least possible inclination, and sat down upon
a stump that immediately became a throne. He resumed
his former position, and drummed lightly on the table,
while waiting to be served. In less complete repose than
she had previously seen him, Mrs. Laudersdale now examined
anew the individual before her.
Not by any means tall she found him, but having the
square shoulders and broad chest which give, in so much
greater a degree than mere height, an impression of
strength, — a frame agile and compact, with that easy
carriage of the head and that rapid movement so deceptively
increasing the stature. The face, too, was
probably what, if not informed by a singularly clean
and fine soul, would, in the lapse of years, become
gross, — the skin of a clear olive, which had slightly
flushed as he addressed herself, but not when speaking
to other strangers, — kept beardless, and rather square in
contour; the mouth not small, but keenly cut, like marble,
and always quivering before he spoke, as if the lightning
of his thought ran thither naturally to seek spontaneous
expression; teeth white; chin cleft; nose of the unclassified
order, rather long, the curve opposite to aquiline,
and saved from sharpness by nostrils that dilated with a
pulse of their own, as those of very proud and sensitive
dark hair, long and fine; heavy brows that overhung
deep-set eyes of lightest hazel, but endowed by shadow
with a power that no eye of gypsy-black ever swayed for
an instant. His whole countenance reminded you of
nothing so much as of the young heroes of the French
Revolution, for whom irregular features and sallow cheeks
were transmutted into brilliant and singular beauty. It
wore an inwrapped air, and, with all its mobility, was a
mask. He very seldom raised the lids, and his pallor,
though owning more of the golden touch of the sun, was
as dazzling as Mrs. Laudersdale's own.
Mrs. Laudersdale scarcely observed, — she felt; and
probably she saw nothing but the general impression of
what I have been telling you.
“Tea, Roger?” asked Mrs. McLean.
“Green, I thank you, and strong.”
Rising to receive it, he continued his course till it naturally
brought him before Mrs. Laudersdale. Pausing
deliberately and sipping the pungent tonic, he at last
looked up, and said, —
“Well, you are offended?”
“Then you were awake when I stayed to look at you?”
she asked, in reply; for curiosity is a solvent.
“Then you did stay and look at me? That is exactly
what I wished to know. How did I look, Belphœbe?”
“Out of his eyes, tell him,” said Helen Heath, in
passing.
“They were not open,” responded Mrs. Laudersdale.
“And I cannot tell how you saw me.”
“I saw you as Virgil saw his mother, — I mean Æneas,
— as the goddesses are always known, you remember, in
departure.”
Mrs. Laudersdale felt a weight on her lids beneath his
glance, and rose to approach the table.
“Allow me,” said Mr. Raleigh, taking her plate and
bringing it back directly with a wafery slice of bread and
a quaking tumulus of fragrant jelly.
Mrs. Laudersdale laughed, though perhaps scarcely
pleased with him.
“How did you know my tastes so well?” she asked.
“Since they are not mine,” he replied. “Of course
you eat jelly, because it is no trouble; you choose your
bread thin for the same reason; likewise you would find
a glass of that suave, rich cream delicious. Among all
motions, you prefer smooth sailing; and I 'll venture to
say that you sleep in down all summer.”
Mrs. Laudersdale looked up in slow and still astonishment;
but Mr. Raleigh was already pouring out the glass
of cream.
“I 've no doubt you would like to have me sweeten it,”
said he, offering it to her; “but I will not humor such ascetic
tendencies. I never approved of flagellation.”
And as he spoke, he was gone to break ground for a
flirtation with Helen Heath.
Helen Heath appeared to be one of those gay, not-to-be-heart-broken
damsels who can drink forever of this
dangerous and exhilarating cup without showing symptoms
of intoxication. Young men who have nothing
worse to do with their time gravitate naturally and unawares
toward them for amusement, and spin out the
thread till they reach its end without expectation, without
surprise, without regret, without occasion for remorse.
Mr. Raleigh could not have been more unfortunate than
he was in meeting her, since it gave him reason and excuse
henceforth for visiting the Bawn at all seasons.
The table was at last removed, the dew began to fall,
Mrs. Laudersdale shivered and withdrew toward the
house.
“Incessu patet dea,” Mr. Raleigh remembered.
Somewhat later, he started from his seat, bade them all
good-night, ran gayly down the bank, and shoved off from
shore. And shortly after, Mrs. Laudersdale, looking from
her window, saw, for an instant, a single firefly hovering
over the dark lake. It was Mr. Roger Raleigh's distant
lantern, as, stretched at ease, he turned the slow leaves of
a Froissart, and suffered the Arrow to drift as it would
across the night.
The next morning Mrs. Laudersdale descended, as
usual, to the breakfast-table, at an hour when all the rest
had concluded their repast. Miss Helen Heath alone
remained, trifling with the tea-cups, and singing little
exercises.
“Quite an acquisition, Mrs. Laudersdale!” said she.
“What?” said the other, languidly, leaning one arm
on the table and looking about for any appetizing edible.
“What is an acquisition?”
“You mean who. Mr. Raleigh, of course. But is n't
it the queerest thing in the world, up here in this savage
district, to light upon a gentleman?”
“Is this a savage district? And is Mr. Raleigh a
gentleman?”
“Is he? I never saw his match.”
“Nor I.”
“What! don't you find him so? a thorough gentleman?”
“I don't know what a thorough gentleman is, I dare
say,” assented Mrs. Laudersdale, indifferently, with no
spirit for repartee, breaking an egg and putting it down,
gradually raising the siege, yawning, and leaning back in
her chair.
“You poor thing!” said Helen. “You are starving
to death. What shall I get for you? I have influence in
the kitchens. Does marmalade, to spread your muffins,
present any attractions? or shall I beg for rusks? or
what do you say to doughnuts? there are doughnuts in
this closet; crullers and milk are nice for breakfast.”
And in a few minutes Helen had rifled a shelf of sufficient
temptations to overcome Mrs. Laudersdale's abstinence.
“After all,” said she then, “you did n't answer my
question.”
“What question?”
“If it were n't odd to meet Mr. Raleigh here.”
“I don't know,” said Mrs. Laudersdale.
“Dear! Mary Purcell takes as much interest. She
said he was impertinent, made her talk too much, and
made fun of her.”
“Very likely.”
“You are as aggravating as he! If you had anything
to do except to look divinely, we 'd quarrel. I thought I
had a nice bit of entertaining news for you.”
“Is that your trouble? I should be sorry to oppress
you with it longer. Pray, tell it.”
“Will it entertain you?”
“It won't bore you.”
“I don't know that I will tell it on such terms. However,
I — must talk. Well, then. I have not been
dreaming by daylight, but up and improving my opportunities.
Partly from himself, and partly from Kate, and
partly from the matron here, I have made the following
cities, and crossed some parallels of latitude, to exile himself
in this wilderness of ice and snow, — that 's what you
and I vote it, whether the trees are green and the sun
shines, or not; and I don't see what bewitched mother to
adopt such a suicidal plan as coming here to be buried
alive. He, that is, Mr. Raleigh, to join my ends, has
lived here for five years; and as he came when he was
twenty, he is consequently about my age now, — I
should n't wonder if a trifle older than you. He came
here because an immense estate was bequeathed him on
the condition that he should occupy this corner of it
during one half of every year from his twenty-first to his
thirty-first. He has chosen to occupy it during the entire
year, running down now and then to have a little music
or see a little painting. Sometimes a parcel of his
friends, — he never was at college, has n't any chums, and
has educated himself by all manner of out-of-the-way
dodges, — sometimes these friends, odd specimens, old
music-masters, rambling artists, seedy tutors, fencers,
boxers, hunters, clowns, all light down together, and then
the neighborhood rings with this precious covey; the rest
of the year, may-be, he don't see an individual. One
result of this isolation is, that freaks which would be very
strange escapades in other people with him are mere
commonplaces. Sometimes he goes over to the city
there, and roams round like a lost soul seeking for its
body; sometimes he goes up a hundred miles or two,
takes a guide and handles the mountains; and, except in
the accidents at such times, he has n't seen a woman since
he came.”
“That accounts,” said Mrs. Laudersdale.
“Yes. But just think what a life!”
“He would n't stay, if he did n't like,” replied Mrs.
Laudersdale, to whom the words poverty and riches conveyed
not the least idea.
“I don't know. He has an uncle, of whom he is very
fond, in India,” continued Helen, — “an unfortunate kind
of man, with whom everything goes wrong, and who is
always taking fevers; and once or twice Mr. Raleigh has
started to go and take care of him, and lose the whole
estate by the means. He intends to endow him, I believe,
by and by, after the thing is at his disposal. This uncle
kept him at school, when he was an orphan in different
circumstances, at a Jesuit institution; and he and Miss
Kent were always quarrelling over him, and she thought
she had tied up her property nicely out of old Reuben
Raleigh's way. It will be nuts, if he ever accepts his
nephew's proposed present. The best of it all is, that, if
he breaks the condition, — there 's no accounting for the
caprices of wills, — part of it goes to a needy institution,
and part of it inalienably to Mrs. McLean, who —”
“Is an institution, too.”
“Who is not needy. There, is n't that a pretty little
conte?”
“Very,” said Mrs. Laudersdale, having listened with
increasing interest. “But, Helen, you 'll be a gossip, if
you go on and prosper.”
“Why, my dear child! He 'll be over here every day,
now; and do you suppose I 'm going to flirt with any
one, when I don't know his antecedents? There he is
now!”
And as Mrs. Laudersdale turned, she saw Mr. Raleigh
standing composedly in the doorway and surveying them.
She bade him good-morning, coolly enough, while Helen
began searching the grounds of the teacups, rather uncertain
ears.
“Turning teacups, Gypsy Helen, and telling fates, all
to no audience, and with no cross on your palm?” asked
the guest.
“So you ignore Mrs. Laudersdale?”
“Not at all; you were n't looking at her cup, — if she
has one. Will you have the morning paper?” he asked
of that lady, who, receiving it, leisurely unfolded and
glanced over its extent.
“Where 's my Cousin Kate?” then demanded Mr.
Raleigh of Helen, having regarded this performance.
“Gone shopping in town.”
“Her vocation. For the day?”
“No, — it is time for their return now. When you
hear wheels —”
“I hear them”; and he strolled to the window. “You
should have said, when I heard tongues; Medes and
Elamites and the dwellers in Mesopotamia were less
cheerful. A very pretty team. So she took her conjugal
appurtenance with her?”
“And left her cousinly impertinence behind her,” retorted
a gay voice from his elbow.
“Ah, Kate! are you there? It 's not a moment since
I saw you `coming from the town.' A pretty hostess,
you! I arrive on your invitation to pass the day —”
“But I did n't expect you before the sun.”
“To pass the day, and find you absent and the breakfast-table
not clared away.”
“My dear Roger, we have not quite taken our habits
yet. As soon as the country air shall have wakened and
made over Helen and Mrs. Laudersdale, you will find us
ready for company at daybreak.”
“What a passion for `company'! I shall not be surprised
some day to receive cards for your death-bed.”
“Friends and relatives invited to attend? No, Roger,
you must n't be naughty. You shall receive cards for my
dinner-party before we go, if you won't come without; for
we have innumerable friends in town already.”
“Happy woman!”
“What 's that? A newspaper? A newspaper! How
McLean will chuckle!” And she seized the sheet which
Mrs. Laudersdale had abandoned in sweeping from the
room.
“Is there a Mr. Laudersdale? Where is he?” asked
Mr. Raleigh, as he leaned against the window.
“Who?” asked his cousin, deep in a paragraph.
“Mr. Laudersdale. Where is he?”
“Oh! between his four planks, I suppose,” she replied,
thinking of the Sound-boat's berth, which probably contained
the gentleman designated.
“Between his four planks,” repeated Mr. Raleigh, in a
musing tone, something shocked by her apparent levity,
entirely misinterpreting her, and to this little accident
owing nearly thirteen years' unhappiness.
“She must have married early,” he continued.
“Oh, fabulously early,” replied Mrs. McLean, between
the lines she read. “She is Creole, I believe. She is
perfect. The women are as infatuated about her as the
men. Here 's Helen Heath been dawdling round the
table all the morning for the sake of chatting to her
while she breakfasts. I don't know why, I 'm sure; the
woman 's charming, but she 's too lazy even to talk.
McLean! Another flurry in France.”
And after shaking hands with Mr. Raleigh, that worthy
seized the proffered paper and vanished behind it, leaving
she seemed by no means in haste to assume, preferring to
remain and vex her husband with a thousand little teasing
arts. Meanwhile Mr. Raleigh proceeded to take that office
upon himself, by crossing the hall, exploring the parlors,
examining the manuscript commonplace-volumes, and
finally by sketching on a leaf of his pocket-book Mrs.
Laudersdale, at the other end of the piazza, half-swinging
in the vines through which broad sunbeams poured, while
Helen Heath was singing and several other ladies were
busying themselves with books and needlework in her
vicinity.
“Ah, Mr. Raleigh!” said Helen Heath, as he put up
the pocket-book and drew near, — “Mrs. Laudersdale
and I have been wondering how you amuse yourself
up here; and I make my discovery. You study animated
nature; that is to say, you draw Mrs. Laudersdale
and me.”
“Mistaken, Miss Helen. I draw only Mrs. Laudersdale;
and do you call that animated nature?”
“I wish you would draw Mrs. Laudersdale out.”
At this point Mrs. Laudersdale fell out; but, without
otherwise stirring from his position than by moving an
apparently careless arm, Mr. Raleigh caught and restored
her to her balance, as lightly as if he had brushed a floating
gossamer from the air to his finger. For the first
time, perhaps, in her life, a carnation blossomed an instant
in her cheek, then all was as before, — only two of the
party felt on that instant that in some mysterious manner
their relations with each other were entirely changed.
“But what is it that you do with yourself?” persisted
Helen. “Tell us, that we may do likewise.”
“Will you come and see?” he asked, — his eyes, however,
from the lake to the brooks, and hang among the alders,
and angle, dreaming, all day long? Or will you rise at
dead of night and go out on the lake with me and watch
field after field of white lilies flash open as the sun touches
them with his spear? Or will you lie during still noons
up among the farmers' fields where myriad bandrol corn-poppies
flaunt over your head, and stain your finger-tips
with the red berries that hang like globes of light in the
palace-gardens of mites and midges, soaking yourself in
hot sunshine and south-winds and heavy aromatic earth-scents?”
“Come!” said Mrs. Laudersdale, rising earnestly, like
one in an eager dream.
“It is plain that you are in training for a poet,” said
Helen Heath, laughing, to Mr. Raleigh. “Well, when
will you take us? Are the lilies in bloom? Shall we go
to-morrow morning?”
“I don't know that I shall take you at all, Miss Helen;
— river-lilies might suit you best; but these queens of
the lakes, the great, calm pond-lilies, creatures of quiet
and white radiance, — I have seen only one head that
possessed enough of the genuine East-Indian repose to be
crowned with them.”
“You like repose,” said Mrs. Laudersdale. “But what
is it?”
“Repose is strength, — life that develops from within,
and feels itself, and has no need of effort. Repose is
inherent security.”
“Goodness!” exclaimed Helen. “Article first in a
new dictionary, — encyclopædia, I should say. You worship,
but you don't possess your god, for you look at this
moment like a shaft in the bow; and here comes an
archer to give it flight.”
“Where are you going, Kate?” said her cousin.
“To pick strawberries in the garden. Want to come?”
The three could do no better than accept her invitation.
The good ladies might stare as they could after Mrs. Laudersdale,
and wonder what sudden sprite had possessed
her, since for neither man nor woman of the numerous
party had she hitherto condescended to lift an unwonted
eyelid; what they would have said to have seen her
plunged in a strawberry-bed, gathering handfuls and raining
them drop by drop into Helen Heath's mouth, to silence
her while she herself might talk, — her own fingers
tipped with more sanguine shade than their native rose,
her eyes full of the noon sparkle, and her lips parted with
laughter, — we cannot say. Roger Raleigh forgot to
move, to speak, to think, as he watched her. But in
the midst of this brilliant and novel gayety of hers,
there was still a dignity to make one feel that she had
by no means abandoned her regal purple, but merely
adorned it with profuse golden flourishes.
At dinner that day, Helen begged to know if there
were not a great many routes in the vicinity practicable
only on horseback, and thought she had attained her end
when Mr. Raleigh put his horses and his escort at the
service of herself and Mrs. Laudersdale during their stay.
“During our stay!” said Mrs. Laudersdale. “That
reminds me that we are to go away!”
“Pleasantly, certainly. When snows fall and storms
pipe, the Bawn is an ice-house,” said he.
After noon, the remainder of the day was interspersed
with light thunder-showers, rendering tea on the grass
again impossible; they passed the steaming cups, therefore,
as they sat on the piazza curtained with dripping
woodbine. The glitter of the drops in the sunset light, a
eyes, and some unconscious excitement fanned a faint
color to and fro on her cheek. At last the moon rose; the
whole party, regardless of wet slippers, sauntered with
Mr. Raleigh to the shore, where the little Arrow hung
balancing on her restraining cord. Mrs. Laudersdale
stepped in, Mr. Raleigh followed, took up an oar, and
pushed out, both standing, and drifting slowly for a few
rods' distance; then Mr. Raleigh made the shore again,
assisted her out, and shot impatiently away alone. The
waters shone like white fire in the wake he cut, great
shadows fell through them where island and wood intercepted
the broad ascending light, and Mrs. Laudersdale's
gay laugh rung across them as the space grew, — a sweet,
rich laugh, that all the spirits of the depths caught and
played with like a rare beam that transiently illumined
their shadowy silent haunts.
The next day, and the next, and so for a fortnight, Mr.
Roger Raleigh presented himself with the breakfast-urn
at the Bawn, tarried during sunshine, slipped home by
starlight across the lake. Every day Mrs. Laudersdale
was more brilliant, and flashed with a cheery merriment
like harmless summer-lightnings. One night, as he
pushed away from the bank, he said, —
“Au revoir for five hours.”
“For five hours?” said Mrs. Laudersdale.
“For five hours.”
“At half past three in the night?”
“In the morning.”
“And what brings you here at dead of dark?”
“The lilies and the dawn.”
“Indeed! And whom do you expect to find?”
“You and Miss Helen.”
“Well, summer and freedom are here; I am ready for
all fates, all deeds of valor, vigils among the rest. We
will await you at half past three in the morning. Helen,
we must sleep at high-pressure, soundly, crowding all we
can on the square inch of time. Au revoir.”
A shadow stood on the piazza, in the semi-darkness, at
the appointed hour; two other shadows flitted forward to
meet it, and silently down the bank, into the boat, and out
upon the lonely glimmering reaches of the water. Nobody
spoke; the midnight capture of no fort was ever
effected with more phantom-like noiselessness than now
went to surprise the Vestals of the Lake; only as two
hands touched for an instant, a strange thrill, like fire,
quivered through each and tore them apart more swiftly
than two winds might cross each other's course. Helen
Heath was drowsy and half-nodding in the bow, nodding
with the more ease that it was still so dark and that Mr.
Raleigh's back was toward her. Mrs. Laudersdale reclined
in the stern. Mr. Raleigh once in a while sent
them far along with a strong stroke, then only an occasional
plash broke the charm of perfect stillness. Ever
and anon they passed under the lee of some island, and
the heavy air grew full of idle night-sweetness; the
waning moon with all its sad and alien power hung low,
— dun, malign, and distant, a coppery blotch on the rich
darkness of heaven. They floated slowly, still; now and
then she dipped a hand into the cool current; now and
then he drew in his oars, and, bending forward, dipped
his hand with hers. The stars retreated in a pallid veil
that dimmed their beams, faint lights streamed up the
sky, — the dark yet clear and delicious. They paused
motionless in the shelter of a steep rock; over them a
wild vine hung and swayed its long wreaths in the water,
and twisted, and tufts of ribbon-grass fell forward and
streamed in the indolent ripple; beneath them the lake,
lucid as some dark crystal, sheeted with olive transparence
a bottom of yellow sand; here a bream poised on
slowly waving fins, as if dreaming of motion, or a perch
flashed its red fin from one hollow to another. The
shadow lifted a degree, the eye penetrated to farther regions;
a bird piped warily, then freely, a second and third
answered, a fourth took up the tale, blue-jay and thrush,
cat-bird and bobolink; wings began to dart about them,
the world to rustle overhead, near and far the dark prime
grew instinct with sound, the shores and heavens blew
out gales of melody, the air broke up in music. He
lifted his oars silently; she caught the sweet-brier, and,
lightly shaking it, a rain of dew-drops dashed with deepest
perfume sprinkled them; they moved on. A thin mist
breathed from the lake, steamed round the boat, and lay
like a white coverlet upon the water; a light wind sprang
up and blew it in long rags and ribbons, lifted, and torn,
and streaming, out of sight. All the air was pearly, the
sky opaline, the water now crisply emblazoned with a
dark and splendid jewelry, — the paved work of a sapphire;
a rosy fleece sailed across their heads, some furnace
glowed in the east behind the trees, long beams fell
resplendently through and lay beside vast shadows, the
giant firs stood black and intense against a red and risen
sun; they trailed with one oar through a pad of buds all-unaware
of change, stole from the overhanging thickets
through a high-walled pass, where, on the open lake, the
broad, silent, yellow light crept from bloom to bloom and
awoke them with a touch. How perfectly they put off
sleep! with what a queenly calm displayed their spotless
scent! He twined his finger round a slippery serpent-stem,
turned the crimson underside of the floating pavilion,
and brought up a waxen wonder from its throne to
hang like a star in the black braids on her temple. An
hour's harvesting among the nymphs, in this rich atmosphere
of another world, and with a loaded boat they
turned to shore again.
“Smothered in sweets!” exclaimed Mr. Raleigh, as he
sprang out, and woke Helen Heath, where, slipped down
upon the floor of the boat, her head fallen on her arms,
she had lain half asleep. They were the first words
spoken during the morning, and in such situations silence
is dangerous.
When the rest of the family descended to breakfast,
they found the pictures framed in wreaths of lilies, great
floats of them in hall and parlor, and the table laden with
flat dishes where with coiled stems they crowded, a white,
magnificent throng. Mr. Raleigh still lingered, and,
while Mrs. Laudersdale and Helen renewed their toilets,
had busied himself in weaving a crown of these and
another of poppy-leaves, hanging the one on Mrs. Laudersdale's
head, as she entered refreshed, snowy, and fragrant
herself, and the sleep-giving things on Helen's, —
the latter avenging herself by surveying her companion's
adornment, and, as she adjusted the bloom-gray leaves of
her own, inquiring if olives grew pickled.
Nothing could be more airy and blithe than were Mrs.
Lauderdale's spirits all that morning, — bubbles dancing
on a brook, nor foam-sparkle of rosy Champagne. She
related their adventures with graphic swiftness, and improvised
dangers and escapes with such a reckless disregard
of truth that Mr. Raleigh was forced to come to the
have encountered in the Enchanted Forest.
The red dawn brought its rain, and before they rose
from table the sunshine withdrew and large drops began
to patter in good earnest. Mr. Raleigh, who had generally
suffered others to entertain him, now, as Mrs.
McLean ushered the whole company into the sewing-room,
seemed spurred by gayety and brilliance, and to
bring into employ all those secrets through which he had
ever annihilated time. For a while devoting himself to
the elder dames, he won the heart of one by a laborious
invention of a million varicolored angles to a square barley-corn
of worsted-work, involved Mrs. McLean's crocheting
in an inextricable labyrinth as he endeavored to
afford her some requisite conchological assistance, and
turned with three strokes a very absurd drawing of Mrs.
Laudersdale's into a splendid caricature. Having made
himself thus generally useful, he now proceeded to make
himself generally agreeable; went with all necessary
gravity through a series of complicate dancing-steps with
Miss Heath; begged Miss Purcell, who was longing to
cry over her novel, to allow him to read for her, since he
saw that she was trying her eyes, and therewith made
fiasco of a page of delicious dolor; and being challenged
to chess by a third, declared that was child's play, and
dominos was the game for science, — whereon, having
seated a circle at that absorbing sport, he deserted for a
meerschaum and the gentlemen, and in company with
Captain Purcell, Mr. McLean, and the rest, rolled up
from the hall, below, wreaths of smoke, bursts of laughter,
and finally chimes of those concordant voices with which
gentlemen talk politics, and, even when agreeing infamously,
become vociferant and high-colored.
It was after lunch that Mrs. Laudersdale, having grown
weary of the needle-women's thread of discourse, left the
sewing-room and proceeded toward her own apartment.
Just as she crossed the head of the staircase, the hall-door
was flung open, admitting a gleeful blast of the boisterous
gale, and an object that, puffing and blowing like a sad-hued
dolphin, and shaking like a Newfoundland, appeared
at first to be the famous South West Wind, Esq., in proper
person, — whose once sumptuous array clung to his form,
and whose face and hands, shining as coal, rolled off the
rain like a bronze.
“Bless my heart, Capua!” cried Mr. Raleigh, removing
the stem from his lips; “how came you here?”
“Lors, Massa, it 's only me,” said Capua.
“So I see,” replied his master, restoring the pipe to its
former position. “How did you come?”
“'Bout swimmed, I 'spect,” answered Capua, grounding
a chuckle on a reef of ivory. “'T a'n't no fish-story,
dat!”
“Well, what brings you?”
“Naughty Nan, — she had n't been out —”
“Do you mean to say, you rascal! that you 've taken
Nan out on such a day? and round the lake, too, I 'll
warrant?” asked Mr. Raleigh, with some excitement.
“Jes' dat; an' round de lake, ob course; we could n'
come acrost.”
“You 've ruined her, then —”
“Bress you, Massa, she won't ketch no cold, — she!
Smokes like a beaver now; came like streak o' lightnin'.”
“You may as well swim her back, — and where we
can all see the sport, too.”
“But —”
“No buts about it, Capua,” insisted his master, with
mock gravity, the stem between his teeth.
“'Spect I 'd better rub her down, now I'se here, an'
wait 'll it holds up a bit, Mass' Roger?” urged Capua,
coaxingly.
“Do as you 're bid!” ejaculated his master; which,
evidently, from long habit, meant, Do as you please.
Mrs. Laudersdale and Helen Heath had crept down the
stairs during this dialogue, and now stood interested spectators
of the scene. Mrs. McLean came running down
behind them.
“Forgotten me, Capua?” said she.
“Lors, Miss Kate!” he replied, scraping his foot and
pulling off his hat, — “Cap never f'gets his friends, though
you 've growed. How d' ye do, Miss Kate?”
“Nicely, thank you. And how 's your wife?”
“My wife? Well, she 's 'bout beat out. Massa Roger
'n I, we buried her; finer funeral dan Massa Roger's
own mother, Miss Kate, dat was!”
“Poor fellow! I 'm so sorry!” began Mrs. McLean,
consolingly.
“Well, Miss Kate, you know some folks is easier spared
'n others. Some tongues sharper 'n others. Alwes liked
to gib a hot temper time to cool, 's Massa says.”
“And how do you do, Capua?”
“Pretty well, Miss Kate; leastways, I'se well enough,
— a'n't so pretty.”
“What is his name?” whispered Helen.
“'Annible, Missis,” said the attentive Capua, whose eyes
had been for some time oscillating with indecision between
Helen Heath and Mrs. Laudersdale. “Hannibal Raleigh
's my name; though Massa alwes call me Cap,” he added,
insinuatingly, — which, by the way, “Massa” never had
been known to do.
“And are you always going to stay and take care of
Master Roger?”
“'Spect I shall. Lors, Miss Kate, he 's more bother to
me 'n all my work, — dat boy!”
“That will do, Capua,” said his master; “you may go.”
And therewith Capua scuffled away.
“Well, Roger, what does this mean?” asked Mrs. McLean,
as the door closed.
“It means that Capua, having been dying of curiosity,
has resolved to die game, and therefore takes matters into
his own hands, and arrives to inspect my conduct and my
company.”
“Ah, I see. He trembles for his sceptre.”
“Miss Heath,” said Mr. McLean, rallyingly, “you received
a great many of the sable shafts.”
“A Saint Sebastiana,” said his wife.
“Saint Sebastian died of his wounds. Not I,” said
Helen.
“Let me tell you, Miss Helen,” said Mr. Raleigh,
“that Capua is a connoisseur, and his dictum is worth
all flatteries. If he had only been with us this morning!”
“You have teased me so much about that, Mr. Raleigh,
that I have half a mind never to go with you on another
expedition.”
“Make no rash vows. I was just thinking what fine
company you would be when trouting. The most enchanting
quiet is required then, you are aware.”
“Oh! when shall we go trouting?”
“We? It was only half a mind, then! We will go
to-morrow, wind and weather agreeing.”
“And what must I do?”
“You must keep still, stand in the shadow, and fish upstream.”
At this point, Capua put his head inside the door
again.
“What is it?” asked Mr. Raleigh.
“Forgot to say, Massa,” replied Capua, rolling his eyes
fearfully, and still hesitating, and half-closing the door, and
then looking back.
“Well, Capua?”
“Mass' Raleigh, your house done been burned up!”
said Capua, at last, jerking back his head, as if afraid of
losing it.
“Ah? And what did you do with —”
“Oh, eberyting safe an' sound. 'T a'n't dat house;
't a'n't dis yer house Massa lib in; — Massa's sparrer-
house. Reckoned I 'd better come and 'form him.”
“Is that all?” asked his master, who was accustomed
to Capua's method of breaking ill news.
“Now, Mass' Roger, don't you go to being pervoked
an' flyin' into one ob dese yer tempers! It 's all distinguished
now. Ole Cap did n't want to shock his young
massa, so thought 't warn't de wisest way to tell him
't warn't de sparrer-house, either, at first. 'Twas de inside
ob de libery, if he must know de troof; wet an' smutty
dar now, mebbe, but no fire.”
“Why not? What made the fire go out?” asked Mr.
Raleigh, composedly.
“Well, two reasons,” replied Capua, rolling a glance
over the company; — “one was dis chile's exertions; an'
t'other fact, on account ob wich de flames was checked,
was because dere warn't no more to burn. Hi!”
“Capua, take Nan, and don't let me see your face
again, till I send for it!” said his master, now slightly
irate.
“Massa's nigger alwes mind him,” was the dutiful response.
Mrs. Laudersdale's handkerchief fell at that moment
darted to restore it.
“Bress her pretty eyes!” said he. “Ole Cap see's
fur into a millstone as any one!” and vanished through
the doorway.
“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Raleigh, turning to Mrs.
Laudersdale. “He has refused to leave me, and I must
indulge him too much, and my sins fall on the head of the
nearest passer. He appears to have a constitutional inability
to comprehend this absence of punishment. His
immunity is so painful to him that I sometimes fancy him
to be homesick for a lashing. In fact, all those Burdens
of the Book of Isaiah, which his people carry on their
backs, are dust in his balance. The sorrows that have
darkened the brows of his race touch no electric chord in
him. Capua is not a representative man. He is only
the dry-nurse of my failings. Ah, welladay! Now if I
do not hasten home, Kate, I shall find a conflagration of
the whole house there before me.”
And making quick adieux, — while Mrs. Laudersdale
jested about tempting the raging waters, and the dinner-bell
was ringing, and Helen singing,
Come o'er the stream, Charlie, and dine wi' McLean!”
seen, and the segment of an afternoon rainbow, shut it,
and was gone.
Early again the next morning, Mr. Raleigh sought the
Bawn, followed this time by Capua, who was determined
not to lose any ground once made, and who now carried
the rods, bait, and other paraphernalia.
“Powerful pretty woman, dat, Massa!” said he, as
and answering.
“Which one, Capua?” asked his master.
“A'n't no t'orrer,” was his reply; “leastwise, a'n't no
'count, — good for nott'n. Now she, — pity she a'n't single,
Massa, — should say she 'd lived where sun was
plenty and had laid up heaps in her heart.”
Here Mrs. Laudersdale came out, and shortly afterward
Helen and three or four others. In reply to their
questions, Mr. Raleigh stated that the preceding day's
disaster had been occasioned by a meerschaum, and had
merely charred a table with its superficies of papers and
pamphlets, which Capua had chosen to magnify for his
own purposes; and the assemblage immediately turned
its course inland and toward the brooks. The two who
led soon distanced the rest, Capua trudging respectfully
behind and keeping them in sight. Here, as they brushed
along through the woods, they delayed in order to examine
a partridge's nest, to tree a squirrel, to gather some strange
wild-flower opening at their approach. Here on the banks
they watched the bitterns rise and sail heavily away, and
finally in silence commenced the genuine sport.
“Nonsense!” said Helen Heath, meaningly, as Mrs.
Laudersdale, when the others joined them, displayed her
first capture. “Is that all you 've caught?”
Mrs. Laudersdale drew in another for reply.
“How absurd!” said Helen. “Here a month ago
you were the dearest and most helpless of mortals, and
now you are doing everything!”
The other opened her eyes a moment, and then laughed.
“Hush!” said she.
“Shs! shs!” echoed Capua, making an infinite hubbub
himself.
Silence accordingly reigned and produced a string fit
for the Sultan's kitchen, — of all the number, Mrs. Laudersdale
adding by far the majority, — possibly because
her shining prey found destination in the same basket
with Mr. Raleigh's, — possibly because, as Helen had intimated,
a sudden deftness had bewitched her fingers, so
that neither dropping rod nor tangling reel detained her
for an instant.
“Our lines have fallen in pleasant places,” said Helen,
as they took at last their homeward path; “and what a
shame! not an adventure yet!”
Mrs. McLean hung on Mr. Raleigh's arm as they went,
— for she had taken a whim and feared to see her cousin
in the fangs of a coquette; by which means Helen became
the companion of Captain Purcell and his daughter,
and Mrs. Laudersdale kept lightly in advance, leading a
gambol with the greyhound that Capua had added to the
party, and presenting in one person, as she went springing
from knoll to knoll along the bank, now in sunshine, now
in shade, lifting the green boughs or sweeping them aside,
a succession of the vivid figures of some antique and processional
frieze. Suddenly, with a quick cry, she disappeared,
and Helen had her adventure. Mr. Raleigh
darted forward, while the hound came frisking back;
yet, when he found her fainting in the hollow, stood
with stolid immobility until Capua snatched her up and
carried her along in his arms, leaving his master to reflect
how many times such swarthy servitors might have borne
her, as a child, through her island groves. And thus the
party, somewhat sobered, resumed their march again.
But in the discovery that he had not dared to lift her
in his arms, he who took such liberties with every one, —
that, lying under her semblance of death, she had inspired
woman to be an object somewhat sacred, — in this discovery
Mr. Raleigh learned not a little. And it would not,
perhaps, be an untrue surmise that he found therein as
much of pain as of any other emotion; since all the experiences
and passions of life must share the phenomena
of the great fact itself whose pulse beats through them;
and if to love unawares be to dwell like a child in the region
of thoughtless and innocent bliss, in attaining manhood
all the sadness which is to be eliminated from life
becomes apparent, and bliss henceforth must be sought
and earned. From that day, then, Mr. Raleigh with difficulty
retained his former habits, prevented any eagerness
of manner, maintained a cautious vigilance, and in so doing
he again became aware that the easy insouciance with
which he addressed all other women had long been lost
toward Mrs. Laudersdale, or, if yet existing, had become
like the light and tender play of any lingering summer-wind
in the tress upon her brow.
Mrs. Laudersdale's ankle having been injured by her
fall, and Mrs. McLean having taken a cold, the two invalids
now became during a week and a day the auditory
for all quips and pranks that Miss Heath and Mr. Raleigh
could devise. And on the event of their convalescence,
the Lord of Misrule himself seemed to have ordained the
course of affairs, with a swarming crew of all the imps
and mischiefs ever hatched. Mr. Raleigh and Capua
went and came with boat-loads of gorgeous stuff from
across the lake, a little old man appeared on the spot in
answer to a flight of telegrams, machinery and scenery
rose like exhalations, music was brought from the city,
all the availables of the family were to be found in garden,
closet, house-top, conning hieroglyphical pages, and
into a little Spanish Masque, to which kings and queens
have once listened in courtly state, and which now unrolls
its resplendent pageant before the eyes of Mrs. Laudersdale,
translating her, as it were, into another planet, where
familiar faces in pompous entablature look out upon her
from a whirl of light and color, and familiar voices utter
stately sentences in some honeyed unknown tongue. And
finally, when the glittering parade finishes, and the strange
groups, in their costly raiment, throng out for dancing, she
herself gives her hand to some Prince of the pageantry,
who does her homage, and, sealing the fact of her restoration,
swims once round the room in a mist of harmony, and
afterward sits by his side, captive to his will, and subject
to his enchantment, while
The flute, violin, bassoon,
All night had the casement jessamine stirred
With the dancers dancing in tune,
Till a silence fell with the waking bird
And a hush with the setting moon.”
This little episode of illness and recovery having been
thus duly celebrated, the masqueraders again forswore
roofs and spent long days in distant junketing throughout
the woods; the horses, too, were brought into requisition,
and a flock of boats kept forever on the wing. And
meanwhile, as Helen Heath said, — she then least of all
comprehending the real drama of that summer, — Mrs.
Laudersdale had taught them how the Greek animated
his statue.
“And how was that?” asked Mr. Raleigh.
“He took it out-doors, I fancy, and called the winds to
curl about it. He set its feet in morning-dew, he let in
light and shade through green dancing leaves above it, he
to chirp and whistle in its ear, and finally he steeped
it in sunshine.”
“Sunshine, then was the vivifying stroke?”
Helen nodded.
“You are mistaken,” said he; “the man never found a
soul in his work till he put his own there first.”
“I always wonder,” remarked Mrs. Laudersdale here,
“that every artist, in brooding over his marble, adding,
touching, bringing out effects, does not end by loving it, —
absorbingly, because so beautiful to him, — despairingly,
because to him forever silent.”
“You need n't wonder anything about it,” said Helen,
mischievously. “All that you have to do is to make the
most of your sunshine.”
Mr. McLean, struck with some sudden thought, inspected
the three as they stood in a blaze of the midsummer
noon, then crossed over to his little wife, drew her
arm in his, and held it with cautious imprisonment. The
other wife did as she was bidden, and made the most of
her sunshine.
If, on first acquaintance, Mrs. Laudersdale had fascinated
by her repose, her tropical languor, her latent fire,
the charm was none the less, when, turning, it became
one dazzle of animation, of careless freedom, of swift and
easy grace. Nor, unfamiliar as were such traits, did
they seem at all foreign to her, but rather, when once
donned, never to have been absent; as if, indeed, she had
always been this royal creature, this woman bright and
winning as some warm, rich summer's day. The fire
that sleeps in marble never flashes and informs the whole
mass so fully; if a pearl — lazy growth and accretion of
amorphous life — should fuse and form again in sparkling
unconsciousness had she stepped from passive to
positive existence, and found this new state to be as sweet
and strange as any child has found it! Long a wife, she
had known, nevertheless, nothing but quiet custom or indifference,
and had dreamed of love only as the dark and
silent side of the moon might dream of light. Now she
grew and unfolded in the warmth of this season, like a
blossom perfumed and splendid. Sunbeams seemed to
lance themselves out of heaven and splinter about her.
She queened it over demesnes of sprite-like revelry; the
life they led was sylvan; at their fêtes the sun assisted.
The summer held to her lips a glass whose rosy effervescence,
whose fleeting foam, whose tingling spirit exhaled
a subtile madness of joy, — a draught whose lees were
despair. So nearly had she been destitute of emotion
hitherto that she had scarcely a right to be classed with
humanity; now, indeed, she would win that right. Not
only her character, but her beauty, became another thing
under all this largess; one remembered the very Persian
rose, in looking at her, and thought of gardens amid
whose clouds of rich perfume the nightingales sang all
night long; her manner, too, became strangely gracious,
and a sweetness lingered after her presence, delicate and
fine as the drop of honey in some flower's nectary. So
she woke from her icy trance; but, alas! what had
wakened her?
The summer was passing. Every day the garden-scenes
of Watteau became vivid and real; every evening
Venice was made possible, when shadowy barks slipped
down dusk tides, freighted with song and laughter, and
snatches of guitar-tinkling; and when some sudden torch,
that for an instant had summoned with its red fire all
quenched below, and, a fantastic flotilla, they passed on
into the broad brilliance of a rising moon, all Middle-Age
mythology rose and wafted them back into the obscurity.
It was a life too fine for every day, fare too rich for
health; they must be exotics who did not wither in such
hot-house air. It was rapidly becoming unnatural. They
performed in the daylight stray clarified bits from
Fletcher or Molière, drama of an era over-ripe; they
sang only from an old book of madrigals; their very
reading was fragmentary, — now an emasculated Boccaccio,
then a curdling phantasm of Poe's, and after some
such scenic horror as the “Red Death” Helen Heath
dashed off the Pesther Waltzes.
If, finally, on one of the last August-nights, we had
passed, Asmodeus-like, over the roofs, looking down we
should have seen three things. First, that Mrs. Laudersdale
slept like any innocent dreamer, and, wrapped with
white moonlight, in her long and flowing outline, in her
imperceptible breath, resembling some perfect statue that
we fancy to be instinct with suspended life. Next, that
Mr. Raleigh did not sleep at all, but absorbed himself, to
the entire disturbance of Capua's slumbers, in the rapture
of reproducing, as he could, the turbulent passion and joy
of souls larger than his own. And, lastly, that Mrs.
McLean woke with visions of burglars before her eyes,
to find her pillow deserted and her husband sitting at a
writing-table.
“How startled I was!” she exclaimed. “What are
you doing, dear?”
“Writing to Laudersdale,” he said, in reply.
“Why, what for? — what can you be writing to him
for?”
“I think it best he should come and take his wife off
my hands.”
“How absurd! how contemptible! how all you husbands
band together like a parcel of slaveholders, and
hunt down each other's runaways!”
Mr. McLean laughed.
“Now, John, you 're not making mischief?”
“No, child, I am preventing it.” And therewith the
worthy man, dropping the wax on the envelope, imprinted
it with a Scotch crest, and put out the light. “That 's
off my mind!” said he.
At last September came; a few more weeks, and they
would separate, perhaps, to the four corners of the earth.
Mr. Raleigh arrived one afternoon at the Bawn, and
finding no one to welcome him, — that is to say, Mrs.
Laudersdale had gone out, and Helen Heath was invisible,
— he betook himself to a solitary stroll, and, by a
short cut through the woods, to the highway, and just
before emerging from the green shadows he met Mrs.
Laudersdale.
“Whither now, Wandering Willie?” said she; for,
singularly enough, they seemed to avoid speaking each
other's name in direct address, using always some title
suggested by their reading or singing, or some sportive
impromptu.
“I am going to take the road.”
“Like a gallant highwayman?” And without more
ado, and naturally enough, she accompanied him.
The conversation, this afternoon, was sufficiently insignificant;
indeed, Mrs. Laudersdale always affected you
more by her silence than her speech, by what she was
rather than by what she said; and it is only the impression
produced on her by this walk with which we have
any concern.
The road, narrow and winding in high banks fringed
with golden-rod and purple asters, was at first completely
shadowed, — an old, deep-rutted, cross-country road,
birch-trees shivering at either side, and every now and
then a puff of pine-breath drifting in between. After a
time it rose gradually into the turnpike, and became a
long, dusty track, stretching as far as the eye could see, a
straight, dazzling line, burnt white by summer-heats,
powdered by travel. There was no wind stirring; the
sky was lost in a hot film stained here and there with
sulphurous wreaths; the distant fields, skirted by low
hills, were bathed in an azure mist; nearer, a veil of dun
and dimmer smoke from burning brush hung motionless;
around their feet the dust whirled and fell again. Bathed
in soft, voluptuous tints, hazed and mellowed, into what
weird, strange country were they hastening? What visionary
land of delight, replete with perfume and luxury,
lay ever beyond? — what region rich, unknown, forbidden,
whose rank vegetation steamed with such insidious poison?
And on what arid, barren road, what weary road,—
but, alas, long worn and beaten by the feet of other wayfarers!
a road that ran real and strong through this
noxious and seducing mirage!
A sudden blast of wind lifted a cloud of dust from before
them and twisted it down among the meadows; the
sun thrust aside his shroud and burnt for an instant on a
scarlet maple-bough that hung in premature brilliance
across the way. The hasty color, true and fine, was like
a spell against enchantment; it was the drop that tested
the virtue of this chemistry and proved it naught.
Mrs. Laudersdale looked askance at her companion,
then turned and met his gaze. Slowly her lashes fell,
the earth seemed to fail beneath her feet, the light to
swept branding and burning up throat and face, stinging
her very forehead, and shooting down her finger-tips.
In an instant it had faded, and she shone the pallid,
splendid thing she was before. In that instant, for the
first time this summer, she comprehended that her husband's
existence imported anything to her. Behind the
maple-tree, the wood began again; without a syllable, she
stepped aside, suffered him to pass, and hastened to bury
herself in its recesses.
What lover ever accounted for his mistress's caprices?
Mr. Raleigh proceeded on his walk alone. And what
was her husband to him? He did not know that such a
man existed. For him there had been no deadly allurement
in the fervid scene; it had stretched a land of
promise veiled in its azure ardors, with intimations of
rapture and certainty of rest. Now, as he wandered
on and turned down another lane to the woods, the
tints grew deeper; his eyes, bent inward, saw all the
world in the color of his thought; he would have affirmed
that the bare brown banks were lined in deeptoned
indigo flower-bells whose fragrance rose visible
above them or curled from stem to stem, and that the
hollows in which the path hid itself at last were of the
same soft gloom. But, finally, when not far distant from
the Bawn again, he shook off his reverie and struck another
path that he might avoid rencontre. Perhaps the
very sound that awoke him was the one he wished to
shun; at the next step it became more distinct, — a
child's voice singing some tuneless song; and directly a
tiny apparition appeared before him, as if it had taken
shape, with its wide, light eyes and corn-silk hair, from
the most wan and watery of sunbeams. But what had a
did it come? Impossible to imagine. Her garments, of
rich material, hung freshly torn, it may be, but in shreds;
her skin, if that of some fair and delicate nursling, was
stained with berries and smeared with soil; she seemed
to have no destination; and after surveying him a moment,
she mounted a fallen tree, and, bending and swinging
forward over a bough, still surveyed him.
“Ah, ha!” said Mr. Roger Raleigh; “what have we
here?”
The child still looked in his face, but vouchsafed, in her
swinging, no reply.
“What is the little lady's name?” he asked then.
This query, apparently more comprehensible, elicited a
response. She informed him that her name was “Dymom,
Pink, and Beauty.”
“Indeed! And anything else?”
“Rose Pose,” she added, as if soliciting the aid of memory
by lifting her hands near her temples.
“Is that all?”
“Little silly Daffodilly.”
“No more?”
“Rite.”
“Rite, — ah, that is it! Rite what?”
“Rite!” said the child, authoritatively, bringing down
her foot and shaking back her hair.
“And how old is Rite?”
“One, two, four, twenty. Maman is twenty; — Rite is
twenty, too.”
“When was Rite four?”
“A great while ago. She went to heaven in the afternoon,”
was added, confidentially, after a moment's inspection
to see if he were worthy.
“Ah! And what was there there?”
“Pitchtures, and music, and peoples, and a great
house.”
“And where is Rite going now?”
“Going away in a ship.”
“Rite will have to wash her face first.”
But at this proposition the child flashed open her pale-blue
orbs, half-closed them as a sleepy cat does, and, with
no other change of countenance to mark her indignation,
appeared to shut him out from her contemplation. Directly
afterward, she opened them again, bent forward and
back over the swinging, and recommenced her song, as if
there were not another person than herself within a hundred
miles. Half-hidden in the great hemlock-bough, this
tiny, fantastic creature, so fair, so supercilious, seemed
in her waywardness a veritable fay, mate for any of
the little men in green, bibbers of dew-drops, lodgers in
bean-blossoms, Green-Jacket, Red-Cap, and White-Owl's-Feather.
Mr. Raleigh hesitated whether or not he should remain
and watch her fade away into the twilight, wondered if
she were bewitching him, then rubbed his hand across
his eyes and said, in a disenchanted, matter-of-fact manner,
—
“Do you know your way home, child?” and obtained,
of course, no reply. For an instant he had half the mind
to leave her to find it; but at once convicted of his absurdity,
“Then I shall take you with me,” he said, making
a step toward her, — “because you are, or will be,
lost.”
At the motion, she darted past and stood defiantly just
out of his reach. Mr. Raleigh attempted to seize her, but
he might as easily have put his hand on a butterfly; she
such a dance up and down the forest-path as none other
than a will-o'-the-wisp, it seemed, could have woven. All
at once a dark figure glided out from another alley and
snatched the sprite into its arms. It was a colored nurse,
who poured out a torrent of broken French and English
over the runaway, and made her acknowledgments to Mr.
Raleigh in the same jargon. As she turned to go, the
child stretched her arms toward her late pursuer, making
the nurse pause, and, putting up her little lips, touched
with them his own; then, picturesque as ever, and thrown
into relief by the scarlet sack, snowy turban, and sable
skin of her bearer, she disappeared. It is doubtful if in
all his life Mr. Raleigh would ever receive a purer, sweeter
kiss.
He had promised to be at the Bawn that evening, and
now accordingly sought the shore, where the Arrow lay,
and was soon within the shelter of his own house. The
arrangement of toilet was a brief matter; and that concluded,
Mr. Raleigh entered his library, an apartment
now slightly in disarray, and therefore, perhaps, not uncongenial
with his present mood. After strolling round
the place, Mr. Raleigh paused at the window an instant,
the window overhung with clematis, and commanding the
long stretch of water between him and the Bawn, which
last was, however, too distant for any movement to be
discerned there. Soon Mr. Raleigh turned his back upon
the scene that lay pictured in such beauty below, and,
throwing himself into a deep arm-chair, remained motionless
and plunged in thought for many moments. Rising
at last, he took from the table a package of letters from
India that had arrived in his absence. Glancing absently
at the superscriptions, breaking the seal of one, he replaced
they must wait. Then Mr. Raleigh had recourse to a
universal panacea, and walked to and fro across the
room, with measured, unvarying steps, till the striking
clock warned him that time was passing. Mr. Raleigh
drew near his desk again, took up the pen, and hesitated;
then recalling his gaze that had seemed to search his own
inmost nature, he drew the paper nearer and wrote.
What he wrote, the very words, may not signify; with
the theme one is sufficiently acquainted. Perhaps he
poured out there all that had so often trembled on his
lips without finding utterance; perhaps, if ever passionate
heart flashed its own fire into its implements, this pen and
paper quivered beneath the current throbbing through
them. The page was brief, but therein all was said.
Sealing it hastily, he summoned Capua.
“Capua,” said he, giving him the note, “you are to go
with me across the lake now. We shall return somewhere
between eleven and twelve. Just as we leave, you are to
give this note to Mrs. Laudersdale. Do you understand?”
“Yah, Massa, let dis chile alone,” responded Capua,
grinning at the prospect of society, and speedily following
his master.
The breeze had fallen, so that they rowed the whole distance,
with the idle sail hanging loosely, and arrived only
just as the red sunset painted the lake behind them with
blushing shadows. Mr. Raleigh joined Helen Heath and
his cousin in the hall; Capua, superb with the importance
of his commission, sought another entrance. But just as
the latter individual had crossed the threshold, he encountered
the nurse whom his master had previously met in
the wood. Nothing could have been more acceptable in
his eyes than this addition to the circle below-stairs.
curtsies and articulations and gesticulations followed with
such confusing rapidity, that, when the mutually pleased
pair turned in company toward the kitchens, a scrap of
white paper, that had fluttered down in the disorder, was
suffered to remain unnoticed on the floor. The courier
had lost his despatch. Coming in from her walk, not five
minutes later, Mrs. Laudersdale's eye was caught thereby;
stooping to take it, she read with surprise her own name
thereon, and ascended the stairs possessed thereof.
What burden of bliss, what secret of sorrow, lay infolded
there, that at the first thought she covered it with
sudden kisses, and the next, crushing it against her heart,
burst into a wild weeping? Again and again she read it,
and at every word its intense magnetic strength thrilled
her, rapt her from remembrance, conquered her. She
seized a pencil and wrote hurriedly: —
“You are right. With you I live, without you I die.
You shut heaven out from me; make earth, then, heaven.
Come to me, for I love you. Yes, I love you.”
She did not stay to observe the contrast between her
fervent sentences and the weak, faint characters that
expressed them, but hastily sought the servant who was
accustomed to act as postman, gave him directions to acquaint
her of its reception, and watched him out of sight.
All that in the swiftness of a fever-fit. Scarcely had the
boat vanished when old thoughts rushed over her again,
and she would have given her life to recall it. Returning,
she found Capua eagerly searching for the lost letter,
and thus learned that she was not to have received it
until several hours later.
Perhaps no other woman in her situation could have
done what Mrs. Laudersdale had done, without incurring
such isolation as she, — whose intellect, naturally subject
to her affection, had become more so through the absence
of systematic education, — whose morality had been
allowed to be merely one of instinct, — to whom introspection
had been till now a thing unknown, — and who,
accepting a husband as another child accepts a parent,
had, in the whirl of gay life where she afterward reigned,
found so little time for thought, and remained in such
mental unsophistication as to experience now her first
passion.
As Mrs. Laudersdale entered her room again, the opposite
door opened and admitted that individual the selfishness
of whose marriage was but half expiated when he
found himself on the surplus side of the world.
In the meanwhile, Mr. Raleigh was gayly passing the
time with Helen Heath. There were to be some guests
from the town that evening, and they were the topic of
her discourse.
“I wonder if we are never to have tea,” said she at
last, looking at her watch.
“I did n't know you were attached to the custom,” said
he, indifferently, as he had said everything else, while
intently listening for a footstep.
“Ah! but I like to see other folks take their bitters.”
“Do not even the publicans the same?”
“You will become a proficient chemist, converting the
substance of my remarks to airy nothings through your
gospel-retorts.”
“Oh, I understand your optics as well. You like to
see other folks; taking the bitters is a different thing.
The tea-bell is a tocsin.”
“Pshaw! You don't care to see any one! But shall
for a sweet tooth?”
“None at all.”
“Not even in Mrs. Laudersdale's instance?”
“Mrs. Laudersdale has a sweet tooth, then?” Mr.
Raleigh asked in return, as if there were any trivial thing
concerning her in which he could yet be instructed.
“I 'm not going to tell you anything about Mrs.
Laudersdale.”
“There comes that desired object, the tea-tray. It 's
not to be formal, then, to-night. That 's a blessing!
What shall I bring you?” he continued, — “tea or
cocoa?”
“Neither. You may have the tea, and I 'll leave the
cocoa for Mrs. Laudersdale.”
“Mrs. Laudersdale drinks cocoa, then?”
“You may bring me some milk and macaroons.”
As Mr. Raleigh was about to obey, his little apparition
of the wood suddenly appeared in the doorway, followed
by her nurse, — having arisen from the discipline of bath
and brush, fair and spotless as a snowflake. She flitted
by him with a mocking recognition.
“Rite!” cried a voice from above, familiar, but with
how strange a tone in it! “Little Rite!”
“Maman!” cried the sprite, and went dancing up the
stairs.
Mr. Raleigh's face, as he turned, darkened with a
heavier flush than half a score of Indian summers
branded upon it afterward.
“That is Mrs. Laudersdale's little maid?” asked he,
when, after a few moments, he brought the required
salver.
“Yes, — would you ever suspect it?”
Numberless as had been the times he had heard her
speak of Rite, he never had suspected it, but had always
at the name pictured some indifferent child, some baby-friend,
or cousin by courtesy.
“She is not like her mother,” said he, coolly.
“The very antipodes, — all her father. — Bless me!
What is this? A real Laudersdale mess, — custards and
cheese-cakes, — and I detest them both.”
“Blame my unfortunate memory. I thought I had
certainly pleased you, Miss Helen.”
“When you forgot my orders? Well, never mind.
In n't she exquisite?”
“Is n't who exquisite? Oh, the little maid? Quite!
Why has n't she been here all summer?”
“She was always a sickly, ailing thing, and has been
at one of those rich Westchester farms where health and
immortality are made. And now she is going away to
Martinique, where her grandmother will take charge of
her, bottle up those spirits, and make her a second edition
of her mother. By the way, how that mother has effervesced
this summer!” continued Helen, as the detested
custard disappeared. “I wonder what made her. Do
you suppose it was because her husband was away?”
At that instant Mrs. Laudersdale came sailing down
the stairs.
A week previously, when, to repay the civilities of
their friends in the neighboring city, Mrs. McLean had
made a little fancy-party, Helen appearing as Champagne,
all in rosy gauzes with a veiling foam of dropping silver
lace, had begged Mrs. Laudersdale to give her prominence
by dressing for Port; and accordingly that lady
had arrayed herself in velvet, out of which her shoulders
rose like snow, and whose rich duskiness made her perfect
color was sprinkled with glittering crystal drops and coruscations;
and wreathing her forehead with crisp vine-leaves
and tendrils, she had bunched together in intricate
splendor all the amethysts, carbuncles, garnets, and rubies
in the house, for grape-clusters at the ear, till she seemed,
with her smile and her sunshine, the express and incarnate
spirit of vintage. To-night, stripped of its sparkling
drops, she wore the same dress, and in her hair a wreath
of fresh white roses. Behind her descended a tall and
stately gentleman. She swept forward. “Mr. Raleigh,”
she murmured, while her eyes diffused their gloom and
fell, “let me introduce you to my husband!”
The blow had come previously. Mr. Raleigh bowed
almost to the ground, without a word, then looked up and
offered his hand. Mr. Laudersdale comprehended the
whole matter at a heart-beat, and took it. Then they
moved on toward other friends, whom, while waiting for
knowledge of his wife's return from her walk, Mr. Laudersdale
had not seen. Mr. Raleigh went in search of
Capua, and ere long reappeared.
It grew quite dark; the candles were lighted. Rite
slipped in, and, after having flown about like a thistledown
for a while, mounted a chair and put her arms
about her mother's shoulders. Then Mr. Raleigh, sitting
silently on a sofa, attracted her, and shortly afterward she
had curled herself beside him and fallen asleep with her
head upon his knee; otherwise he did not touch her.
Mrs. Laudersdale stood by an open casement; the servant
who had carried her note came up the lawn and
spoke to her from without. There was no one in the
house, and he had left it on the library-table. The pressure
of those tender little arms was yet warm about the
“He shall never see that note!” she murmured, and
slipped through the casement.
Accustomed to all rash and intrepid adventure during
this summer, it was nothing for her to unmoor a boat, enter
it, and lift the oars, not pausing to observe that it was
the Arrow. Just then, however, a little wind ruffled down
and shook the sail, a wind not quite favorable, but in which
she could tack across and back; she drew in the oars, put
to the proof all her new boat-craft, and recklessly dashed
through the dark element that curled and seethed about
her. She had to make but two tacks in that hour's impetuous
progress, before the house rose, as it had frequently
done before, glooming at but a few rods' distance,
and loading with odorous breath the air that tossed its
vines ere stealing across the lake. She trembled now,
and remembered that she alone of all the party had always
unconsciously evaded entering Mr. Raleigh's house,
had never seen the house nearer than now, and never
been its guest. It was entering some dark, unknown
place; it was to intrude on a sacred region. But the
breeze hurried her along while she thought, and the next
moment the keel was buried in the sand. There was no
time to lose; she left the boat, ascended a flight of stone
steps close at hand, and was in the garden. Low, ripe
greenery was waving over her here, deep alluring shadows
opening around, full fresh fragrance fanning idly to and
fro and stealing her soul away. Beyond, the lake gleamed
darkly, the water lapped gently, the wind sighed and fell
like a fluttering breath. She would have lingered forever,
— she dared not linger a moment. She brushed
the dew from the heavy blossoms as she swept on, then
the drenching branches swayed and closed behind her;
which appeared.
There were stray starbeams in this apartment; her
eyes were accustomed to the gloom; she could dimly
discern the great book-cases lining the wall, — an antique
chair, — the glittering key-board of a grand-piano
that stood apart, yet thrilling perhaps with recent harmonies,
— a colossal head of Antinoüs, that self-involved
dreamer, stone-entranced in a calm of passion. She had
been feverishly agitated; but as this white silence dawned
upon her, so strong, yet voluptuous, never sad, making in
its masque of marble one intense moment eternal, some of
the same power spread soothingly over her. She paused
a moment to gather the thronging thoughts. How still the
room was! She had not known that music was at his
command before. How sweet the air that blew in at the
window! what late flowers bore such pungent balm?
That portrait leaning half-startled from the frame, was
it his mother? These books, were they the very ones
that had fed his youth? How everything was yet warm
from his touch! how his presence yet lingered! how
much of his life had passed into the dim beauty of the
place! How each fresh waft from the blooms without
came drowned in fine perfume, laden with delicious languor!
What heaven was there! and, ah! what heaven
was yet possible there!
Something that had flitted from the table in the draught,
and had hovered here and there along the floor, now lay
at her foot; she caught it absently; it was her letter. To
snatch it from its envelope, and so tear it the more easily
to atoms, was her first thought; but as suddenly she
paused. Was it hers? Though written and sealed by
her hand, had she any longer possession therein? Had
might be in the room? Absurd refinement of honor!
She broke the seal. Yet stay! Was there no justice
due to him? That letter which had been read long before
the intended time, whose delivery any accident might
have frustrated, whose writer might have recalled it, —
did it demand no magnanimity of reply on her part?
Had he now no claim to the truth from her? As she
knew what he never would have told her an hour later,
had she authority to recede from the position she had
taken in response, simply because she could and he could
not? Should she ignobly refuse him his right?
Whether this were a sophism of sin or the logic of
highest virtue, she, who would have blotted out her writing
with her heart's blood, did not wait to weigh.
“To him, also, I owe a duty!” she exclaimed, dropped
the letter where she had found it, and fled, — fled, hurrying
through all the bewildering garden-walks, down from
the fragrance, the serenity, the bowery seclusion, from all
this conspiring loveliness that tempted her to dally and
commanded her to stay, — fled from this dream of passion,
this region of joy, — fled forever, as she thought,
out into the wide, chill, lonely night.
Pushing off the boat and springing in, once more the
water curled beneath the parting prow, and she shot with
her flashing sail and hissing wake heedlessly, like a phantom,
past another boat that was making more slowly in to
shore.
“This way, Helen,” murmurs a subdued voice. “There
are some steps, Mr. Laudersdale. Here we are; but it 's
dark as Erebus. Give me your hand; I 'm half afraid;
after that spectre that walked the water just now, these
shadows are not altogether agreeable. There 's the door,
McLean would say. Don't believe he 'd like it.”
“What made you come, then?” asks Helen, as they
step within.
“Oh, just for the frolic; it was getting stupid, too. I
suppose we we 've ruined our dresses. But there! we must
hurry and get back. I did n't think it would take so
long. He can't manage a boat so well as Roger,” adds
Mrs. McLean, in a whisper.
“Goodness!” exclaims Helen. “I can't see an inch
of the way. We shall certainly deal devastation.”
“I 've been exploring a mantel-shelf; here 's a candle,
but how to light it? Have n't you a match, Mr. Laudersdale?”
That gentleman produces one from a little pocket-safe;
it proves a failure, — and so a second, and a third.
“This is the last, Mrs. McLean. Have your candle
ready.”
The little jet of flame flashes up.
“Quick, Helen! a scrap of paper, quick!”
“I don't know where to find any. Here 's a billet on
the floor; the seal's broken; Mr. Raleigh don't read his
letters, you know; shall I take it?”
“Anything, yes! My fingers are burning! Quick,
it 's the last match! There!”
Helen waves a tiny flambeau, the candle is lighted, the
flame whirled down upon the hearth and trodden out.
“I wonder what it was, though,” adds Mrs. McLean,
stooping over it. “Some of our correspondence. No
matter, then. Now for that Indian mail. Here, — no,
— this must be it. `Mr. Roger Raleigh,' — `Roger Raleigh,
Esq.,' — that 's not it. `Day, Knight, & Co., for
Roger Raleigh.' Why, Mr. Laudersdale, that 's your
`Mrs. Catherine McLean, care of Mr. Roger Raleigh.'
Does n't that look handsomely, Helen?” contemplating
it with newly married satisfaction.
“Now you have it, come!” urged Helen.
“No, indeed! I must find that Turkish tobacco, to
reward Mr. Laudersdale for his heroic exertions in our
behalf.”
Mr. Laudersdale, somewhat fastidious and given to
rigid etiquette, looks as if the exertions would be best
rewarded by haste. Mrs. McLean takes the candle in
hand and proceeds on a tour of the apartment.
“There! is n't this the article? John says it 's pitiful
stuff, not to be compared with Virginia leaf. Look at
this meerschaum, Mr. Laudersdale; there 's an ensample.
Prettily colored, is it not?”
“Now are you coming?” asks Helen.
“Would you? We 've never been here without my
worshipful cousin before; I should like to investigate his
domestic arrangements. Needle and thread. Now what
do you suppose he is doing with needle and thread? Oh,
it 's that little lacework that Mrs. — Sketches! I
wonder whom he 's sketching. You, Helen? Me? Upside
down, of course. No, it 's — Yes, we may as
well go. Come!”
And in the same breath Mrs. McLean blows out the
candle and precedes them. Mr. Laudersdale scorns to
secure the sketch; and holding back the boughs for Miss
Heath, and assisting her down the steps, quietly follows.
Meantime, Mrs. Laudersdale has reached her point of
departure again, has stolen up out of the white fog now
gathering over the lake, slipped into her former place,
and found all nearly as before. The candles had been
doorways. Some of the guests were in the brilliant dining-room,
some in the back-parlor. Mr. Raleigh, while
Fate was thus busying herself about him, still sat motionless,
one hand upon the sofa's side, one on the back, little
Rite still sleeping on his knee. Capua came and exchanged
a few words with his master; then the colored
nurse stepped through the groups, sought the child, and
carried her away, head and arms hanging heavy with
slumber. Still Mr. Raleigh did not move. Mrs. Laudersdale
stood in the window, vivid and glowing. There
were no others in the room.
“Where is Mrs. McLean?” asked Mary Purcell at
the door, after the charade in which she had been engaged
was concluded.
“Gone across the lake with Nell and Mr. Laudersdale
for a letter,” replied Master Fred Heath, who had returned
that afternoon from the counting-room, with his
employer, and now sauntered by.
Mrs. Laudersdale started; she had not escaped too early;
but then — Her heart was beating in her throat.
“What letter?” asked Mrs. Heath, with amiable curiosity,
as she joined them.
“Do you know what letter, Mr. Raleigh?”
“One from India, Madame,” was his response.
“Strange! Helen gone without permission! What
was in the letter, I wonder. Do you know what was in
the letter, Mr. Raleigh?”
“Congratulations, and a recommendation of Mrs. McLean's
cousin to her good graces,” he said.
“Oh, it was not Helen's, then?”
“No.”
“My young gentleman 's not in good humor to-night,”
nod, and moving off.
“How did you know what was in Mrs. McLean's letter,
sir?” asked Mary Purcell.
“I conjectured. In Mrs. Heath's place, I should have
known.”
“There they come! — you can always tell Mrs. McLean's
laugh. You 've lost all the charades, Helen!”
They came in, very gay, and seemed at once to arouse
an airier and finer spirit among the humming clusters.
Mr. Laudersdale did not join his wife, but sat on the
piazza talking with Mr. McLean. People were looking
at an herbal, others coquetting, others quiet. Some one
mentioned music. Directly afterward, Mr. Raleigh rose
and approached the piano. Every one turned. Taking
his seat, he threw out a handful of rich chords; the instrument
seemed to diffuse a purple cloud; then, buoyed
over perfect accompaniment, the voice rose in that one
love-song of the world. What depth of tenderness is
there from which the Adelaide does not sound? What
secret of tragedy, too? Singing, he throbbed through it a
vitality as if the melody surcharged with beauty grew
from his soul and were his breath of life indeed. The
thrilling strain came to penetrate and fill one heart; the
passionate despair surged round her; the silence following
was like the hand that closes the eyes of the dead.
Mr. Raleigh did not rise, nor look up, as he finished.
“How melancholy!” said Helen Heath, breaking the
hush.
“All music should be melancholy,” said he.
“How absurd, Roger!” said his cousin. “There is
much music that is only intensely beautiful.”
“Intense beauty at its height always drops in pathos,
infinite, the soul finite.”
“Nonsense! There 's that song, Number Three in
Book One —”
“I don't remember it.”
“Well, there 's no pathos there! It 's just one trill of
laughter and merriment, a sunbeam and effect. Play it,
Helen.”
Helen went, and, extending her hands before Mr.
Raleigh, played a couple of bars; he continued where
she left it, as one might a dream, and, strangely enough,
the little, gushing sparkle of joy became a phantom of
itself, dissolving away in tears.
“Oh, of course,” said Mrs. McLean, “you can make
mouths in a glass, if you please; but I, for one, detest
melancholy! Don't you, Mrs. Laudersdale?”
Mrs. Laudersdale had shrunk into the shadow of the
curtain. Perhaps she did not hear the question; for her
reply, that did not come at once, was the fragment of a
Provençal romance, sung, — and sung in a voice neither
sweet nor rich, but of a certain personal force as potent
as either quality, and a stifled strength of tone that made
one tremble.
The moon and stars are dead and gone,
The night 's at deep, the winds asleep,
And thou and I are all alone!
What care have we, though life there be?
Tumult and life are not for me!
Silence and sleep about us creep:
Tumult and life are not for thee!
How late it is since such as this
Had topped the height of breathing bliss!
And now we keep an iron sleep, —
In that grave thou, and I in this!
Her voice yet shivered through the room, he struck a
chord of dead conclusion, the curtain stirred, she emerged
from the gloom and was gone.
Mr. Raleigh rose and bade his cousin good night.
Mrs. McLean, however, took his arm and sauntered with
him down the lawn.
“I thought Capua came with you,” she remarked.
“He returned in a spare wherry, some time since,” he
replied; and thereon they made a few paces in silence.
“Roger,” said the little lady, taking breath preparatory
to wasting it, “I thought Helen was a coquette. I 've
changed my mind. The fault is yours.”
He turned and looked down at her with some surprise.
“You know we have n't much more time, and certainly
—”
“Kate!”
“Yes, — don't scold! — and if you are going to propose,
I really think you ought to, or else —”
“You think I ought to marry Miss Heath?”
“Why — I — well — Oh, dear! I wish I had held
my peace!”
“That might have been advisable.”
“Don't be offended now, Roger!”
“Is there any reason to suppose her — to suppose
me —”
“Yes, there!” replied Mrs. McLean, desperately.
He was silent a moment.
“Good God, Kate!” said he, then, clasping his hands
behind his head, and looking up the deep transparence of
the unanswering night. “What a blessing it is that life
don't last forever!”
“But it does, Roger,” she uttered under her breath, —
storm she had aroused.
“The formula changes,” he replied, with his old air,
and retracing their steps.
The guests were all gone. Helen Heath was eating
an ice; he bent over her chair and said, —
“Good night, Miss Helen!”
“Oh, good night, Mr. Raleigh! You are going? Well,
we 're all going soon. What a glorious summer it has
been! Are n't you sorry we must part?”
“Why must we part?” he asked in a lower tone.
“Where is the necessity of our parting? Why won't you
stay forever, Helen?”
She turned and surveyed him quickly, while a red —
whether of joy or anger he could not tell — flashed up her
cheek.
“Do you mean —”
“Miss Health, I mean, will you marry me?”
“Mr. Raleigh, no!”
With a bow he passed on.
Mr. Raleigh trimmed the Arrow's sail, for the breeze
had sunk again, and swept slowly out with one oar suspended.
A waning moon was rising behind the trees, it
fell upon the little quay that had been built that summer,
and seemed with its hollow beams still to continue the
structure upon the water. The Arrow floated in the
shadow just beyond. Mr. Raleigh's eyes were on the
quay; he paused, nerveless, both oars trailing, a cold
damp starting on his forehead. Some one approached
as if looking out upon the dim sheet, — some one who,
deceived by the false light, did not know the end to be so
near, and walked forward firmly and confidently. Indeed,
the quay had been erected in Mr. Laudersdale's absence.
The water was deep there, the bottom rocky.
“Shout and warn him of his peril!” urged a voice in
Mr. Raleigh's heart.
“Let him drown!” urged another voice.
If he would have called, the sound died a murmur in
his throat. His eyes were on the advancing figure; it
seemed as if that object were to be forever stamped upon
the retina. Still as he gazed, he was aware of another
form, one sitting on the quay, unseen in shadow like himself,
and seeing what he saw, and motionless as he. Would
Mrs. Laudersdale dip her hands in murder? It all passed
in a second of time; at the next breath he summoned
every generous power in his body, sprang with the leap
of a wild creature, and confronted the recoiling man. Ere
his foot touched the quay, the second form had glided from
the darkness, and seized her husband's arm.
“A thousand pardons, sir,” said Mr. Raleigh, then. “I
thought you were in danger. Mrs. Laudersdale, good
night!”
It was an easy matter to regain the boat, to gather up
his oars, and shoot away. Till they faded from sight, he
saw her still beside him; and so they stood till the last
echo of the dipping oars was muffled in distance and lost.
Summer-nights are brief; breakfast was late on the
next morning, — or rather, Mrs. Laudersdale was late, as
usual, to partake it.
“Shall I tell you some news?” asked Helen Heath.
She lifted her heavy eyes absently.
“Mrs. McLean has made her husband a millionnaire.
There was an Indian mail yesterday. Mr. Raleigh read
his letters last night, after going home. His uncle is dying,
— old, unfortunate, forlorn. He has abandoned everything,
and must hew his own way in the world from this
day forward. Mr. Raleigh left this morning for India.”
When you saw Mrs. Laudersdale for the first time, at
a period thirteen years later, would you have imagined
her possessed of this little drama? You fancy now that
in this flash all the wealth of her soul burned out and left
her a mere volition and motive power? You are mistaken,
as I said.
II.
When Miss Kent, the maternal great-aunt of Mr. Raleigh,
devised her property, the will might possibly have
been set aside as that of a monomaniac, but for the fact
that he cared too little about anything to go to law for it,
and for the still more important fact that the heirs-at-law
were sufficiently numerous to ingulf the whole property
and leave no ripple to attest its submerged existence, had
he done so; and on deserting it, he was better pleased to
enrich the playfellow of his childhood than a host of unknown
and unloved individuals. I cannot say that he did
not more than once regret what he had lost: he was not
of a self-denying nature, as we know; on the contrary,
luxurious and accustomed to all those delights of life generally
to be procured only through wealth. But, for all
that, there had been intervals, ere his thirteen years' exile
ended, in which, so far from regret, he experienced a certain
joy at remembrance of this rough and rugged point
of time where he had escaped from the chrysalid state to
one of action and freedom and real life. He had been
happy in reaching India before his uncle's death, in applaying
his own clear understanding to the intricate entanglements
of the affairs before him, in rescuing his uncle's
commercial good name, and in securing thus for himself a
foothold on the ladder of life, although that step had not
For the rest, I am not sure that Mr. Raleigh
did not find his path suiting him well enough. There was
no longer any charm in home; he was forbidden to think
of it. That strange summer, that had flashed into his life
like the gleam of a carnival-torch into quiet rooms, must
be forgotten; the forms that had peopled it, in his determination,
should become shadows. Valiant vows! Yet
there must have come moments, in that long lapse of days
and years, when the whole season gathered up its garments
and swept imperiously through his memory: nights,
when under the shadow of the Himmaleh, the old passion
rose at spring-tide and flooded his heart and drowned out
forgetfulness, and a longing asserted itself, that, if checked
as instantly by honor as despair, was none the less insufferable
and full of pain, — warm, wide, Southern nights,
when all the stars, great and golden, leaned out of heaven
to meet him, and all ripe perfumes, wafted by their own
principle of motion, floated in the rich dusk and laden air
about him, and the phantom of snow on topmost heights
sought vainly to lend him its calm. Days also must have
showered their fervid sunshine on him, as he journeyed
through plains of rice, where all the broad reaches whitening
to harvest filled him with intense and bitterest loneliness.
What region of spice did not recall the noons when
they two had trampled the sweet-fern on wide, high New
England pastures, and breathed its intoxicating fragrance?
and what forest of the tropics, what palms, what blooms,
what gorgeous affluence of color and of growth, equalled
the wood on the lake-shores, with its stately hemlocks, its
joyous birches, its pale-blue, shadow-blanched violets?
Nor was this regret, that had at last become a part of
the man's identity, entirely a selfish one. He had no authority
firmly and tenderly as he loved, he was loved, and of the
two fates his was not the harder. But a man, a man, too,
in the stir of the world, has not the time for brooding over
the untoward events of his destiny that a woman has; his
tender memories are forever jostled by cent per cent; he
meets too many faces to keep the one in constant and unchanging
perpetuity sacredly before his thought. And so
it happened that Mr. Raleigh became at last a silent, keen-eyed
man, with the shadow of old and enduring melancholy
on his life, but with no certain sorrow there.
In the course of time his business connections extended
themselves; he was associated with other men more intent
than he upon their aim; although not wealthy, years
might make him so; his name commanded respect. Something
of his old indifference lingered about him; it was seldom
that he was in earnest; he drifted with the tide, and
except to maintain a clear integrity before God and men
and his own soul, exerted scarcely an effort. It was not
an easy thing for him to break up any manner of life;
and when it became necessary for one of the firm to visit
America, and he as the most suitable was selected, he assented
to the proposition with not a heart-beat. America
was as flat a wilderness to him as the Desert of Sahara.
On landing in India, he had felt like a semi-conscious
sleeper in his dream, the country seemed one of phantasms;
the Lascars swarming in the port, — the merchants
wrapped in snowy muslins, who moved like white-robed
bronzes faintly animate, — the strange faces, modes,
and manners, — the stranger beasts, immense, and alien
to his remembrance; all objects that crossed his vision
had seemed like a series of fantastic shows; he could
have imagined them to be the creations of a heated
magic. But now they had become more his life than
the scenes which he had left; this land with its heats
and its languors had slowly and passively endeared itself
to him; these perpetual summers, the balms and
blisses of the South, had unconsciously become a need
of his nature. One day all was ready for his departure;
and in the clipper ship Osprey, with a cargo for
Day, Knight, and Company, Mr. Raleigh bade farewell
to India.
The Osprey was a swift sailer and handled with consummate
skill, so that I shall not venture to say in how
few days she had weathered the Cape, and, ploughing up
the Atlantic, had passed the Windward Islands, and off
the latter had encountered one of the severest gales in
Captain Tarbell's remembrance, although he was not new
to shipwreck. If Mr. Raleigh had found no time for reflection
in the busy current of affairs, when, ceasing to
stand aside, he had mingled in the turmoil and become a
part of the generations of men, he could not fail to find it
in this voyage, not brief at best, and of which every day's
progress must assure him anew toward what land and
what people he was hastening. Moreover, Fate had
woven his lot, it seemed, inextricably among those whom
he would shun; for Mr. Laudersdale himself was deeply
interested in the Osprey's freight, and it would be incumbent
upon him to extend his civilities to Mr. Raleigh.
But Mr. Raleigh was not one to be cozened by circumstances
more than by men.
The severity of the gale, which they had met some
three days since, had entirely abated; the ship was laid
to while the slight damage sustained was undergoing repair,
and rocked heavily beneath the gray sky on the long,
had just come upon deck at dawn, where he found every
one in unaccountable commotion. “Ship to leeward in
distress,” was all the answer his inquiries could obtain,
while the man on the topmast was making his observations.
Mr. Raleigh could see nothing, but every now and
then the boom of a gun came faintly over the distance.
The report having been made, it was judged expedient to
lower a boat and render her such assistance as was possible.
Mr. Raleigh never could tell how it came to pass
that he found himself one of the volunteers in this dangerous
service.
The disabled vessel proved to be a schooner from the
West Indies in a sinking condition. A few moments sufficed
to relieve a portion of her passengers, sad wretches
who for two days had stared death in the face, and they
pulled back toward the Osprey. A second and third
journey across the waste, and the remaining men prepared
to lower the last woman into the boat, when a
stout, but extremely pale individual, who could no longer
contain his frenzy of fear, clambered down the chains and
dropped in her place. There was no time to be lost, and
nothing to do but submit; the woman was withdrawn to
wait her turn with the captain and crew, and the laden
boat again labored back to the ship. Each trip in the
heavy sea and the blinding rain occupied no less than a
couple of hours, and it was past noon when, uncertain just
before if she might yet be there, they again came within
sight of the little schooner, slowly and less slowly settling
to her doom. As they approached her at last, Mr. Raleigh
could plainly detect the young woman standing at a
little distance from the anxious group, leaning against the
broken mast with crossed arms, and looking out over the
the motion of the captain, she stepped forward, bound the
ropes about herself, and was swung over the side to await
the motion of the boat, as it slid within reach on the top
of the long wave, or receded down its shining, slippery
hollow. At length one swell brought it nearer, Mr. Raleigh's
arms snatched the slight form and drew her half-fainting
into the boat, a cloak was tossed after, and one by
one the remainder followed; they were all safe, and some
beggared. The bows of the schooner already plunged
deep down in the gaping gulfs, they pulled bravely
away, and were tossed along from billow to billow.
“You are very uncomfortable, Mademoiselle Le Blanc?”
asked the rescued captain at once of the young woman, as
she sat beside him in the stern-sheets.
“Moi?” she replied. “Mais non, Monsieur.”
Mr. Raleigh wrapped the cloak about her, as she spoke.
They were equidistant from the two vessels, neither of
which was to be seen, the rain fell fast into the hissing
brine, their fate still uncertain. There was something
strangely captivating and reassuring in this young girl's
equanimity, and he did not cease speculating thereon till
they had again reached the Osprey, and she had disappeared
below.
By degrees the weather lightened; the Osprey was on
the wing again, and a week's continuance of this fair wind
would bring them into port. The next day, toward sunset,
as Mr. Raleigh turned about in his regular pacing
of the deck, he saw, at its opposite extremity, the same
slight figure dangerously perched upon the taffrail, leaning
over, now watching the closing water, and now
eagerly shading her eyes with her hand to observe the
ship which they spoke, as they lay head to the wind, and
It was not Mr. Raleigh's custom to interfere; if
people chose to drown themselves, he was not the man to
gainsay them; but now, as his walk drew him toward
her, it was the most natural thing in the world to pause
and say, —
“Il serait fâcheux, Mademoiselle, lorsqu'on a failli faire
naufrage, de se noyer” — and, in want of a word, Mr.
Raleigh ignominiously descended to his vernacular, —
“with a lee-lurch.”
The girl, resting on the palm of one hand, and unsupported
otherwise, bestowed upon him no reply, and did
not turn her head. Mr. Raleigh looked at her a moment,
and then continued his walk. Returning, the thing happened
as he had predicted, and, with a little quick cry,
Mademoiselle Le Blanc was hanging by her hands among
the ropes. Reaching her with a spring, “Viens, petite!”
he said, and with an effort placed her on her feet again
before an alarm could have been given.
“Ah! mais j'ai cru que c'en était fait de moi!” she
exclaimed, drawing in her breath like a sob. In an instant,
however, surveying Mr. Raleigh, the slight emotion
seemed to yield to one of irritation, that she had been
rescued by him; for she murmured quickly, in English,
head haughtily thrown back and eyes downcast, — “Monsieur
thinks that I owe him much for having saved my
life!”
“Mademoiselle best knows its worth,” said he, rather
amused, and turning away.
The girl was still looking down; now, however, she
threw after him a quick glance.
“Tenez!” said she, imperiously, and stepping toward
him. “You fancy me very ungrateful,” she continued,
away the floating hair at her temples. “Well, I am not,
and at some time it may be that I prove it. I do not like
to owe debts; but, since I must, I will not try to cancel
them with thanks.”
Mr. Raleigh bowed, but said nothing. She seemed
to think it necessary to efface any unpleasant impression,
and, with a little more animation and a smile,
added, —
“The Captain Tarbell told me your name, Mr. Raleigh,
and that you had not been at home for thirteen years. Ni
moi non plus, — at least, I suppose it is home where I
am going; yet I remember no other than the island and
my —”
And here the girl opened her eyes wide, as if determined
that they should not fill with tears, and looked out
over the blue and sparkling fields around them. There
was a piquancy in her accent that made the hearer wish
to hear further, and a certain artlessness in her manner
not met with recently by him. He moved forward, keeping
her beside him.
“Then you are not French,” he said.
“I? Oh, no, — nor Creole. I was born in America;
but I have always lived with mamma on the plantation;
et maintenant, il y a six mois qu'elle est morte!”
Here she looked away again. Mr. Raleigh's glance
followed hers, and, returning, she met it bent kindly and
with a certain grave interest upon her. She appeared to
feel reassured, somewhat protected by one so much her
elder.
“I am going now to my father,” she said, “and to my
other mother.”
“A second marriage,” thought Mr. Raleigh, “and before
should read his thought, he added, — “And how do you
speak such perfect English?”
“Oh, my father came to see us every other year, and I
have written home twice a week since I was a little child.
Mamma, too, spoke as much English as French.”
“I have not been in America for a long time,” said Mr.
Raleigh, after a few steps. “But I do not doubt that you
will find enjoyment there. It will be new: womanhood
will have little like youth for you; but, in every event, it
is well to add to our experience, you know.”
“What is it like, sir? But I know! Rows of houses,
very counterparts of rows of houses, and they of rows of
houses yet beyond. Just the toy-villages in boxes, uniform
as graves and ugly as bricks — ”
“Brick houses are not such ugly things. I remember
one, low and wide, possessed of countless gables, covered
with vines and shaded with sycamores; it could not have
been so picturesque, if built of the marble of Paros, and
gleaming temple-white through masks of verdure.”
“It seems to me that I, too, remember such a one,”
said she, dreamily. “Mais non, je m'y perds. Yet, for
all that, I shall not find the New York avenues lined with
them.”
“No; the houses there are palaces.”
“I suppose, then, I am to live in a palace,” she answered,
with a light tinkling laugh. “That is fine; but
one may miss the verandas, all the whiteness and coolness.
How one must feel the roof!”
“Roofs should be screens, and not prisons, not shells,
you think?” said Mr. Raleigh.
“At home,” she replied, “our houses are, so to say,
parasols; in those cities they must be iron shrouds.
like a little fatalist.
“You must not take it with such desperation; perhaps
you will not be obliged to wear the shroud.”
“Not long, to be sure, at first. We go to freeze in the
country, a place with distant hills of blue ice, my old
nurse told me, — old Ursule. Oh, sir, she was drowned!
I saw the very wave that swept her off!”
“That was your servant?”
“Yes.”
“Then, perhaps, I have some good news for you. She
was tall and large?”
“Oui.”
“Her name was Ursule?”
“Oui! je dis que oui!”
Mr. Raleigh laughed at her eagerness.
“She is below, then,” he said, — “not drowned. There
is Reynolds. Mr. Reynolds, will you take this young
lady to her servant, Ursule, the woman you rescued?”
And Mademoiselle Le Blanc disappeared under that
gentleman's escort.
The ordinary restraints of social life not obtaining so
much on board ship as elsewhere, Mr. Raleigh saw his
acquaintance with the pale young stranger fast ripening
into friendliness. It was an agreeable variation from the
monotonous routine of his voyage, and he felt that it was
not unpleasant to her. Indeed, with that childlike simplicity
that was her first characteristic, she never saw him
without seeking him, and every morning and every evening
it became their habit to pace the deck together. Sunrise
and twilight began to be the hours with which he
associated her; and it was strange, that, coming, as she
did, out of the full blaze of tropical suns, she yet seemed
hours, and that must fairly dissolve beneath the sky of noon.
She puzzled him, besides, and he found singular contradictions
in her: to-night, sweetness itself, — to-morrow, petulant
as a spoiled child. She had all a child's curiosity,
too; and he amused himself by seeing, at one time, with
what novelty his adventures struck her, when, at another,
he would have fancied she had always held Taj and Himmaleh
in her garden. Now and then, excited, perhaps,
by emulation and wonder, her natural joyousness broke
through the usually sad and quiet demeanor; and she
related to him, with dramatic abandon, scenes of her gay
and innocent island-life, so that he fancied there was not
an emotion in her experience hidden from his knowledge,
till, all-unaware, he tripped over one reserve and another,
that made her, for the moment, as mysterious a being as
any of those court-ladies of ancient régimes, in whose lives
there were strange lacunæ and spaces of shadow. And a
peculiarity of their intercourse was, that, let her depart in
what freak or perversity she pleased, she seemed always
to have a certainty of finding him in the same mood in
which she had left him, — as some bright wayward vine
of Southern forests puts out a tendril to this or that enticing
point, yet, winding back, will find its first support
unchanged. Shut out, as Mr. Raleigh had been, from
any but the most casual female society, he found a great
charm in this familiarity, and, without thinking how lately
it had begun or how soon it must cease, he yielded himself
to its presence. At one hour she seemed to him an
impetuous and capricious thing, for whose better protection
the accident of his companionship was extremely fortunate,
— at another hour, a woman too strangely sweet to
part with; and then Mr. Raleigh remembered that in all
of these had not spent a week in his memory.
Mademoiselle Le Blanc came on deck one evening,
and, wrapping a soft, thick mantle round her, looked
about for a minute, shaded her eyes from the sunset,
meantime, with a slender, transparent hand, bowed to one,
spoke to another, slipped forward and joined Mr. Raleigh,
where he leaned over the ship's side.
“Voici ma capote!” said she, before he was aware of
her approach. “Ciel! qu'il fait frais!”
“We have changed our skies,” said Mr. Raleigh,
looking up.
“It is not necessary that you should tell me that!” she
replied. “I shiver all the time. I shall become a little
iceberg, for the sake of floating down to melt off Martinique!”
“Warm yourself now in the sunset; such a blaze was
kindled for the purpose.”
“Whenever I see a sunset, I find it to be a splendid
fact, une jouissance vraie, Monsieur, to think that men can
paint, — that these shades, which are spontaneous in the
heavens, and fleeting, can be rivalled by us and made
permanent, — that man is more potent than light.”
“But you are all wrong in your jouissance.”
She pouted her lip, and hung over the side in an
attitude that it seemed he had seen a hundred times
before.
“That sunset, with all its breadth and splendor, is
contained in every pencil of light.”
She glanced up and laughed.
“Oh, yes! a part of its possibilities. Which proves —?”
“That color is an attribute of light and an achievement
of man.”
Toute la journée,
Le vent vain va
En sa tournée,”
hummed the girl, with a careless dismissal of the subject.
Mr. Raleigh shut up the note-book in which he had
been writing, and restored it to his pocket. She turned
about and broke off her song.
“There is the moon on the other side,” she said, “floating
up like a great bubble of light. She and the sun are
the scales of a balance, I think; as one ascends, the other
sinks.”
“There is a richness in the atmosphere, when sunset
melts into moonrise, that makes one fancy it enveloping
the earth like the bloom on a plum.”
“And see how it has powdered the sea! The waters
look like the wings of the papillon bleu.”
“It seems that you love the sea.”
“Oh, certainly. I have thought that we islanders were
like those Chinese who live in great tanka-boats on the
rivers; only our boat rides at anchor. To climb the
highest land, and see yourself girt with fields of azure
enamelled in sheets of sunshine and fleets of sails, and
lifted against the horizon, deep, crystalline, and translucent
as a gem, — that makes one feel strong in isolation,
and produces keen races. Don't you think so?”
“I think that isolation causes either vivid characteristics
or idiocy, seldom strong or healthy ones; and I do
not value race.”
“Because you came from America!” — with an air of
disgust, — “where there is yet no race, and the population
is still too fluctuating for the mould of one.”
“I come from India, where, if anywhere, there is race.”
“But, pshaw! that was not what we were talking
about.”
“No, Mademoiselle, we were speaking of an element
even more fluctuating than American population.”
“Of course I love the sea; but if the sea loves me, it
is the way a cat loves the mouse.”
“It is always putting up a hand to snatch you?”
“I suppose I am sent to Nineveh and persist in shipping
for Tarshish. I never enter a boat without an accident.
The Belle Voyageuse met shipwreck, and I on
board. That was anticipated, though, by all the world;
for the night before we set sail, — it was a very murk,
hot night, — we were all called out to see the likeness of
a large merchantman transfigured in flames upon the sky,
— spars and ropes and hull one net and glare of fire.”
“A mirage, probably, from some burning ship at
sea.”
“No, I would rather think it supernatural. Oh, it was
frightful! Rather superb, though, to think of such a
spectral craft rising to warn us with ghostly flames that
the old Belle Voyageuse was riddled with rats!”
“Did it burn blue?” asked Mr. Raleigh.
“Oh, if you 're going to make fun of me, I 'll tell you
nothing more!”
As she spoke, Capua, who had considered himself, during
the many years of wandering, both guiding and folding
star to his master, came up, with his eyes rolling fearfully
in a lively expansion of countenance, and muttered a few
words in Mr. Raleigh's ear, lifting both hands in comical
consternation the while.
“Excuse me a moment,” said Mr. Raleigh, following
him, and, meeting Captain Tarbell at the companion-way,
the three descended together.
Mr. Raleigh was absent some fifteen minutes, at the
end of that time rejoining Mademoiselle Le Blanc.
“I did not mean to make fun of you,” said he, resuming
the conversation as if there had been no interruption. “I
was watching the foam the Osprey makes in her speed,
which certainly burns blue. See the flashing sparks!
now that all the red fades from the west, they glow in
the moon like broken amethysts.”
“What did you mean, then?” she asked, pettishly.
“Oh, I wished to see if the idea of a burning ship was
so terrifying.”
“Terrifying? No; I have no fear; I never was
afraid. But it must, in reality, be dreadful. I cannot
think of anything else so appalling.”
“Not at all timid?”
“Mamma used to say, those that know nothing fear
nothing.”
“Eminently your case. Then you cannot imagine a
situation in which you would lose self-possession?”
“Scarcely. Is n't it people of the finest organization,
comprehensive, large-souled, that are capable of the extremes
either of courage or fear? Now I am limited, so
that, without rash daring or pale panic, I can generally
preserve equilibrium.”
“How do you know all this of yourself?” he asked,
with an amused air.
“Certaines occasions me l'ont appris,” she replied,
briefly.
“So I presumed,” said he. “Ah? They have thrown
out the log. See, we make progress. If this breeze
holds!”
“You are impatient, Mr. Raleigh. You have dear
friends at home, whom you wish to see, who wish to
see you?”
“No,” he replied, with a certain bitterness in his tone.
“There is no one to whom I hasten, no one who waits to
receive me.”
“No one? But that is terrible! Then why should
you wish to hasten? For me, I would always be willing
to loiter along, to postpone home indefinitely.”
“That is very generous, Mademoiselle.”
“Mr. Raleigh —”
“Well?”
“I wish — please — you must not say Mademoiselle.
Nobody will address me so, shortly. Give me my name,
— call me Marguerite. Je vous en prie.”
And she looked up with a blush deepening the applebloom
of her cheek.
“Marguerite? Does it answer for pearl or for daisy
with you?”
“Oh, they called me so because I was such a little
round white baby. I could n't have been very precious,
though, or she never would have parted with me. Yes, I
wish we might drift on some lazy current for years. I
hate to shorten the distance. I stand in awe of my father,
and I do not remember my mother.”
“Do not remember?”
“She is so perfect, so superb, so different from me!
But she ought to love her own child!”
“Her own child?”
“And then I do not know the customs of this strange
land. Shall I be obliged to keep an establishment?”
“Keep an establishment?”
“It is very rude to repeat my words so! You ought n't!
Yes, keep an establishment!”
“I beg your pardon, Mademoiselle.”
“No, it is I who am rude.”
“Not at all, — but mysterious. I am quite in the dark
concerning you.”
“Concerning me?”
“Ah, Miss Marguerite, it is my turn now.”
“Oh! It must be — This is your mystery, n'est ce
pas? Mamma was my grandmamma. My own mother
was far too young when mamma gave her in marriage;
and, to make amends, mamma adopted me and left me
her name and her fortune. So that I am very wealthy.
And now shall I keep an establishment?”
“I should think not,” said Mr. Raleigh, with a smile.
“Do you know, you constantly reassure me? Home
grows less and less a bugbear when you speak of it.
How strange! It seems as if I had known you a year,
instead of a week.”
“It would probably take that period of time to make
us as well acquainted under other circumstances.”
“I wish you were going to be with us always. Shall
you stay in America, Mr. Raleigh?”
“Only till the fall. But I will leave you at your
father's door —”
And then Mr. Raleigh ceased suddenly, as if he had
promised an impossibility.
“How long before we reach New York?” she asked.
“In about nine hours,” he replied, — adding, in unconscious
undertone, “if ever.”
“What was that you said to yourself?” she demanded,
in a light and gayly inquisitive voice, as she looked around
and over the ship. “Why, how many there are on deck!
It is such a beautiful night, I suppose. Eh, Mr. Raleigh?”
“Are you not tired of your position?” he asked. “Sit
down beside me here.” And he took a seat.
“No, I would rather stand. Tell me what you said.”
“Sit, then, to please me, Marguerite, and I will tell
you what I said.”
She hesitated a moment, standing before him, the hood
of her capote, with its rich purple, dropping from the fluttering
yellow hair that the moonlight deepened into gold,
and the fire-opal clasp rising and falling with her breath,
like an imprisoned flame. He touched her hand, still
warm and soft, with his own, which was icy. She withdrew
it, turned her eyes, whose fair, faint lustre, the pale
forget-me-not blue, was darkened by the antagonistic light
to an amethystine shadow, inquiringly upon him.
“There is some danger,” she murmured.
“Yes. When you are not a mark for general observation,
you shall hear it.”
“I would rather hear it standing.”
“I told you the condition.”
“Then I shall go and ask Captain Tarbell.”
“And come sobbing back to me for `reassurance.'”
“No,” she said, quickly, “I should go down to Ursule.”
“Ursule has a mattress on deck; I assisted her up.”
“There is the captain! Now —”
He seized her hand and drew her down beside him.
For an instant she would have resisted, as the sparkling
eyes and flushed cheeks attested, — and then, with the instinctive
feminine baseness that compels every woman,
when once she has met her master, she submitted.
“I am sorry, if you are offended,” said he. “But the
captain cannot attend to you now, and it is necessary to
be guarded in movement; for a slight thing on such
occasions may produce a panic.”
“You should not have forced me to sit,” said she, in a
smothered voice, without heeding him: “you had no
right.”
“This right, that I assume the care of you.”
“Monsieur, you see that I am quite competent to the
care of myself.”
“Marguerite, I see that you are determined to
quarrel.”
She paused a moment, ere replying; then drew a little
nearer and turned her face toward him, though without
looking up.
“Forgive me, then!” said she. “But I would rather
be naughty and froward, it lets me stay a child, and so
you can take me in keeping, and I need not think for
myself at all. But if I act like a woman grown, then
comes all the responsibility, and I must rely on myself,
which is such trouble now, though I never felt it so
before, — I don't know why. Don't you see?” And she
glanced at him with her head on one side, and laughing
archly.
“You were right,” he replied, after surveying her a
moment; “my proffered protection is entirely superfluous.”
She thought he was about to go, and placed her hand
on his, as it lay along the side. “Don't leave me,” she
murmured.
“I have no intention of leaving you,” he said.
“You are very good. I have never seen one like you.
I love you well.” And, bathed in moonlight, she raised
her face and her glowing lips toward him.
Mr. Raleigh gazed in the innocent eyes a moment, to
seek the extent of her meaning, and felt, that, should he
take advantage of her childlike forgetfulness, he would be
only re-enacting the part he had so much condemned in
one man years before. So he merely bent low over the
hand that lay in his, raised it, and touched his lips to that.
hand away, half rose trembling from her seat, and sank
into it again.
“Soit, Monsieur!” she exclaimed, abruptly. “But
you have not told me the danger.”
“It will not alarm you now?” he replied, laughing.
“I have said that I am not a coward.”
“I wonder what you would think of me when I say
that without doubt I am.”
“You, Mr. Raleigh?” she cried, astonishment banishing
anger.
“Not that I betray myself. But that I have felt the
true heart-sinking. Once, surprised in the centre of an
insurrection, I expected to find my hair white as snow, if
I escaped.”
“Your hair is very black. And you escaped?”
“So it would appear.”
“They suffered you to go on account of your terror?
You feigned death? You took flight?”
“Hardly, — neither.”
“Tell me about it,” she said, imperiously.
Though Mr. Raleigh had exchanged the singular reserve
of his youth for a well-bred reticence, he scarcely
cared to be his own hero.
“Tell me,” said she. “It will shorten the time; and
that is what you are trying to do, you know.”
He laughed.
“It was once when I was obliged to make an unpleasant
journey into the interior, and a detachment was placed
at my service. We were in a suspected district quite
favorable to their designs, and the commanding officer
was attacked with illness in the night. Being called to
his assistance, I looked abroad and fancied things wore an
down a covered path and see if anything were wrong.
Never at fault, he discovered a revolt with intent to murder
my companion and myself, and retreat to the mountains.
Of course there was but one thing to do. I put a
pistol in my belt and walked down and in among them,
singled out the ringleader, fixed him with my eye, and
bade him approach. My appearance was so sudden and
unsuspected that they forgot defiance.”
“Bien, but I thought you were afraid.”
“So I was. I could not have spoken a second word.
I experienced intense terror, and that, probably, gave my
glance a concentration of which I was unaware and by
myself incapable; but I did not suffer it to waver; I
could not have moved it, indeed; I kept it on the man
while he crept slowly toward me. I shall never forget
the horrible sensation. I did not dare permit myself to
doubt his conquest; but if I had failed, as I then thought,
his approach was like the slow coil of a serpent about me,
and it was his glittering eyes that had fixed mine, and not
mine his. At my feet, I commanded him, with a gesture,
to disarm. He obeyed, and I breathed; and one by one
they followed his example. Capua, who was behind me,
I sent back with the weapons, and in the morning gave
them their choice of returning to town with their hands
tied behind their backs, or of going on with me and
remaining faithful. They chose the latter, did me good
service, and I said nothing about the affair.”
“That was well. But were you really frightened?”
“So I said. I cannot think of it yet without a slight
shudder.”
“Yes, and a rehearsal. Your eyes charge bayonets
now. I am not a Sepoy.”
“Well, you are still angry with me?”
“How can I be angry with you?”
“How, indeed? So much your senior that you owe
me respect, Miss Marguerite. I am quite old enough to
be your father.”
“You are, sir?” she replied, with surprise. “Why,
are you fifty-five years old?”
“Is that Mr. Laudersdale's age?”
“How did you know Mr. Laudersdale was my father?”
“By an arithmetical process. That is his age?”
“Yes; and yours?”
“Not exactly. I was thirty-seven last August.”
“And will be thirty-eight next?”
“That is the logical deduction.”
“I shall give you a birthday-gift when you are just
twice my age.”
“By what courier will you make it reach me?”
“Oh, I forgot. But — Mr. Raleigh?”
“What is it?” he replied, turning to look at her, — for
his eyes had been wandering over the deck.
“I thought you would ask me to write to you.”
“No, that would not be worth while.”
His face was too grave for her to feel indignation.
“Why?” she demanded.
“It would give me great pleasure, without doubt. But
in a week you will have too many other cares and duties
to care for such a burden.”
“That shows that you do not know me at all. Vous
avez mal agi avec moi!”
Though Mr. Raleigh still looked at her, he did not
reply. She rose and walked away a few steps, coming
back.
“You are always in the right, and I consequently in
pardon? I will not put up with it?”
“We shall part in a few hours,” he replied; “when
you lose your temper, I lose my time.”
“In a few hours? Then is the danger which you
mentioned past?”
“I scarcely think so.”
“Now I am not going to be diverted again. What is
this dreadful danger?”
“Let me tell you, in the first place, that we shall probably
make the port before our situation becomes apparently
worse, — that we do not take to the boats, because
we are twice too many to fill them, owing to the Belle
Voyageuse, and because it might excite mutiny, and for
several other becauses, — that every one is on deck,
Capua consoling Ursule, the captain having told to each,
personally, the possibility of escape —”
“Achevez!”
“That the lights are closed, the hatches battened down,
and by dint of excluding the air we can keep the flames
in a smouldering state and sail into harbor a shell of safety
over this core of burning coal.”
“Reducing the equation, the ship is on fire?”
“Yes.”
She did not speak for a moment or two, and he saw
that she was quite faint. Soon recovering herself, —
“And what do you think of the mirage now?” she
asked. “Where is Ursule? I must go to her,” she
added suddenly, after a brief silence, starting to her
feet.
“Shall I accompany you?”
“Oh, no.”
“She lies on a mattress there, behind that group,” —
if you could lie beside her and get an hour's rest.”
“Me? I could n't sleep. I shall come back to you, —
may I?” And she was gone.
Mr. Raleigh still sat in the position in which she had
left him, when, a half-hour afterward, she returned.
“Where is your cloak?” he asked, rising to receive
her.
“I spread it over Ursule, she was so chilly.”
“You will not take cold?”
“I? I am on fire myself.”
“Ah, I see; you have the Saturnalian spirit in you.”
“It is like the Revolution, the French, is it not? —
drifting on before the wind of Fate, this ship full of fire
and all red-hot raging turbulence. Just look up the long
sparkling length of these white, full shrouds, swelling and
curving like proud swans, in the gale, — and then imagine
the devouring monster below in his den!”
“Don't imagine it. Be quiet and sit beside me. Half
the night is gone.”
“I remember reading of some pirates once, who, driving
forward to destruction on fearful breakers, drank and
sang and died madly. I wish the whole ship's company
would burst out in one mighty chorus now, or that we
might rush together with tumultuous impulse and dance,
— dance wildly into death and daylight.
“We have nothing to do with death,” said Mr. Raleigh.
“Our foe is simply time. You dance, then?”
“Oh, yes. I dance well, — like those white fluttering
butterflies, — as if I were au gré du vent.”
“That would not be dancing well.”
“It would not be dancing well to be at the will of the
wind, but it is perfection to appear so.”
“The dance needs the expression of the dancer's will.
It is breathing sculpture. It is mimic life beyond all
other arts.”
“Then well I love to dance. And I do dance well.
Wait, — you shall see.”
He detained her.
“Be still, little maid!” he said, and again drew her
beside him, though she still continued standing.
At this moment the captain approached.
“What cheer?” asked Mr. Raleigh.
“No cheer,” he answered, gloomily, dinting his finger-nails
into his palm. “The planks forward are already
hot to the hand. I tremble at every creak of cordage,
lest the deck crash in and bury us all.”
“You have made the Sandy Hook light?”
“Yes; too late to run her ashore.”
“You cannot try that at the —”
“Certain death.”
“The wind scarcely —”
“Veered a point. I am carrying all sail. But if this
tooth of fire gnaws below, you will soon see the masts go
by the board. And then we are lost, indeed!”
“Courage! she will certainly hold together till you can
hail the pilots.”
“I think no one need tremble when he has such an instance
of fearlessness before him,” replied the captain,
bowing to Marguerite; and turning away, he hid his suspense
and pain again under a calm countenance.
Standing all this while beside Mr. Raleigh, she had
heard the whole of the conversation, and he felt the hand
in his growing colder as it continued. He wondered if it
were still the same excitement that sent the alternate flush
and pallor up her cheek. She sat down, leaning her head
suffering the light, fine hair to blow about her temples
before the steady breeze. He bent over to look into her
eyes, and found them fixed and lustreless.
“Marguerite!” he exclaimed.
She tried to speak, but the teeth seemed to hinder the
escape of her words, and to break them into bits of sound;
a shiver shook her from head to foot.
“I wonder if this is fear,” she succeeded in saying.
“Oh, if there were somewhere to go, something to hide
me! A great horror is upon me! I am afraid! Seigneur
Dieu! Mourir par le feu! Périssons alors au plus vite!”
And she shuddered, audibly.
Mr. Raleigh passed his arm about her and gathered her
closer to himself. He saw at once, that, sensitive as she
was to every impression, this fear was a contagious one, a
mere gregarian affinity, and that she needed the preponderating
warmth and strength of a protecting presence,
the influence of a fuller vitality. He did not speak, but
his touch must in some measure have counteracted the
dread that oppressed her. She ceased trembling, but did
not move.
The westering moon went to bury herself in banks of
cloud; the wind increasing piped and whistled in strident
threatening through the rigging; the ship vibrated to the
concussive voice of the minute-gun. No murmurs but
those of wind and water were heard among the throng;
they drove forward in awful, pallid silence. Suddenly
the shriek of one voice, but from fourscore throats, rent
the agonized quiet. A red light was running along the
deck, a tongue of flame lapping round the forecastle, a
spire shooting aloft. Marguerite hid her face in Mr.
Raleigh's arm; a great sob seemed to go up from all the
and instantly the mates sprang forward and the jib
went crashing overboard. Mr. Raleigh tore his eyes
away from the fascination of this terror, and fixed them
by chance on two black specks that danced on the watery
horizon. He gazed with intense vision a moment. “The
tugs!” he cried. The words thrilled with hope in every
dying heart; they no longer saw themselves the waiting
prey of pain and death, of flames and sea. Some few
leaped into the boat at the stern, lowered and cut it
away; others dropped spontaneously into file, and passed
the dripping buckets of sea-water, to keep, if possible, the
flames in check. Mr. Raleigh and Marguerite crossed
over to Ursule.
The sight of her nurse, passive in despair, restored to
the girl a portion of her previous spirit. She knelt beside
her, talking low and rapidly, now and then laughing, and
all the time communicating nerve with her light, firm
finger-touches. Except their quick and unintelligible
murmurs, and the plash and hiss of water, nothing else
broke the torturing hush of expectation. There was a
half-hour of breathless watch ere the steam-tugs were
alongside. Already the place was full of fervid torment,
and they had climbed upon every point to leave, below,
the stings of the blistering deck. None waited on the
order of their going, but thronged and sprang precipitately.
Ursule was at once deposited in safety. The captain
moved to conduct Marguerite across, but she drew back
and clung to Mr. Raleigh.
“J'ai honte,” she said; “je ne bougerai pas plus tôt
que vous.”
The breath of the fierce flames scorched her cheek as
she spoke, the wind of their roaring progress swept her
and still kept her in his care.
There was a strange atmosphere on board the little
vessels, as they labored about and parted from the
doomed Osprey. Many were subdued with awe and joy
at their deliverance; others broke the tense strain of the
last hours in suffocating sobs. Every throb of the panting
engines they answered with waiting heart-beats, as it
sent them farther from the fearful wonder, now blazing
in multiplex lines of fire against the gray horizon. Mr.
Raleigh gazed after it as one watches the conflagration
of a home. Marguerite left her quiet weeping to gaze
with him. An hour silently passed, and as the fiery
phantom faded into dawn and distance she sang sweetly
the first few lines of an old French hymn. Another voice
took up the measure, stronger and clearer; those who
knew nothing of the words caught the spirit of the tune;
and no choral service ever pealed up temple-vaults with
more earnest accord than that in which this chant of
grateful, exultant devotion now rose from rough-throated
men and weary women in the crisp air and yellowing
spring-morning.
The stray sails had thickened into the flickering forest
of shipping at last, and as the moment of parting approached,
Marguerite stood with folded hands before Mr.
Raleigh, looking sadly down the harbor.
“I regret all that,” she said, — “these days that seem
years.”
“An equivocal phrase,” he replied, with a smile.
“But you know what I mean. I am going to strangers;
I have been with you. I shall find no one so kind
to me as you have been, Monsieur.”
“Your strangers can be much kinder to you than I
have been.”
“Never! I wish they did not exist! What do I care
for them? What do they care for me? They do not
know me; I shall shock them. I miss you, I hate them,
already. Non! Personne ne m'aime, et je n'aime personne!”
she exclaimed, with low-toned vehemence.
“Rite,” began Mr. Raleigh.
“Rite! No one but my mother ever called me that.
How did you know it?”
“I have met your mother, and I knew you a great
many years ago.”
“Mr. Raleigh!” And there was the least possible
shade of unconscious regret in the voice before it added,
“And what was I?”
“You were some little wood-spirit, the imp of a fallen
cone, mayhap, or the embodiment of birch-tree shadows.
You were a soiled and naughty little beauty, not so
different from your present self, and who kissed me on
the lips.”
“And did you refuse to take the kiss?”
He laughed.
“You were a child then,” he said. “And I was
not —”
“Was not? —”
Here the boat swung round at her moorings, and the
shock prevented Mr. Raleigh's finishing his sentence.
“Ursule is with us, or on the other one?” she asked.
“With us.”
“That is fortunate. She is all I have remaining, by
which to prove my identity.”
“As if there could be two such maidens in the
world!”
Marguerite left him, a moment, to give Captain Tarbell
her address, and returning, they were shortly afterward
following in another. As they stopped at the destined
door, Mr. Raleigh alighted and extended his hand. She
lingered a moment ere taking it, — not to say adieu, nor
to offer him cheek or lip again.
“Que je vous remercie!” she murmured, lifting her
eyes to his. “Que je vous trouve bon!” and sprang
before him up the steps.
He heard her father meet her in the hall; Ursule had
already joined them; he re-entered the coach and rolled
rapidly beyond recall.
The burning of the Osprey did not concern Mr. Raleigh's
business relations. Carrying his papers about
him, he had personally lost thereby nothing of consequence.
He refreshed himself, and proceeded at once to
the transactions awaiting him. In a brief time he found
that affairs wore a different aspect from that for which he
had been instructed, and letters from the house had
already arrived, by the overland route, which required
mutual reply and delay before he could take further
steps; so that Mr. Raleigh found himself with some
months of idleness upon his hands, in a land with not a
friend. There lay a little scented billet, among the documents
on his table, that had at first escaped his attention;
he took it up wonderingly, and broke the seal. It was
from his Cousin Kate, and had been a few days before
him. Mrs. McLean had heard of his expected arrival, it
said, and begged him, if he had any time to spare, to
spend it with her in his old home by the lake, whither
every summer they had resorted to meditate on the virtues
of the departed. There was added, in a different
hand, whose delicate and pointed characters seemed
singularly familiar, —
Come o'er the stream, Charlie, and dine wi' McLean!”
Mr. Raleigh looked at the matter a few moments; he
did not think it best to remain long in the city; he would
be glad to know if sight of the old scenes could renew a
throb. He answered his letters, replenished his wardrobe,
and took, that same day, the last train for the North.
At noon of the second day thereafter he found Mr.
McLean's coach, with that worthy gentleman in person,
awaiting him, and he stepped out, when it paused at the
foot of his own former garden, with a strange sense of the
world as an old story, a twice-told tale, a maze of error.
Mrs. McLean came running down to meet him, — a
face less round and rosy than once, as the need of pink
cap-ribbons testified, but smiling and bright as youth.
“The same little Kate,” said Mr. Raleigh, after the
first greeting, putting his hands on her shoulders and
smiling down at her benevolently.
“Not quite the same Roger, though,” said she, shaking
her head. “I expected this stain on your skin; but,
dear me! your eyes look as if you had not a friend in the
world.”
“How can they look so, when you give me such a
welcome?”
“Dear old Roger, you are just the same,” said she,
bestowing a little caress upon his sleeve. “And if you
remember the summer before you went away, you will
not find that pleasant company so very much changed
either.”
“I do not expect to find them at all.”
“Oh, then they will find you; because they are all
here, — at least the principals; some with different
names, and some, like myself, with duplicates,” — as a
and sister by the hand, and shaking chestnut curls over
rosy blushes.
After making acquaintance with the new cousins, Mr.
Raleigh turned again to Mrs. McLean.
“And who are there here?” he asked.
“There is Mrs. Purcell, — you remember Helen
Heath? Poor Mrs. Purcell, whom you knew, died, and
her slippers fitted Helen. She chaperons Mary, who is
single and speechless yet; and Captain, now Colonel,
Purcell makes a very good silent partner. He is hunting
in the West, on furlough; she is here alone. There
is Mrs. Heath, — you never have forgotten her?”
“Not I.”
“There is —”
“And how came you all in the country so early in the
season, — anybody with your devotion to company?”
“To be made April fools, John says.”
“Why, the willows are not yet so yellow as they will
be.”
“I know it. But we had the most fatiguing winter;
and Mrs. Laudersdale and I agreed, that, the moment the
snow was off the ground up here, we would fly away and
be at rest.”
“Mrs. Laudersdale? Can she come here?”
“Goodness! Why not? The last few summers we
have always spent together.”
“She is with you now, then?”
“Oh, yes. She is the least changed of all. I did n't
mean to tell, but keep her as a surprise. Of course, you
will be a surprise to everybody. — There, run along, children;
we 'll follow. — Yes, won't it be delightful, Roger?
We can all play at youth again.”
“Like skeletons in some Dance of Death!” he exclaimed.
“We shall be hideous in each other's sight.”
“McLean, I am a bride,” said his wife, not heeding
the late misanthropy; “Helen is a girl; the ghost of the
prior Mrs. Purcell shall be rediviva; and Katy there —”
“Wait a bit, Kate,” said her cousin. “Before you
have shuffled off mortality for the whole party, sit down
under this hedge, — here is an opportune bench, — and
give me accounts from the day of my departure.”
“Dear me, Roger, as if that were possible! The
ocean in a tea-cup? Let me see, — you had a flirtation
with Helen that summer, did n't you? Well, she
spent the next winter at the Fort with the Purcells. It
was odd to miss both her and Mrs. Laudersdale from society
at once. Mrs. Laudersdale was ill; I don't know
exactly what the trouble was. You know she had been
in such an unusual state of exhilaration all that summer;
and as soon as she left New Hampshire and began the old
city-life, she became oppressed with a speechless melancholy,
I believe, so that the doctors foreboded insanity.
She expressed great disinclination to follow their advice,
and her husband finally banished them all. It was a
great care to him; he altered much. McLean surmised
that she did n't like to see him, while she was in this
state; for, though he used to surround her with every
luxury, and was always hunting out new appliances, and
raising the heavens for a trifle, he kept himself carefully
out of her sight during the greater part of the winter. I
don't know whether she became insufferably lonely, or
whether the melancholy wore off, or she conquered it, and
decided that it was not right to go crazy for nothing, or
what happened. But one cold March evening he set out
for his home, dreary, as usual, he thought; and he found
the room all aglow with rich shadows, and his wife awaiting
him, in full toilet, just as superb as you will see her
to-night, just as sweet and cold and impassible and impenetrable.
At least,” continued Mrs. McLean, taking breath,
“I have manufactured this little romance out of odds and
ends that McLean has now and then reported from his
conversation. I dare say there is n't a bit of it true, for
Mr. Laudersdale is n't a man to publish his affairs; but I
believe it. One thing is certain: Mrs. Laudersdale withdrew
from society one autumn and returned one spring,
and has queened it ever since.”
“Is Mr. Laudersdale with you?”
“No. But he will come with their daughter shortly.”
“And with what do you all occupy yourselves, pray?”
“Oh, with trifles and tea, as you would suppose us to
do. Mrs. Purcell gossips and lounges, as if she were
playing with the world for spectator. Mrs. Laudersdale
lounges, and attacks the things of the world with her
finger-ends, as if she were longing to remould them.
Mrs. McLean gossips and scolds, as if it depended on
her to keep the world in order.”
“Are you going to keep me under the hedge all
night?”
“This is pretty well! Hush! Who is that?”
As Mrs. McLean spoke, a figure issued from the great
larches on the left, and crossed the grass in front of them,
— a woman, something less tall than a gypsy queen might
be, the round outlines of her form rich and regular, with a
certain firm luxuriance, still wrapped in a morning-robe
of palm-spread cashmere. In her hand she carried various
vines and lichens that had maintained their orange-tawny
stains under the winter's snow, and the black hair
crowned with bent sprays of the scarlet maple-blossom.
As vivid a hue dyed her cheek through warm walking,
and with a smile of unconscious content she passed quickly
up the slope and disappeared within the doorway. She
impressed the senses of the beholder like some ripe and
luscious fruit, a growth of sunshine and summer.
“Well,” said Mrs. McLean, drawing breath again, “who
is it?”
“Really I cannot tell,” replied Mr. Raleigh.
“Nor guess?”
“And that I dare not.”
“Must I tell you?”
“Was it Mrs. Laudersdale?”
“And should n't you have known her?”
“Scarcely.”
“Mercy! Then how did you know me? She is unaltered.”
“If that is Mrs. Purcell, at the window, — she does not
recognize me, you see; — neither did — both she and yourself
are nearly the same; one could not fail to know either
of you; but of the Mrs. Laudersdale of thirteen years ago
there remains hardly a vestige.”
If Mrs. McLean, at this testimony, indulged in that
little inward satisfaction which the most generous woman
may feel, when told that her color wears better than the
color of her dearest friend, it must have been quickly
quenched by the succeeding sentence.
“Yes, she is certainly more beautiful than I ever
dreamed of a woman's being. If she continues, I do
not know what perfect thing she will become. She is
too exquisite for common use. I wonder her husband is
not jealous of every mote in the air, of rain and wind, of
now bear some charm from her in its flight.”
Mr. Raleigh was talking to Mrs. McLean as one frequently
reposes confidence in a person when quite sure
that he will not understand a word you say.
An hour afterward, Mrs. Purcell joined Mrs. McLean.
“So that is Mr. Raleigh, is it?” she said. “He looks
as if he had made the acquaintance of Siva the Destroyer.
There 's nothing left of him. Is he taller, or thinner, or
graver, or darker, or what? My dear Kate, your cousin,
that promised to be such a hero, has become a mere man-of-business.
Did you ever burn fire-crackers? You
have probably found some that just fizzed out, then.”
And Mrs. Purcell took an attitude.
“Roger is a much finer man than he was, I think, —
so far as I could judge in the short time we have seen
each other,” replied Mrs. McLean with spirit.
“Do you know,” continued Mrs. Purcell, “what makes
the Laudersdale so gay? No? She has a letter from
her lord, and he brings you that little Rite next week. I
must send for the Colonel to see such patterns of conjugal
felicity as you and she. Ah, there is the tea-bell!”
Mr. Raleigh was standing with one hand on the back
of his chair, when Mrs. Laudersdale entered. The cheek
had resumed its usual pallor, and she was in her customary
colors of black and gold. She carried a curiously cut
crystal glass, which she placed on the sideboard, and then
moved toward her chair. Her eye rested casually for a
moment on Mr. Raleigh, as she crossed the threshold, and
then returned with a species of calm curiosity.
“Mrs. Laudersdale has forgotten me?” he asked, with
a bow. His voice, not susceptible of change in its tone
of Southern sweetness, identified him.
“Not at all,” she replied, moving toward him, and offering
him her hand quietly. “I am happy at meeting Mr.
Raleigh again.” And she took her seat.
There was something in her grasp that relieved him.
It was neither studiedly cold, nor absurdly brief, nor traitorously
tremulous. It was simply and forgetfully indifferent.
Mr. Raleigh surveyed her with interest during
the light table-talk. He had been possessed with a restless
wish to see her once more, to ascertain if she had yet
any fraction of her old power over him; he had all the
more determinedly banished himself from the city, — to
find her in the country. Now he sought for some trace
of what had formerly aroused his heart. He rose from
table convinced that the woman whom he once loved with
the whole fervor of youth and strength and buoyant life
was no more, that she did not exist, and that Mr. Raleigh
might experience a new passion, but his old one was as
dead as the ashes that cover the Five Cities of the Plain.
He wondered how it might be with her. For a moment
he cursed his inconstancy; then he feared lest she were
of larger heart and firmer resolve than he, — lest her love
had been less light than his; he could scarcely feel himself
secure of freedom, — he must watch. And then stole
in a deeper sense of loneliness than exile and foreign
tongues had taught him, — the knowledge of being single
and solitary in the world, not only for life, but for eternity.
The evening was passed in the recitation of affairs by
himself and his cousins alone together, and until a week
completed its tale of dawns and sunsets there was the
same diurnal recurrence of question and answer. One
day, as the afternoon was paling, Rite came.
Mr. Raleigh had fallen asleep on the vine-hidden seat
outside the bay window, and was awakened, certainly not
carpet. She was just entering, slow-paced, though
in haste. She held out both of her beautiful arms. A
little form of airy lightness, a very snow-wreath, blew
into them.
“O maman! Est ce toi?” it cried. “O comme tu es
douce! Si belle, si chère!” And the fair head was lying
beneath the dark one, the face hidden in the bent and
stately neck.
Mr. Raleigh left his seat, unseen, and betook himself
to another abode. As he passed the drawing-room door,
on his return, he saw the mother lying on a lounge, with
the slight form nestled beside her, playing with it as some
tame leopardess might play with her silky whelp. It was
almost the only portion of the maternal nature developed
within her.
It seemed as if the tea-hour were a fated one. Mr.
Raleigh had been out on the water and was late. As he
entered, Rite sprang up, half-overturning her chair, and
ran to clasp his hand.
“I did not know that you and Mr. Raleigh were acquainted,”
said Mrs. McLean.
“Oh, Madam, Mr. Raleigh and I had the pleasure of
being shipwrecked together,” was the reply; and except
that Mrs. Laudersdale required another napkin where her
cup had spilled, all went on smoothly.
Mrs. Laudersdale took Marguerite entirely to herself
for a while. She seemed, at first, to be like some one
suddenly possessed of a new sense, and who did not
know in the least what to do with it; but custom and
familiarity destroyed this sentiment. She did not appear
to entertain a doubt of her child's natural affection, but
she had care to fortify it by the exertion of every charm
the house, an element of determination blended with her
manner, and she moved with a certain conscious power,
as if wonderful energies were but half-latent with her, as
if there were kingdoms to conquer and crowns to win, and
she the destined instrument. You would have selected
her, at this time of her lavish devotion to Marguerite, as
the one woman of complete capability, of practical effective
force, and have declared that there was nothing beyond
her strength. The relation between herself and her
child was certainly as peculiar as anything else about
them; the disparity of age seemed so slight that they
appeared like sisters, full of mutual trust, the younger
leaning on the elder for support in the most trivial affairs.
They walked through the woods together, learned again
its glades and coverts, searched its early treasure of blossoms;
they went out on the lake and spent long April
afternoons together, floating about cove and inlet of island-shores;
they returned with innocent gayety to that house
which once the mother, in her moment of passion, had
fancied to be a possible heaven of delight, and which,
since, she had found to be a very indifferent limbo. For,
after all, we derive as much happiness from human beings
as from Nature, and it was a tie of placid affection that
bound her to the McLeans, not of sympathetic union, and
her husband was careful never to oppress her with too
much of his society. Whether this woman, who had lived
a life of such wordless emotion, who had never bestowed
a confidence, suddenly blossomed like a rose and took the
little new-comer into the gold-dust and fragrance of her
heart, or whether there was always between them the thin
impalpable division that estranged the past from the present,
there was nothing to tell; it seemed, nevertheless, as
other's thoughts from birth.
That this assumption of Marguerite could not continue
exclusive Mr. Raleigh found, when now and then joined
in his walks by an airy figure flitting forward at his side:
now and then; since Mrs. Laudersdale, without knowing
how to prevent, had manifested an uneasiness at every
such rencontre; — and that it could not endure forever,
another gentleman, without so much reason, congratulated
himself, — Mr. Frederic Heath, the confidential clerk of
Day, Knight, & Co., — a rather supercilious specimen,
quite faultlessly got up, who had accompanied her from
New York at her father's request, and who already betrayed
every symptom of the suitor. Meanwhile, Mrs.
McLean's little women clamorously demanded and obtained
a share of her attention, — although Capua and
Ursule, with their dark skins, brilliant dyes, and equivocal
dialects, were creatures of a more absorbing interest.
One afternoon, Marguerite, came into the drawing-room
by one door, as Mr. Raleigh entered by another;
her mother was sitting near the window, and other members
of the family were in the vicinity, having clustered
preparatory to the tea-bell.
Marguerite had twisted tassels of the willow-catkins in
her hair, drooping things, in character with her wavy
grace and fresh youth, sprinkling her with their fragrant
yellow powder, the very breath of spring; and in one
hand she had imprisoned a premature lace-winged fly, a
fairy little savage, in its sheaths of cobweb and emerald,
and with its jewel eyes.
“Dear!” said Mrs. Purcell, gathering her array more
closely about her. “How do you dare touch such a
venomous sprite?”
“As if you had an insect at the North with a sting!”
replied Marguerite, suffering it, a little maliciously, to escape
in the lady's face, and following the flight with a
laugh of childlike glee.
“Here are your snowflakes on stems, mamma,” she
continued, dropping anemones over her mother's hands,
one by one; — that is what Mr. Raleigh calls them.
When may I see the snow? You shall wrap me in
eider, that I may be like all the boughs and branches.
How buoyant the earth must be, when every twig becomes
a feather!” And she moved toward Mr. Raleigh,
singing, “Oh, would I had wings like a dove!”
“And here are those which, if not daffodils, yet
The winds of March with beauty,'”
Marguerite danced away with the purple trophy, and,
emptying a carafe into a dish of moss that stood near,
took them to Mrs. Laudersdale, and, sitting on the footstool,
began to rearrange them. It was curious to see,
that, while Mrs. Laudersdale lifted each blossom and let
the stem lie across her hand, she suffered it to fall into
the place designated for it by Marguerite's fingers, that
sparkled in the mosaic till double wreaths of gold-threaded
purple rose from the bed of vivid moss and melted into a
fringe of the starry spires of winter-green.
“Is it not sweet?” said she then, bending over it.
“They have no scent,” said her mother.
“Oh, yes, indeed! the very finest, the most delicate, a
kind of aerial perfume; they must of course alchemize
the air into which they waste their fibres, with some
sweetness.”
“A smell of earth fresh from `wholesome drench of
porcelain between his brown, slender hands. “An immature
scent, just such an innocent breath as should precede
the epigea, that spicy, exhaustive wealth of savor,
that complete maturity of odor, marriage of daphne and
linnæa. The charm of these first bidders for the year's
favor is neither in the ethereal texture, the depth or delicacy
of tint, nor the large-lobed, blood-stained, ancient
leaves. This imponderable soul gives them such a helpless
air of babyhood.”
“Is fragrance the flower's soul?” asked Marguerite.
“Then anemones are not divinely gifted. And yet you
said, the other day, that to paint me would be to paint an
anemone.”
“A satisfactory specimen in the family-gallery,” said
Mrs. Purcell.
“A flaw in the indictment!” replied Mr. Raleigh. “I
am not one of those who paint the lily.”
“Though you 've certainly added a perfume to the violet,”
remarked Mr. Frederic Heath, with that sweetly lingering
accent familiarly called the drawl, as he looked at
the hepaticas.
“I don't think it very complimentary, at any rate,” continued
Marguerite. “They are not lovely after bloom, —
only the little pink-streaked, budded bells, that hang so
demurely. Oui! I have exchanged great queen magnolias
for rues; what will you give me for pomegranates
and oleanders?”
“Are the old oleanders in the garden yet?” asked Mrs.
Laudersdale.
“Not the very same. The hurricane destroyed those,
years ago; these are others, grand and rosy as sunrise
sometimes.”
“It was my Aunt Susanne who planted those, I have
heard.”
“And it was your daughter Rite who planted these.”
“She buried a little box of old keepsakes at its foot,
after her brother had examined them, — a ring or two, a
coin from which she broke and kept one half —”
“Oh, yes! we found the little box, — found it when
Mr. Heath was in Martinique, — all rusted and moulded
and falling apart, and he wears that half of the coin on
his watch-chain. See!”
Mrs. Laudersdale glanced up indifferently, but Mrs.
Purcell sprang from her elegant lounging and bent to
look at her brother's chain.
“How odd that I never noticed it, Fred!” she exclaimed.
“And how odd that I should wear the same!”
And, shaking her châtelaine, she detached a similar
affair.
They were placed side by side in Mr. Raleigh's hand;
they matched entirely, and, so united, they formed a singular
French coin of value and antiquity, the missing
figures on one segment supplied by the other, the embossed
profile continued and lost on each, the scroll begun
by this and ended by that; they were plainly severed
portions of the same piece.
“And this was buried by your Aunt Susanne Le
Blanc?” asked Mrs. Purcell, turning to Mrs. Laudersdale
again, with a flush on her cheek.
“So I presume.”
“Strange! And this was given to mamma by her
mother, whose maiden name was Susan White. There 's
some diablerie about it.”
“Oh, that is a part of the ceremony of money-hiding,”
said Mr. Raleigh. “Kidd always buried a little imp with
the finder.”
“Did he?” said Marguerite, earnestly.
They all laughed thereat, and went in to tea.
III.
Spring at last stole placidly into summer, and Marguerite,
who was always shivering in the house, kept the
company in a whirl of out-door festivals.
“We have not lived so, Roger,” said Mrs. McLean,
“since the summer when you went away. We all follow
the caprice of this child as a ship follows the little compass-needle.”
And she made room for the child beside her in the carriage;
for Mr. Raleigh was about driving them into town,
— an exercise which had its particular charm for Marguerite,
not only for the glimpse it afforded of the gay,
bustling inland-city-life, but for opportunities of securing
the reins and of occasioning panics. Lately, however, she
had resigned the latter pleasure, and sat with quiet propriety
by Mrs. McLean. Frequently, also, she took long
drives alone or with one of the children, holding the reins
listlessly, and ranging the highway unobservantly for
miles around.
Mrs. Purcell declared the girl was homesick; Mrs.
Heath doubted if the climate agreed with her: she neither
denied nor affirmed their propositions.
Mr. Heath came and went from the city where her
father was, without receiving any other notice than she
would have bestowed on a peaceful walking-stick; his attentions
to her during his visits were unequivocal; she
On the occasion of his last stay, there had been a somewhat
noticeable change in his demeanor: he wore a trifle
of quite novel assurance; his supreme bearing was not
mitigated by the restless sparkle of his eye; and in addressing
her his compliments, he spoke as one having
authority.
Mrs. Laudersdale, so long and so entirely accustomed
to the reception of homage that it cost her no more reflection
than an imperial princess bestows on the taxes that
produce her tiara, turned slowly from the apparent apathy
thus induced on her modes of thought, passivity lost in a
gulf of anxious speculation, while she watched the theatre
of events with a glow, like wine in lamplight, that burned
behind her dusky eyes till they had the steady penetration
of some wild creature's. She may have wondered if Mr.
Raleigh's former feeling were yet alive; she may have
wondered if Marguerite had found the spell that once she
found herself; she may have been kept in thrall by ignorance
if he had ever read that old confessing note of hers:
whatever she thought or hoped or dreaded, she said
nothing, — and did nothing.
Of all those who concerned themselves in the affair of
Marguerite's health and spirits, Mr. Raleigh was the only
one who might have solved their mystery. Perhaps the
thought of wooing the child whose mother he had once
loved was sufficiently repugnant to him to overcome the
tenderness which every one was forced to feel for so beautiful
a creation. I have not said that Marguerite was this,
before, because, until brought into contrast with her mother,
her extreme loveliness was too little positive to be felt;
now it was the evanescent shimmer of pearl to the deep
perpetual fire of the carbuncle. Softened, as she became,
moonbeam, and frequently had a bewildered grace, as if
she knew not what to make of herself. Mr. Raleigh,
from the moment in which he perceived that she no
longer sought his company, retreated into his own apartments,
and was less seen by the others than ever.
Returning from the drive on the morning of Mrs. McLean's
last recorded remark, Mr. Raleigh, who had remained
to give the horses in charge to a servant, was
about to pass, when the tableau within the drawing-room
caught his attention and altered his course. He entered,
and flung his gloves down on a table and himself on the
floor beside Marguerite and the children. She appeared
to be revisited by a ray of her old sunshine, and had
unrolled a giant parcel of candied sweets, which their
mother would have sacrificed on the shrine of jalap and
senna, the purchase of a surreptitious moment, and was
now dispensing the brilliant comestibles with much ill-subdued
glee. One mouth, that had bitten off the head
of a checkerberry chanticleer, was convulsed with the
acidulous tickling of sweetened laughter, till, the biter bit,
a metamorphosis into the animal of attack seemed imminent;
at the hands of another a warrior in barley-sugar
was experiencing the vernacular for defeat with reproving
haste and gravity; and there was yet another little
omnivorous creature that put out both hands for indiscriminate
snatching, and made a spectacle of himself in
a general plaster of gum-arabic-drop and brandy-smash.
“Contraband?” said Mr. Raleigh.
“And sweet as stolen fruit,” said Marguerite. “Ursule
makes the richest comfits, but not so innumerable as these.
Mamma and I owe our sweet-tooth and honey-lip to bits
of her concoction.”
“Mrs. Purcell,” asked Mr. Raleigh, as that lady entered,
“is this little banquet no seduction to you?”
“What are you doing?” she replied.
“Drinking honey-dew from acorns.”
“Laudersdale as ever!” ejaculated she, looking over his
shoulder. “I thought you had `no sympathy with' —”
“But I `like to see other folks take' —”
“Their sweets, in this case. No, thank you,” she continued,
after this little rehearsal of the past. “What are
you poisoning all this brood for?”
“Mrs. Laudersdale eats sweetmeats; they don't poison
her,” remonstrated Katy.
“Mrs. Laudersdale, my dear, is exceptional.”
Katy opened her eyes as if she had been told that the
object of her adoration was Japanese.
“It is the last grain that completes the transformation,
as your story-books have told; and one day you will see
her stand a statue of sugar, and melt away in the sun.
To be sure, the whole air will be sweetened, but there
will be no Mrs. Laudersdale.”
“For shame, Mrs. Purcell!” cried Marguerite. “You 're
not sweet-tempered, or you 'd like sweet dainties yourself.
Here are nuts swathed in syrup; you 'll have none of
them? Here are health and slumber and idle dreams in
a chocolate-drop. Not a chocolate? Here are dates; if
you would n't choose the things in themselves, truly you
would for their associations? See, when you take up
one, what a picture follows it: the plum that has swung
at the top of a palm, and crowded into itself the glow of
those fierce noon-suns. It has been tossed by the sirocco;
it has been steeped in reeking dew; there was always
stretched above it the blue intense tent of a heaven full
of light, — always below and around, long level reaches
have hovered over it; swarthy Arab chiefs have
encamped under it; it has threaded the narrow streets of
Damascus — that city the most beautiful — on the backs
of gaunt gray dromedaries; it has crossed the seas, —
and all for you, if you take it, this product of desert freedom,
torrid winds, and fervid suns!”
“I might swallow the date,” said Mrs. Purcell, “but
Africa would choke me.”
Mr. Raleigh had remained silent for some time, watching
Marguerite as she talked. It seemed to him that his
youth was returning; he forgot his resolves, his desires,
and became aware of nothing in the world but her voice.
Just before she concluded, she grew conscious of his gaze,
and almost at once ceased speaking; her eyes fell a moment
to meet it, and then she would have flashed them
aside, but that it was impossible; lucid lakes of light,
they met his own; she was forced to continue it, to
return it, to forget all, as he was forgetting, in that long
look.
“What is this?” said Mrs. Purcell, stooping to pick
up a trifle on the matting.
“C'est à moi!” cried Marguerite, springing up suddenly,
and spilling all the fragments of the feast, to the
evident satisfaction of the lately neglected guests.
“Yours?” said Mrs. Purcell with coolness, still retaining
it. “Why do you think in French?”
“Because I choose!” said Marguerite, angrily. “I
mean — How do you know that I do?”
“Your exclamation, when highly excited or contemptuously
indifferent, is always in that tongue.”
“Which am I now?”
“Really, you should know best. Here is your bawble”;
and went out.
It was a sheath of old morocco. The motion loosened
the clasp, and the contents, an ivory oval and a cushion
of faded silk, fell to the floor. Mr. Raleigh bent and regathered
them; there was nothing for Marguerite but to
allow that he should do so. The oval had reversed in
falling, so that he did not see it; but, glancing at her before
returning it, he found her face and neck dyed deeper
than the rose. Still reversed, he was about to relinquish
it, when Mrs. McLean passed, and, hearing the scampering
of little feet as they fled with booty, she also entered.
“Seeing you, reminds me, Roger,” said she. “What
do you suppose has become of that little miniature I told
you of? I was showing it to Marguerite the other night,
and have not seen it since. I must have mislaid it, and
it was particularly valuable, for it was some nameless
thing that Mrs. Heath found among her mother's trinkets,
and I begged it of her, it was such a perfect likeness of
you. Can you have seen it?”
“Yes, I have it,” he replied. “And have n't I as good
a right to it as any?”
He extended his arm for the case which Marguerite
held, and so touching her hand, the touch was more lingering
than it needed to be; but he avoided looking at
her, or he would have seen that the late color had fled
till the face was whiter than marble.
“Your old propensities,” said Mrs. McLean. “You
always will be a boy. By the way, what do you think
of Mary Purcell's engagement? I thought she would
always be a girl.”
“Ah! McLean was speaking of it to me. Why were
they not engaged before?”
“Because she was not an heiress.”
Mr. Raleigh raised his eyebrows significantly.
“He could not afford to marry any but an heiress,”
explained Mrs. McLean.
Mr. Raleigh fastened the case and restored it silently.
“You think that absurd? You would not marry an
heiress?”
Mr. Raleigh did not at once reply.
“You would not, then, propose to an heiress?”
“No.”
As this monosyllable fell from his lips, Marguerite's
motion placed her beyond hearing. She took a few swift
steps, but paused and leaned against the wall of the gable
for support, and, placing her hand upon the sun-beat
bricks, she felt a warmth in them which there seemed to
be neither in herself nor in the wide summer-air.
Mrs. Purcell came along, opening her parasol.
“I am going to the orchard,” said she; “cherries are
ripe. Hear the robins and the bells! Do you want to
come?”
“No,” said Marguerite.
“There are bees in the orchard, too, — the very bees,
for aught I know, that Mr. Raleigh used to watch thirteen
years ago, or their great-grand-bees, — they stand in
the same place.”
“You knew Mr. Raleigh thirteen years ago?” she
asked, glancing up curiously.
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“Very well.”
“How much is very well?”
“He proposed to me. Smother your anger; he did n't
care for me; some one told him that I cared for him.”
“Did you?”
“This is what the Inquisition calls applying the
question?” asked Mrs. Purcell. “Nonsense, dear child!
he was quite in love with somebody else.”
“And that was —?”
“He supposed your mother to be a widow. Well, if
you won't come, I shall go alone and read my L'Allegro
under the boughs, with breezes blowing between the
lines. I can show you some little field-mice like unfledged
birds, and a nest that protrudes now and then
glittering eyes and cleft fangs.”
Marguerite was silent; the latter commodity was de
trop. Mrs. Purcell adjusted her parasol and passed on.
Here, then, was the whole affair. Marguerite pressed
her hands to her forehead, as if fearful some of the
swarming thoughts should escape; then she hastened up
the slope behind the house, and entered and hid herself
in the woods. Mr. Raleigh had loved her mother. Of
course, then, there was not a shadow of doubt that her
mother had loved him. Horrible thought! and she
shook like an aspen, beneath it. For a time it seemed
that she loathed him, — that she despised the woman
who had given him regard. The present moment was
a point of dreadful isolation; there was no past to remember,
no future to expect; she herself was alone and
forsaken, the whole world dark, and heaven blank. But
that could not be forever. As she sat with her face
buried in her hands, old words, old looks, flashed on her
recollection; she comprehended what long years of silent
suffering the one might have endured, what barren yearning
the other; she saw how her mother's haughty calm
might be the crust on a lava-sea; she felt what desolation
must have filled Roger Raleigh's heart, when he found
cherished a lifeless ideal, — for Marguerite knew from
his own lips that he had not met the same woman whom
he had left.
She started up, wondering what had led her upon this
train of thought, why she had pursued it, and what reason
she had for the pain it gave her. A step rustled among
the distant last-year's leaves; there in the shadowy wood,
where she did not dream of concealing her thoughts,
where it seemed that all Nature shared her confidence,
this step was like a finger laid on the hidden sore. She
paused, a glow rushed over her frame, and her face grew
hot with the convicting flush. Consternation, bitter condemnation,
shame, impetuous resolve, swept over her in
one torrent, and the saw that she had a secret which
every one might touch, and touching, cause to sting. She
hurried onward through the wood, unconscious how rapidly
or how far her heedless course extended. She
sprang across gaps at which she would another time have
shuddered; she clambered over fallen trees, penetrated
thickets of tangled brier, and followed up the shrunken
beds of streams, till suddenly the wood grew thin again,
and she emerged upon an open space, — a long lawn,
where the grass grew rank and tall as in deserted graveyards,
and on which the afternoon sunshine lay with most
dreary, desolate emphasis. Marguerite had scarcely
comprehended herself before; now, as she looked out on
the utter loneliness of the place, all joyousness, all content,
seemed wiped from the world. She leaned against a
tree where the building rose before her, old and forsaken,
washed by rains, beaten by winds. A blind slung open,
loose on a broken hinge; the emptiness of the house
looked through it like a spirit. The woodbine seemed
swung its clusters, heavy as grapes of Eshcol, along one
wall, and, falling from support, had rioted upon the ground
in masses of close-netted luxuriance.
Standing and surveying the silent scene of former
gayety, a figure came down the slope, crushing the grass
with lingering tread, checked himself, and, half-reversed,
surveyed it with her. Her first impulse was to approach,
her next to retreat; by a resolution of forces she remained
where she was. Mr. Raleigh's position prevented
her from seeing the expression of his face; from his attitude
seldom was anything to be divined. He turned
with a motion of the arm, as if he swung off a burden,
and met her eye. He laughed, and drew near.
“I am tempted to return to that suspicion of mine
when I first met you, Miss Marguerite,” said he. “You
take shape from solitude and empty air as easily as a
Dryad steps from her tree.”
“There are no Dryads now,” said Marguerite, sententiously.
“Then you confess to being a myth?”
“I confess to being tired, Mr. Raleigh.”
Mr. Raleigh's manner changed, at her petulance and
fatigue, to the old air of protection, and he gave her his
hand. It was pleasant to be the object of his care, to be
with him as at first, to renew their former relation. She
acquiesced, and walked beside him.
“You have had some weary travel,” he said, “and
probably not more than half of it in the path.”
And she feared he would glance at the rents in her
frock, forgetting that they were not sufficiently infrequent
facts to be noticeable.
“He treats me like a child,” she thought. “He expects
years were making a statue of her, they were making
a woman of me!” And she snatched away her hand.
“I have the boat below,” he said, without paying attention
to the movement. “You took the longest way round,
which, you have heard, is the shortest way home. You
have never been on the lake with me.” And he was
about to assist her in.
She stepped back, hesitating.
“No, no,” he said. “It is very well to think of walking
back, but it must end in thinking. You have no impetus
now to send you over another half-dozen miles of
wood-faring, no pique to sting Io.”
And before she could remonstrate, she was lifted in,
the oars had flashed twice, and there was deep water between
herself and shore. She was in reality too much
fatigued to be vexed, and she sat silently watching the
spaces through which they glanced, and listening to the
rhythmic dip of the oars. The soft afternoon air, with
its melancholy sweetness and tinge of softer hue, hung
round them; the water, brown and warm, was dimpled
with the flight of myriad insects; they wound among the
islands, — a path one of them knew of old. From the
shelving rocks a wild convolvulus drooped its twisted bells
across them, a sweet-brier snatched at her hair in passing,
a sudden elder-tree shot out its creamy panicles above,
they ripped up drowsy beds of folded lily-blooms.
Mr. Raleigh, lifting one oar, gave the boat a sharp
curve and sent it out on the open expanse; it seemed
to him that he had no right thus to live two lives in
one. Still he wished to linger, and with now and then
a lazy movement they slipped along. He leaned one
arm on the upright oar, like a river-god, and from the
then a strain. Marguerite sat opposite and rested along
the side, content for the moment to glide on as they were,
without a reference to the past in her thought, without a
dream of the future. Peach-bloom fell on the air, warmed
all objects into mellow tint, and reddened deep into sunset.
Tinkling cow-bells, where the kine wound out from
pasture, stole faintly over the lake, reflected dyes suffused
it and spread around them sheets of splendid color, outlines
grew ever dimmer on the distant shores, a purple
tone absorbed all brilliance, the shadows fell, and, bright
with angry lustre, the planet Mars hung in the south, and
struck a spear, redder than rubies, down the placid mirror.
The dew gathered and lay sparkling on the thwarts
as they touched the garden-steps; and they mounted and
traversed together the alleys of odorous dark. They
entered at Mr. Raleigh's door, and stepped thence into
the main hall, where they could see the broad light from
the drawing-room windows streaming over the lawn beyond.
Mrs. Laudersdale came down the hall to meet
them.
“My dear Rite,” she said, “I have been alarmed, and
have sent the servants out for you. You left home in
the morning, and you have not dined. Your father and
Mr. Heath have arrived. Tea is just over, and we are
waiting for you to dress and go into town; it is Mrs.
Manton's evening, you recollect.”
“Must I go, mamma?” asked Marguerite, after this
statement of facts. “Then I must have tea first. Mr.
Raleigh, I remember my wasted sweetmeats of the morning
with a pang. How long ago that seems!”
In a moment her face told her regret for the allusion,
and she hastened into the dining-room.
Mr. Raleigh and Marguerite had a merry tea, and
Mrs. Purcell came and poured it out for them.
“Quite like the days when we went gypsying,” said
she, at a moment near its conclusion.
“We have just come from the Bawn, Miss Marguerite
and I,” he replied.
“You have? I never go near it. Did it break your
heart?”
Mr. Raleigh laughed.
“Is Mr. Raleigh's heart such a delicate organ?” asked
Marguerite.
“Once, you might have been answered negatively;
now, it must be like the French banner, percé, troué,
criblé —”
“Pray, add the remainder of your quotation,” said he,
— “sans peur et sans reproche.”
“So that a trifle would reduce it to flinders,” said Mrs.
Purcell, without minding his interruption.
“Would you give it such a character, Miss Rite?”
questioned Mr. Raleigh, lightly.
“I? I don't see that you have any heart at all, sir.”
“I swallow my tea and my mortification.”
“Do you remember your first repast at the Bawn?”
asked Mrs. Purcell.
“Why not?”
“And the jelly like molten rubies that I made? It
keeps well.” And she moved a glittering dish toward
him.
“All things of that summer keep well,” he replied.
“Except yourself, Mr. Raleigh. The Indian jugglers
are practising upon us, I suspect. You are no more like
the same person who played sparkling comedy and sang
passionate tragedy than this bamboo stick is like that willow
wand.”
“I wish I could retort, Miss Helen,” he replied. “I
beg your pardon!”
She was silent, and her eye fell and rested on the
sheeny damask beneath. He glanced at her keenly an
instant, then handed her his cup, saying, —
“May I trouble you?”
She looked up again, a smile breaking over the face
wanner than youth, but which the hour's gayety had
flushed to a forgetfulness of intervening years, extended
her left hand for the cup, still gazing and smiling.
Various resolves had flitted through Marguerite's mind
since her entrance. One, that she would yet make Mr.
Raleigh feel her power, yielded to shame and self-contempt,
and she despised herself for a woman won unwooed.
But she was not sure that she was won. Perhaps,
after all, she did not care particularly for Mr.
Raleigh. He was much older than she; he was quite
grave, sometimes satirical; she knew nothing about him;
she was slightly afraid of him. On the whole, if she
consulted her taste, she would have preferred a younger
hero; she would rather be the Fornarina for a Raffaello;
she had fancied her name sweetening the songs of Giraud
Riquier, the last of the Troubadours; and she did not
believe Beatrice Portinari to be so excellent among
women, so different from other girls, that her name
should have soared so far aloft with that escutcheon of
the golden wing on a field azure. “But they say that
there cannot be two epic periods in a nation's literature,”
thought Marguerite, hurriedly; “so that a man who
might have been Homer once will be nothing but a gentleman
now.” And at this point, having decided that
Mr. Raleigh was fully worth unlimited love, she added to
her resolves a desire for content with whatever amount
all this, while sifting the sugar over her raspberries.
Nevertheless, she felt, in the midst of her heroic content,
a strange jealousy at hearing the two thus discuss days in
which she had no share, and she watched them furtively,
with a sharp, hateful suspicion dawning in her mind.
Now, as Mrs. Purcell's eyes met Mr. Raleigh's, and her
hand was still extended for the cup, Marguerite fastened
her glance on its glittering ring, and said abruptly, —
“Mrs. Purcell, have you a husband?”
Mrs. Purcell started and withdrew her hand, as if it
had received a blow, just as Mr. Raleigh relinquished the
cup, so that between them the bits of pictured porcelain
fell and splintered over the equipage.
“Naughty child!” said Mrs. Purcell. “See now what
you 've done!”
“What have I to do with it?”
“Then you have n't any bad news for me? Has any
one heard from the Colonel? Is he ill?”
“Pshaw!” said Marguerite, rising and throwing down
her napkin.
She went to the window and looked out.
“It is time you were gone, little lady,” said Mr. Raleigh.
She approached Mrs. Purcell and passed her hand
down her hair.
“What pretty soft hair you have!” said she. “These
braids are like carved gold-stone. May I dress it with
sweet-brier to-night? I brought home a spray.”
“Rite!” said Mrs. Laudersdale sweetly, at the door;
and Rite obeyed the summons.
In a half-hour she came slowly down the stairs, untwisting
a long string of her mother's abandoned pearls, great
She wore a dress of white samarcand, with a lavish ornament
like threads and purfiles of gold upon the bodice, and
Ursule followed with a cloak. As she entered the drawing-room,
the great bunches of white azalea, which her
mother had brought from the swamps, caught her eye;
she threw down the pearls, and broke off rapid clusters
of the queenly flowers, touching the backward-curling
hyacinthine petals, and caressingly passing her finger
down the pale purple shadow of the snowy folds. Directly
afterward she hung them in her breezy hair, from
which, by natural tenure, they were not likely to fall,
bound them over her shoulders and in her waist.
“See! I stand like Summer,” she said. “Wrapped in
perfume. It is intoxicating.”
Just then two hands touched her, and her father bent
his face over her. She flung her arms round him, careless
of their fragile array, kissed him on both cheeks,
laughed, and kissed him again. She did not speak, for
he disliked French, and English sometimes failed her.
“Here is Mr. Heath,” her father said.
She partly turned, touched that gentleman's hand with
the ends of her fingers, and nodded. Her father whispered
a brief sentence in her ear.
“Jamais, Monsieur, jamais!” she exclaimed; then,
with a quick gesture of deprecation, moved again toward
him; but Mr. Laudersdale had coldly passed to make his
compliments to Mrs. Heath.
“You are not in toilet?” said Marguerite, following
him, but speaking with Mr. Raleigh.
“No, — Mrs. Purcell has been playing for me a little
thing I always liked, — that sweet tuneful afternoon chiding
of the Miller and the Torrent.”
She glanced at Mrs. Purcell, saw that her dress remained
unaltered, and commenced pulling off the azaleas
from her own.
“I do not want to go,” she murmured. “I need not!
Mamma and Mrs. McLean have already gone in the other
carriage.”
“Come, Marguerite,” said Mr. Laudersdale, approaching
her, as Mr. Heath and his mother disappeared.
“I am not going,” she replied, quickly.
“Not going? I beg your pardon, my dear, but you
are!” and he took her hand.
She half endeavored to withdraw it, threw a backward
glance over her shoulder at the remaining pair, and, led
by her father, went out.
Marguerite did her best to forget the vexation, was
very affable with her father, and took no notice of any of
Mr. Heath's prolonged remarks. The drive was at best
a tiresome one, and she was already half asleep when the
carriage stopped. The noise and light, and the little
vanities of the dressing-room. awakened her, and she
descended prepared for conquest. But, after a few moments,
it all became weariness, the air was close, the
flowers faded, the music piercing. The toilets did not
attract nor the faces interest her. She danced along absent
and spiritless, when her eye, raised dreamily, fell on
an object among the curtains and lay fascinated there.
It was certainly Mr. Raleigh; but so little likely did that
seem, that she again circled the room, with her eyes bent
upon that point, expecting it to vanish. He must have
come in the saddle, unless a coach had returned for him
and Mrs. Purcell, — yes, there was Mrs. Purcell, — and
she wore that sweet-brier fresh-blossoming in the light.
With what ease she moved! — it must always have been
enough tarnished to beguile. There, — she was going to
dance with Mr. Raleigh. No? Where, then? Into the
music-room!
The music-room lay beyond an anteroom of flowers
and prints, and was closed against the murmur of the parlors
by great glass doors. Marguerite, from her position,
could see Mr. Raleigh seated at the piano, and Mrs.
Purcell standing by his side; now she turned a leaf, now
she stooped, and their hands touched upon the keys.
Marguerite slipped alone through the dancers, and drew
nearer. There were others in the music-room, but they
were at a distance from the piano. She entered the
anteroom and sat shadowed among the great fragrant
shrubs. A group already stood there, eating ices and
gayly gossiping. Mr. Laudersdale and Mr. Manton
sauntered in, their heads together, and muttering occult
matters of business, whose tally was kept with forefinger
on palm.
“Where is Raleigh?” asked Mr. Manton, looking up.
“He can tell us.”
“At his old occupation,” answered a gentleman from
beside Mrs. Laudersdale, “flirting with forbidden fruit.”
“An alliterative amusement,” said Mrs. Laudersdale.
“You did not know the original Raleigh?” continued
the gentleman. “But he always took pleasure in female
society; yet, singularly enough, though fastidious in
choice, it was only upon the married ladies that he bestowed
his platonisms. I observe the old Adam still
clings to him.”
“He probably found more liberty with them,” remarked
Mrs. Laudersdale, when no one else replied.
“Without doubt he took it.”
“I mean, that, where attentions are known to intend
nothing, one is not obliged to measure them, or to calculate
upon effects.”
“Of the latter no one can accuse Mr. Raleigh!” said
Mr. Laudersdale, hotly, forgetting himself for once.
Mrs. Laudersdale lifted her large eyes and laid them
on her husband's face.
“Excuse me! excuse me!” said the gentleman, with
natural misconception. “I was not aware that he was a
friend of yours.” And taking a lady on his arm, he
withdrew.
“Nor is he!” said Mr. Laudersdale, in lowest tones,
replying to his wife's gaze, and for the first time intimating
his feeling. “Never, never, can I repair the ruin he
has made me!”
Mrs. Laudersdale rose and stretched out her arm,
blindly.
“The room is quite dark,” she murmured; “the flowers
must soil the air. Will you take me up-stairs?”
Meanwhile, the unconscious object of their remark was
turning over a pile of pages with one hand, while the
other trifled along the gleaming keys.
“Here it is,” said he, drawing one from the others,
and arranging it before him, — a gondel-lied.
There stole from his fingers the soft, slow sound of
lapsing waters, the rocking on the tide, the long sway of
some idle weed. Here a jet of tune was flung out from
a distant bark, here a high octave flashed like a passing
torch through night-shadows and lofty arching darkness
told in clustering chords. Now the boat fled through
melancholy narrow ways of pillared pomp and stately
beauty, now floated off on the wide lagoons alone with
the stars and sea. Into this broke the passion of the
whole, and fading away again, behind its wild beating, with
the silence of lapping ripple and dipping oar.
Mrs. Purcell, standing beside the player, laid a careless
arm across the instrument, and bent her face above
him like a flower languid with the sun's rays. Suddenly
the former smile suffused it, and, as the gondel-lied fell
into a slow floating accompaniment, she sang with a swift,
impetuous grace, and in a sweet, yet thrilling voice, the
Moth Song. The shrill music and murmur from the
parlors burst all at once in muffled volume upon the
melody, and, turning, they both saw Marguerite standing
in the doorway, like an angry wraith, and flitting back
again. Mrs. Purcell laughed, but took up the thread of
her song again where it was broken, and carried it through
to the end. Then Mr. Raleigh tossed the gondel-lied
aside, and rising, they continued their stroll.
“You have more than your share of the good things
of life, Raleigh,” said Mr. McLean, as the person addressed
poured out wine for Mrs. Purcell. “Two affairs
on hand at once? You drink deep. Light and sparkling,
— thin and tart, — is n't it Solomon who forbids
mixed drink?”
“I was never the worse for claret,” replied Mr. Raleigh,
bearing away the glittering glass.
The party from the Lake had not arrived at an early
hour, and it was quite late when Mr. Raleigh made his
way through ranks of tireless dancers, toward Marguerite.
She had been dancing with a spirit that would have resembled
joyousness but for its reckless abandon. She
seemed to him then like a flame, as full of wilful, sinuous
caprice. At the first he scarcely liked it, but directly the
artistic side of his nature recognized the extreme grace
Standing now, the corn-silk hair slightly disordered
and still blown about by the fan of some one near
her, her eyes sparkling like stars in the dew-drops of wild
wood-violets, warm, yet weary, and a flush deepening
her cheek with color, while the flowers hung dead around
her, she held a glass of wine and watched the bead
swim to the brim. Mr. Raleigh approached unaware,
and startled her as he spoke.
“It is au gré du vent, indeed,” he said, — “just the
white fluttering butterfly, — and now that the wings are
clasped above this crimson blossom, I have a chance
of capture.” And smiling, he gently withdrew the
splendid draught.
“Buvez, Monsieur,” she said; “c'est le vin de la vie!”
“Do you know how near daylight it is?” he replied.
“Mrs. Laudersdale fainted in the heat, and your father
took her home long ago. The Heaths went also; and
the carriage has just returned for the only ones of us that
are left, you and me.”
“Is it ready now?”
“Yes.”
“So am I.”
And in a few moments she sat opposite him in the
coach, on their way home.
“It would n't be possible for me to sit on the box and
drive?” she asked.
“No.”
“I should like it, in this wild starlight, these flying
clouds, this breath of dawn.”
Meeting no response, she sank into silence. No emotion
can keep one awake forever, and, after all her late
fatigue, the roll of the easy vehicle upon the springs soon
wakefulness, she watched the gleams that fell within
from the carriage-lamps, the strange shadows on the
roadside, the boughs tossing to the wind and flickering
all their leaves in the speeding light; she watched, also,
Mr. Raleigh's face, on which, in the fitful flashes, she
detected a look of utter weariness.
“Monsieur,” she exclaimed, with angry assertion, “est
ce que je vous gêne!”
“Immensely,” said Mr. Raleigh with a smile; “but,
fortunately, for no great time.”
“We shall be soon at home? Then I must have slept.”
“Very like. What did you dream?”
“Oh, one must not tell dreams before breakfast, or they
come to pass, you know.”
“No, — I am uninitiated in dream-craft. Mr.
Heath —”
“Monsieur,” she cried, in sudden heat, “il me semble
que je comprends les Laocoons! C'est la même chose
avec moi!”
As she spoke, she fell, struck forward by a sudden
shock, the coach was rocking like a boat, and plunging
down unknown gulfs. Mr. Raleigh seized her, broke
through the door, and sprang out.
“Qu'avez vous?” she exclaimed.
“The old willow is fallen in the wind,” he replied.
“Quel dommage that we did not see it fall!”
“It has killed one of the horses, I fear,” he continued,
measuring, as formerly, her terror by her levity. “Capua!
is all right? Are you safe?”
“Yah, massa!” responded a voice from the depths, as
Capua floundered with the remaining horse in the thicket
at the lake-edge below. “Yah, massa, — nuffin harm
nuff chance to be in glory, ef 't was n't. I 's done beat
wid dis yer pony, anyhow, Mass'r Raleigh. Seems, ef
he was a 'sect to fly in de face ob all creation an' pay no
'tention to his centre o' gravity, he might walk up dis yer
hill!”
Mr. Raleigh left Marguerite a moment, to relieve
Capua's perplexity. Through the remaining darkness,
the sparkle of stars, and wild fling of shadows in the
wind, she could but dimly discern the struggling figures,
and the great creature trampling and snorting below.
She remembered strange tales out of the Arabian Nights,
Bellerophon and the Chimæra, St. George and the Dragon;
she waited, half-expectant, to see the great talon-stretched
wings flap up against the slow edge of dawn,
where Orion lay, a pallid monster, watching the planet
that flashed like some great gem low in a crystalline
west, and she stepped nearer, with a kind of eager and
martial spirit, to do battle in turn.
“Stand aside, Una!” cried Mr. Raleigh, who had
worked in a determined, characteristic silence, and the
horse's head, sharp ear, and starting eye were brought to
sight, and then his heaving bulk.
“All right, massa!” cried Capua, after a moment's
survey, as he patted the trembling flanks. “Pretty tough
ex'cise dat! Spect Massam Clean be mighty high, —
his best cretur done about killed wid dat tree; — feared
he show dis nigger a stick worf two o' dat!”
“We had like to have finished our dance on nothing,”
said Mr. Raleigh now, looking back on the splintered
wheels and panels. “Will you mount? I can secure
you from falling.”
“Oh, no, — I can walk; it is only a little way.”
“Reach home like Cinderella? If you had but one
glass slipper, that might be; but in satin ones it is impossible.”
And she found herself seated aloft before quite
aware what had happened.
Pacing along, they talked lightly, with the gayety natural
upon excitement, — Capua once in a while adding a
cogent word. As they opened the door, Mr. Raleigh
paused a moment.
“I am glad,” he said, “that my last day with you has
been crowned by such adventures. I leave the Lake at
noon.”
She hung, listening, with a backward swerve of figure,
and regarding him in the dim light of the swinging hall-lamp,
for the moment half petrified. Suddenly she turned
and seized his hand in hers, — then threw it off.
“Cher ami,” she murmured hastily, in a piercing whisper,
like some articulate sigh, “si vous m'aimez, dites le
moi!”
The door closed in the draught, the drawing-room door
opened, and Mr. Laudersdale stepped out, having been
awaiting their return. Mr. Raleigh caught the flash of
Marguerite's eye and the crimson of her cheek, as she
sprang forward up the stairs and out of sight.
The family did not breakfast together the next day, as
politeness chooses to call the first hour after a ball, and
Mr. Raleigh was making some arrangements preliminary
to his departure, in his own apartments, at about the hour
of noon. The rooms which he had formerly occupied
Mrs. McLean had always kept closed, in a possibility
of his return, and he had found himself installed in them
upon his arrival. The library was to-day rather a melancholy
room: the great book-cases did not enliven it;
the grand-piano, with its old dark polish, seemed like a
had absorbed a richer hue with the years than once
it wore; the portrait of his mother seemed farther withdrawn
from sight and air; Antinoüs took a tawnier tint
in his long reverie. The Summer, past her height, sent
a sad beam, the signal of decay, through the half-open
shutters, and it lay wearily on the man who sat by the
long table, and made more sombre yet the faded carpet
and cumbrous chair.
There was a tap on the door. Mr. Raleigh rose and
opened it, and invited Mr. Laudersdale in. The latter
gentleman complied, took the chair resigned by the other,
but after a few words became quiet. Mr. Raleigh made
one or two attempts at conversation, then, seeing silence
to be his visitor's whim, suffered him to indulge it, and
himself continued his writing. Indeed, the peculiar relations
existing between these men made much conversation
difficult. Mr. Laudersdale sat with his eyes upon the
floor for several minutes, and his countenance wrapped
in thought. Rising, with his hands behind him, he
walked up and down the long room, still without speaking.
“Can I be of service to you, sir?” asked the other,
after observing him.
“Yes, Mr. Raleigh, I am led to think you can,” — still
pacing up and down, and vouchsafing no further information.
At last, the monotonous movement ended, Mr. Laudersdale
stood at the window, intercepting the sunshine, and
examined some memoranda.
“Yes, Mr. Raleigh,” he resumed, with all his courtly
manner, upon close of the examination, “I am in hopes
that you may assist me in a singular dilemma.”
“I shall be very glad to do so.”
“Thank you. This is the affair. About a year ago,
being unable to make my usual visit to my daughter and
her grandmother, I sent there in my place our head clerk,
young Heath, to effect the few transactions, and also to
take a month's recreation, — for we were all overworked
and exhausted by the crisis. The first thing he proceeded
to do was to fall in love with my daughter. Of course he
did not mention this occurrence to me, on his return.
When my daughter, arrived at New York, I was again
detained, myself, and sent her to this place under his care.
He lingered rather longer than he should have done,
knowing the state of things; but I suspected nothing, for
the idea of a clerk's marriage with the heiress of the great
Martinique estate never entered my mind; moreover, I
have regarded her as a child; and I sent him back with
various commissions at several times, — once on business
with McLean, once to obtain my wife's signature to some
sacrifice of property, and so on. I really beg your pardon,
Mr. Raleigh; it is painful to another, I am aware,
to be thrust upon family confidences —”
“Pray, sir, proceed,” said Mr. Raleigh, wheeling his
chair about.
“But since you are in a manner connected with the
affair yourself —”
“You must be aware, Mr. Laudersdale, that my chief
desire is the opportunity you afford me.”
“I believe so. I am happy to afford it. On the occasion
of Mr. Heath's last visit to this place, Marguerite
drew attention to a coin whose history you heard, and the
other half of which Mrs. Purcell wore. Mr. Heath obtained
the fragment he possessed through my wife's aunt,
Susanne Le Blanc; Mrs. Purcell obtained hers through
people were not slow to put the coin and the names together;
Mr. Heath, moreover, had heard portions of the
history of Susanne Le Blanc when in Martinique.
“On resuming his duties in the counting-house, after
this little incident, one day, at the close of business-hours,
he demanded from me the remnants of this history with
which he might be unacquainted. When I paused, he
took up the story and finished it with ease, and — and
poetical justice, I may say, Mr. Raleigh. Susanne was the
sister of Mrs. Laudersdale's father, though far younger
than he. She met a young American gentleman, and
they became interested in each other. Her brother designed
her for a different fate, — the governor of the
island, indeed, was her suitor, — and forbade their intercourse.
There were rumors of a private marriage; her
apartments were searched for any record, note, or proof,
unsuccessfully. If there were such, they had been left in
the gentleman's hands for better concealment. It being
supposed that they continued to meet, M. Le Blanc prevailed
upon the governor to arrest the lover on some trifling
pretence, and send him out of the island. Shortly
afterward, as he once confessed to his wife, he caused a
circumstantial account of the death and funeral obsequies
of each to reach the other. Immediately he urged the
governor's suit again, and when she continued to resist,
he fixed the wedding-day himself, and ordered the trousseau.
Upon this, one evening, she buried the box of
trinkets at the foot of the oleanders, and disappeared the
next, and no trace of her was found.
“When I reached this point, young Heath turned to me
with that impudently nonchalant drawl of his, saying, —
“`And her property, sir?'
“`That,' I replied innocently, `which comprised half
the estate, and which she would have received on attaining
the requisite age, was inherited by her brother, upon
her suicide.'
“`Apparent suicide, you mean,' said he; and thereupon
took up the story, as I have said, matched date to date
and person to person, and informed me that exactly a
fortnight from the day of Mademoiselle Susanne Le
Blanc's disappearance, a young lady took rooms at a
hotel in a Southern city, and advertised for a situation as
governess, under the name of Susan White. She gave
no references, spoke English imperfectly, and had difficulty
in obtaining one; finally, however, she was successful,
and after a few years married into the family of her
employer, and became the mother of Mrs. Heath. The
likeness of Mrs. Purcell, the grandchild of Susan White,
to Susanne Le Blanc, was so extraordinary, a number of
years ago, that, when Ursule, my daughter's nurse, first
saw her, she fainted with terror. My wife, you are aware,
was born long after these events. This governess never
communicated to her husband any more specific circumstance
of her youth than that she had lived in the West
Indies, and had left her family because they had resolved
to marry her, — as she might have done, had she not died
shortly after her daughter's birth. Among her few valuables
were found this half-coin of Heath's, and a miniature,
which his mother recently gave your cousin, but
which, on account of its new interest, she has demanded
again; for it is probably that of the ancient lover, and
bearing, as it does, a very striking resemblance to yourself,
you have pronounced it to be undoubtedly that of
your uncle, Reuben Raleigh, and wondered how it came
into the possession of Mrs. Heath's mother. Now, as you
Le Blanc's lover.”
“No, — I was not aware.”
Mr. Laudersdale's countenance, which had been animated
in narration, suddenly fell.
“I was in hopes,” he resumed, — “I thought, — my
relation of these occurrences may have been very confused;
but it is as plain as daylight to me, that Susanne
Le Blanc and Susan White are one, and that the property
of the first is due to the heirs of the last.”
“Without doubt, sir.”
“The same is plain to the Heaths. I am sure that
Marguerite will accept our decision in the matter, — sure
that no daughter of mine would retain a fraudulent penny;
for retain it she could, since there is not sufficient proof
in any court, if we chose to contest; but it will beggar
her.”
“How, sir? Beggar her to divide her property?”
“It is a singular division. The interest due on Susanne's
moiety swells it enormously. Add to this, that,
after M. Le Blanc's death, Madame Le Blanc, a much
younger person, did not so well understand the management
of affairs, the property depreciated, and many losses
were encountered, and it happens that the sum due
Mrs. Heath covers the whole amount that Marguerite
possesses.”
“Now, then, sir?” exclaimed Mr. Raleigh, interrogatively.
“Now, then, Mrs. Heath requests my daughter's hand
for her son, and offers to set off to him, at once, such
sum as would constitute his half of her new property
upon her decease, and allow him to enter our house as
special partner.”
“Ah!”
“This does not look so unreasonable. Last night he
proposed formally to Marguerite, who is still ignorant of
these affairs, and she refused him. I have urged her differently,
— I can do no more than urge, — and she remains
obdurate. To accumulate misfortunes, we escaped
1857 by a miracle. We have barely recovered; and
now various disasters striking us, — the loss of the Osprey
the first and the chief of them, — we are to-day on
the verge of bankruptcy. Nothing but the entrance of
this fortune can save us from ruin.”
“Unfortunate!” said Mr. Raleigh, — “most unfortunate!
And can I serve you at this point?”
“Not at all, sir,” said Mr. Laudersdale, with sudden
erectness. “No, — I have but one hope. It has seemed
to me barely possible that your uncle may have communicated
to you events of his early life, — that you may
have heard, that there may have been papers telling of
the real fate of Susanne Le Blanc.”
“None that I know of,” said Mr. Raleigh, after a
pause. “My uncle was a very reserved person. I often
imagined that his youth had not been without its passages,
something to account for his unvarying depression. In
one letter, indeed, I asked him for such a narration. He
promised to give it to me shortly, — the next mail, perhaps.
The next mail I received nothing; and after that
he made no allusion to the request.”
“Indeed? Indeed? I should say, — pardon me, Mr.
Raleigh, — that your portion of the next mail met with
some accident. Your servants could not explain it?”
“There is Capua, who was majordomo. We can inquire,”
said Mr. Raleigh, with a smile, rising and ringing
for that functionary.
On Capua's appearance, the question was asked, if he
had ever secretly detained letter or paper of any kind.
“Lors, massa! I alwes knew 't would come to dis!”
he replied. “No, massa, neber!” shaking his head with
repeated emphasis.
“I thought you might have met with some accident,
Capua,” said his master.
“Axerden be —, beg massa's parden; but such
s'picions poison any family's peace, and make a feller
done forgit hisself.”
“Very well,” said Mr. Raleigh, who was made to believe
by this vehemence in what at first had seemed a
mere fantasy. “Only remember, that, if you could assure
me that any papers had been destroyed, the assurance
would be of value.”
“'Deed, Mass Roger? Dat alters de case,” said Capua,
grinning. “Dere 's been a good many papers 'stroyed in
dis yer house, firs' an' last.”
“Which in particular?”
“Don' rekerlember, massa, 's so long ago.”
“But make an effort.”
“Well, Massa Raleigh, — 'pears to me I do 'member
suthin', — I do b'lieve — yes, dis 's jist how 't was. Spect
I might as well make a crean breast ob it. I 's alwes had
it hangin' roun' my conscious; do' no' but I 's done grad
to git rid ob it. Alwes spected massa 'd be 'xcusin' Cap
o' turnin' tief.”
“That is the last accusation I should make against you,
Capua.”
“But dar I stan's convicted.”
“Out with it, Capua!” said Mr. Laudersdale, laughing.
“Lord, Massa Lausdel! how you do scare a chile!
Didn' know mass'r was dar. See, Mass Roger, dis 's jist
folks lib'd acrost de lake dat summer, an' massa was possessed
to 'most lib dar too? Well, one day, massa mind
Ol' Cap's runnin' acrost in de rain an' in great state ob
excitement to tell him his house done burnt up?”
“Yes. What then?”
“Dat day, massa, de letters had come from Massa
Reuben out in Indy, an' massa's pipe kinder 'tracted
Cap's 'tention, an' so he jist set down in massa's chair an'
took a smoke. Bimeby Cap thought, — `Ef massa come
an' ketch him!' — an' put down de pipe an' went to
work, and bimeby I smelt mighty queer smell, massa,
'bout de house, made him tink Ol' Nick was come hissef
for Ol' Cap, an' I come back into dis yer room an' Massa
Reuben's letters from Indy was jist most done burnt up,
he cotched 'em in dese yer ol' brack han's, Mass Roger,
an' jist whipt 'em up in dat high croset.”
And having arrived at great confusion in his personal
pronouns, Capua mounted nimbly on pieces of furniture,
thrust his pocket-knife through a crack of the wainscot,
opened the door of a small unseen closet, and, after groping
about and inserting his head as Van Amburgh did in
the lion's mouth, scrambled down again with his hand full
of charred and blackened papers, talking glibly all the
while.
“Ef massa 'd jist listen to reason,” he said, “'stead o'
flyin' into one ob his tantrums, I might sprain de matter.
You see, I knew Mass Roger 'd feel so oncomforble and
remorsefle to find his ol' uncle's letters done 'stroyed, an'
't was all by axerden, an' couldn' help it noways, massa,
an' been done sorry eber since, an' wished dar warn't no
letters dis side de Atlantic nor torrer, ebery day I woke.”
After which plea, Capua awaited his sentence.
“That will do, — it 's over now, old boy,” said Mr.
Raleigh, with his usual smile.
“Now, massa, you a'n't gwine —”
“No, Capua, I 'm going to do nothing but look at the
papers.”
“But massa's —”
“You need not be troubled, — I said, I was not.”
“But, massa, — s'pose I deserve a thrashing?”
“There 's no danger of your getting it, you blameless
Ethiop!”
Upon which pacific assurance, Capua departed.
The two gentlemen now proceeded to the examination
of these fragments. Of the letters nothing whatever was
to be made. From one of them dropped a little yellow
folded paper that fell apart in its creases. Put together,
it formed a sufficiently legible document, and they read
the undoubted marriage-certificate of Susanne Le Blanc
and Reuben Raleigh.
“I am sorry,” said Mr. Laudersdale, after a moment.
“I am sorry, instead of a fortune, to give them a barsinister.”
“Your daughter is ignorant? — your wife?”
“Entirely. Will you allow me to invite them in here?
They should see this paper.”
“You do not anticipate any unpleasant effect?”
“Not the slightest. Marguerite has no notion of want
or of pride. Her first and only thought will be — sa
cousine Hélène.” And Mr. Laudersdale went out.
Some light feet were to be heard pattering down the
stairs, a mingling of voices, then Mr. Laudersdale passed
on, and Marguerite tapped, entered, and closed the door.
“My father has told me something I but half understand,”
said she, with her hand on the door. “Unless I
signify? Would all the mines of Peru tempt me?”
Mr. Raleigh remained leaning against the corner of the
bookcase. She advanced and stood at the foot of the
table, nearly opposite him. Her lips were glowing as if
the fire of her excitement were fanned by every breath;
her eyes, half hidden by the veiling lids, seemed to throw
a light out beneath them and down her cheek. She wore
a mantle of swan's down closely wrapped round her, for
she had complained ceaselessly of the chilly summer.
“Mr. Raleigh,” she said, “I am poorer than you are,
now. I am no longer an heiress.”
At this moment, the door opened again and Mrs. Laudersdale
entered. At a step she stood in the one sunbeam;
at another, the shutters blew together, and the
room was left in semi-darkness, with her figure gleaming
through it, outlined and starred in tremulous evanescent
light. For an instant both Marguerite and Mr. Raleigh
seemed to be half awe-struck by the radiant creature
shining out of the dark; but directly, Marguerite sprang
back and stripped away the torrid nasturtium-vine which
her mother had perhaps been winding in her hair when
her husband spoke with her, and whose other end, long
and laden with fragrant flame, still hung in her hand and
along her dress. Laughing, Marguerite in turn wound it
about herself, and the flowers, so lately plucked from the
bath of hot air, where they had lain steeping in sun,
flashed through the air a second, and then played all their
faint spirit-like luminosity about their new wearer. She
seemed sphered in beauty, like the Soul of Morning in
some painter's phantasy, with all great stars blossoming
out in floral life about her, colorless, yet brilliant in shape
and light. It was too much; Mr. Raleigh opened the
lent the place a gayer life. As he did so, Mr. Laudersdale
entered, and with him Mr. Heath and his mother.
Mr. Laudersdale briefly recapitulated the facts, and
added, —
“Communicating my doubts to Mr. Raleigh, he has
kindly furnished me with the marriage-certificate of his
uncle and Mademoiselle Le Blanc. And as Mr. Reuben
Raleigh was living within thirteen years, you perceive
that your claims are invalidated.”
There was a brief silence while the paper was inspected.
“I am still of opinion that my grandmother's second
marriage was legal,” replied Mr. Heath; “yet I should
be loath to drag up her name and subject ourselves to a
possibility of disgrace. So, though the estate is ours, we
can do without it!”
Meanwhile, Marguerite had approached her father, and
was patching together the important scraps.
“What has this to do with it?” said she. “You admitted
before this discovery — did you not? — that the
property was no longer mine. These people are Aunt
Susanne's heirs still, if not legally, yet justly. I will not
retain a sous of it! My father shall instruct my lawyer,
Mrs. Heath, to make all necessary transfers to yourself.
Let us wish you good morning!” And she opened the
door for them to pass.
“Marguerite! are you mad?” asked her father, as the
door closed.
“No, father, — but honest, — which is the same thing,”
she responded, still standing near it.
“True,” he said, in a low tone like a groan. “But we
are ruined.”
“Ruined? Oh, no! You are well and strong. So
am I. I can work. I shall get much embroidery to do,
for I can do it perfectly; the nuns taught me. I have a
thousand resources. And there is something my mother
can do; it is her great secret; she has played at it summer
after summer. She has moulded leaves and flowers
and twined them round beautiful faces in clay, long
enough; now she shall carve them in stone, and you will
be rich again!”
Mrs. Laudersdale sat in a low chair while Marguerite
spoke, the nasturtium-vine clinging round her feet like a
gorgeous snake, her hands lying listlessly in her lap, and
her attitude that of some queen who has lost her crown
and is totally bewildered by this strange conduct on the
part of circumstances. All the strength and energy that
had been the deceits of manner were utterly fallen away,
and it was plain, that, whatever the endowment was
which Marguerite had mentioned, she could only play
at it. She was but a woman, sheer woman, with the
woman's one capability, and the exercise of that denied
her.
Mr. Laudersdale remained with his eyes fixed on her,
and lost, it seemed, to the presence of others.
“The disgrace is bitter,” he murmured. “I have kept
my name so proudly and so long! But that is little. It
is for you I fear. I have stood in your sunshine and
shadowed your life, dear! — At least,” he continued, after
a pause, “I can place you beyond the reach of suffering.
I must finish my lonely way.”
Mrs. Laudersdale looked up slowly and met his earnest
glance.
“Must I leave you?” she exclaimed, with a wild terror
in her tone. “Do you mean that I shall go away?
me, — you may always be cold, — but I must serve you,
live with you, die with you!” And she sprang forward
with outstretched arms.
He caught her before her foot became entangled in the
long folds of her skirt, drew her to himself, and held her.
What he murmured was inaudible to the others; but a
tint redder than roses are swam to her cheek, and a smile
broke over her face like a reflection in rippling water.
She held his arm tightly in her hand, and erect and
proud, as it were with a new life, bent toward Roger
Raleigh.
“You see!” said she. “My husband loves me. And
I, — it seems at this moment that I have never loved any
other than him!”
There came a quick step along the matting, the handle
of the door turned in Marguerite's resisting grasp, and
Mrs. Purcell's light muslins swept through. Mr. Raleigh
advanced to meet her, — a singular light upon his face, a
strange accent of happiness in his voice.
“Since you seem to be a part of the affair,” she said in
a low tone, while her lip quivered with anger and scorn,
“concerning which I have this moment been informed,
pray take to Mr. Laudersdale my brother's request to
enter the house of Day, Knight, and Company, from this
day.”
“Has he made such a request?” asked Mr. Raleigh.
“He shall make it!” she murmured swiftly, and was
gone.
That night a telegram flashed over the wires, and
thenceforth, on the great financial tide, the ship Day,
Knight, and Company lowered its peak to none.
The day crept through until evening, deepening into
to come and bid her farewell. It seemed that his plans
were altered, or possibly he was gone, and at sunset she
went out alone. The cardinals that here and there
showed their red caps above the bank, the wild roses that
still lined the way, the grapes that blossomed and reddened
and ripened year after year ungathered, did not
once lift her eyes. She sat down, at last, on an old fallen
trunk cushioned with moss, half of it forever wet in the
brook that babbled to the lake, and waited for the day to
quench itself in coolness and darkness.
“Ah!” said Mr. Raleigh, leaping from the other side
of the brook to the mossy trunk, “is it you? I have been
seeking you, and what sprite sends you to me?”
“I thought you were going away,” she said, abruptly.
“That is a broken paving-stone,” he answered, seating
himself beside her, and throwing his hat on the grass.
“You asked me, yesterday, if I confessed to being a
myth,” she said, after a time. “If I should go back to
Martinique, I should become one in your remembrance, —
should I not? You would think of me just as you would
have thought of the Dryad yesterday, if she had stepped
from the tree and stepped back again?”
“Are you going to Martinique?” he asked, with a
total change of face and manner.
“I don't know. I am tired of this; and I cannot live
on an ice-field. I had such life at the South! It is `as
if a rose should shut and be a bud again.' I need my
native weather, heat and sea.”
“How can you go to Martinique?”
“Oh, I forgot!”
Mr. Raleigh did not reply, and they both sat listening
to the faint night-side noises of the world.
“You are very quiet,” he said at last, ceasing to fling
waifs upon the stream.
“And you could be very gay, I believe.”
“Yes. I am full of exuberant spirits. Do you know
what day it is?”
“It is my birthday.”
“It is my birthday!”
“How strange! The Jews would tell you that this
sweet first of August was the birthday of the world.
When earth was born in bloom,'” —
hoarse in tears.
“Do you know what you promised me on my birthday?
I am going to claim it.”
“The present. You shall have a cast which I had
made from one of my mother's fancies or bass-reliefs, —
she only does the front of anything, — a group of fleurs-de-lis
whose outlines make a child's face, my face.”
“It is more than any likeness in stone or pencil that I
shall ask of you.”
“What then?”
“You cannot imagine?”
“Monsieur,” she whispered, turning toward him, and
blushing in the twilight, “est ce que c'est moi?”
There came out the low west-wind singing to itself
through the leaves, the drone of a late-carousing honeybee,
the lapping of the water on the shore, the song of the
wood-thrush replete with the sweetness of its half-melody;
and ever and anon the pensive cry of the whippoorwill
fluted across the deepening silence that summoned all
these murmurs into hearing. A rustle like the breeze
in the birches passed, and Mrs. Purcell retarded her
the shade and now went on together with her. It seemed
as if the loons and whippoorwills grew wild with sorrow
that night, and after a while Mrs. Purcell ceased her
lively soliloquy, and as they walked they listened. Suddenly
Mr. Raleigh turned. Mrs. Purcell was not beside
him. They had been walking on the brook-edge; the
path was full of gaps and cuts. With a fierce shudder
and misgiving, he hurriedly retraced his steps, and
searched and called; then, with the same haste, rejoining
Marguerite, gained the house, for lanterns and assistance.
Mrs. Purcell sat at the drawing-room window.
“Comment?” cried Marguerite, breathlessly.
“Oh, I had no idea of walking in fog up to my chin,”
said Mrs. Purcell; “so I took the short cut.”
“You give me credit for the tragic element,” she continued,
under her breath, as Mr. Raleigh quietly passed
her. “That is old style. To be sure, I might as well
die there as in the swamps of Florida. Purcell is ordered
to Florida. Of course, I am ordered too!” And
she whirled him the letter which she held.
Other letters had been received with the evening mail,
and one that made Mr. Raleigh's return in September
imperative occasioned some discussion in the House of
Laudersdale. The result was that that gentleman secured
one passage more than he had intended in the spring; and
if you ever watch the shipping-list, the arrival of the
Spray-Plough at Calcutta, with Mr. and Mrs. Raleigh
among the passengers, will be seen by you as soon as me.
Later in the evening of this same eventful day, as Mr.
Raleigh and Marguerite sat together in the moonlight that
flooded the great window, Mrs. Laudersdale passed them
and went down the garden to the lake. She wore some
sweetness in her eye and an unspoken joy about her lips.
Mr. Raleigh could not help thinking it was a singular happiness,
this that opened before her; it seemed to be like a
fruit plucked from the stem and left to mature in the sunshine
by itself, late and lingering, never sound at heart.
She floated on, with the light in her dusky eyes and the
seldom rose on her cheek, — floated on from moonbeam to
moonbeam, — and the lovers brought back their glances
and gave them to each other. For one, life opened a
labyrinth of warmth and light and joy; for the other,
youth was passed, destiny not to be appeased: if his
affection enriched her, the best he could do was to bestow
it; in his love there would yet be silent reservations.
“Mr Raleigh,” said Marguerite, “did you ever love
my mother?”
“Once I thought I did.”
“And now?”
“Whereas I was blind, now I see.”
“Listen! Mrs. Purcell is singing in the drawing-room.”
Unsought, and shed their tangled sweets,
I sit and hark, or in the starry dark,
Or when the night-rain on the hill-side beats.
“Alone! But when the eternal summers flow
And refluent drown in song all moan,
Thy soul shall waste for its delight, and haste
Through heaven. And I shall be no more alone!”
“What a voice she sings with to-night!” said Marguerite.
“It is stripped of all its ornamental disguises,
— so slender, yet piercing!”
“A needle can pain like a sword-blade. There goes
the moon in clouds. Hark! What was that? A cry?”
And he started to his feet.
“No,” she said, — “it is only the wild music of the
lake, the voices of shadows calling to shadows.”
“There it is again, but fainter; the wind carries it the
other way.”
“It is a desolating wind.”
“And the light on the land is like that of eclipse!”
He stooped and raised her and folded her in his arms.
“I have a strange, terrible sense of calamity, Mignonne!”
he said. “Let it strike, so it spare you!”
“Nothing can harm us,” she replied, clinging to him.
“Even death cannot come between us!”
“Marguerite!” said Mr. Laudersdale, entering, “where
is your mother?”
“She went down to the lake, sir.”
“She cannot possibly have gone out upon it!”
“Oh, she frequently does; and so do we all.”
“But this high wind has risen since. The flaws —”
And he went out hastily.
There flashed on Mr. Raleigh's mental sight a vision of
the moonlit lake, one instant. A boat, upon its side, bending
its white sail down the depths; a lifted arm wound in
the fatal rope; a woman's form, hanging by that arm,
sustained in the dark transparent tide of death; the wild
wind blowing over, the moonlight glazing all. For that
instant he remained still as stone; the next, he strode
away, and dashed down to the lake-shore. It seemed as
if his vision yet continued. They had already put out in
boats; he was too late. He waited in ghastly suspense
till they rowed home with their slow freight. And then
his arm supported the head with its long, uncoiling, heavy
like a pall on sculpture, till another man took the burden
from him and went up to the house with his own.
When Mr. Raleigh entered the house again, it was at
break of dawn. Some one opened the library-door and
beckoned him in. Marguerite sprang into his arms.
“What if she had died?” said Mrs. Purcell, with her
swift satiric breath, and folding a web of muslin over her
arm. “See! I had got out the shroud. As it is, we
drink skål and say grace at breakfast. The funeral
baked-meats shall coldly furnish forth the marriage-feast.
You men are all alike. Le Roi est mort? Vive la
Reine!”
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