University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER I.
ELIZABETH.

DUSK was settling down upon the great, roomy
house in which the Fordyces lived. It was a
May evening, but chill, with some lingering breath of
the vanished winter, and a bright fire was kindled in
the great open stove. A servant brought in lights, and
placed one on the centre-table, and another on the
mantel. They revealed the group in the room quite
clearly. A set of merry young people were these Fordyces,
— pure blondes, all of them, except one who
stood at the window, and who was not a daughter of
the house, though her name was also Fordyce.

Kate Fordyce was the eldest of the party, and besides
her there were two other sisters, and two brothers,
— all Saxon, and rosy, and merry. They were teasing
each other good-naturedly, laughing a great deal, and
saying a good many things which passed with them for
wit, because it takes so little in this respect to satisfy
those who are ready and waiting to be amused.

The girl at the window paid no heed to them. She

was looking intently out towards the lovely, lonely
hills, where the rosy glow of the sunset still lingered.
A little at one side, as the window framed the landscape,
was her uncle's iron manufactory, from which a
red light streamed high, and sparkling cinders rayed
off and glittered through the dusk. She always liked
to look out of this window at this hour. The manufactory,
prosaic as it might be by daylight, gave to the
evening landscape a weird picturesqueness. Its mystery
allured, as well as its brightness. Then there were
the hills, — not the one on which the village of Lenox
stood, — but the distant, solitary ones, where free winds
blew, which wild birds haunted. Their aspect made
her sad, oftentimes; touched her to pain; and yet she
used to say that if her ghost could come back she knew
it would walk among those hills. To-night, however,
and a great many other times when she looked at them,
they seemed to her like prison-walls, shutting her in
from the world, — the world which must be somewhere,
and mean something besides woods, and slopes, and
waters, — the world which held excitements the thought
of which thrilled her pulses, triumphs which fired her
fancy, delights which haunted her dreams. Would she
ever, ever know any thing about it; or was Lenox to
be all her world?

She was not unhappy. Her feeling was not positive
enough for that. She was only beset by the longing
to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, — the
longing which is always the inheritance of an imaginative
youth.

No one in the Fordyce household was at all unkind
to Elizabeth. In a certain fashion they all loved her.
If there were an imperceptible dividing line between
them and her, it was she, not they, who drew it. For
they were not of her kind. Their father and hers had
been brothers, and certain family traits were reproduced
in them all. But this girl had taken something from
her mother which did not run in the Fordyce blood, —
a fine and keen imagination, a capacity to enjoy and to
suffer, of which they knew nothing. She was not heeding
now their merry nightfall talk. Her thoughts were
far away, tilting in some great tournament of life, living
in some other world of poetry, and passion, and
love, and woe.

She dared sometimes even to utter longing prayers
that a door might be opened into this world of her
dreams. It was almost the only prayer she ever said,
except the Lord's prayer, which she still repeated every
night as simply as a child. Of deep spiritual experiences,
of mental conflicts, she knew nothing as yet.
She guessed vaguely at her own capacity for emotion.
I am glad that I can show her to you once, while still
all her sorrows lay before her.

“What does Queen Bess say?” her Cousin Kate
asked at last, going up to her and breaking in upon her
revery.

“What about? I have not heard a word you have
been saying.”

She turned as she spoke, and her face fulfilled the
promise of her voice. To do that was something, for

the voice was no common one. It was not sweet, simply,
but low, and clear, and tender. You felt that it
indicated a deep and thoughtful nature.

She was a tall, slight girl, this Elizabeth Fordyce,
whom her cousin called Queen Bess. She had dark
gray eyes, which sometimes seemed hazel, and sometimes
black. They were shaded by lashes so long that
they cast a shadow. Her complexion was clear, but not
fair. She had no color in her cheeks, except when some
strong emotion stirred her, and then a glow, deep and
warm as the heart of a summer rose, would suffuse
them. Her lips alone were bright always. Her head
was proudly set on her slender throat. Her hair was
soft, and dark, and abundant. Her features were not
faultless, but one who cared for her would never remember
to find fault with them. She had a low, womanly
brow; too broad, perhaps, for some tastes. Her mouth
was not small, but the bright, mobile lips expressed
every passing shade of feeling.

I have told you all this, and yet I am conscious that
I have given you no true conception of Elizabeth. I
can only trust to your learning to know her as my story
goes on. In those early days, when, as I said, all her
troubles lay before her, she neither understood herself,
nor was understood by any one else. Perhaps no one
loved her quite well enough to take the trouble of
studying her. Her individuality was too decided for
her to be generally popular. Nor had it even been the
fashion in Lenox to call her pretty. Her cousins —
with their full contours, their pink cheeks, and yellow

hair — were spoken of as “the handsome Fordyces;”
but no one meant to include Elizabeth when this phrase
was used. And yet she had a charm of her own for
those who had ears to hear and eyes to see. As she
turned to ask what her cousins had been talking about,
her eyes and cheeks brightened, and the Fordyce
blondes paled beside her.

Kate answered her, speaking in a pretty, eager way,
which seemed like a reminiscence of the time when she
was fifteen; but then she had been kept young by overmuch
petting, though she was twenty-four now, and
the eldest of the Fordyce sisters.

“We are talking about our May picnic. We must
have it on Thursday, or we can't, by any stretch of imagination,
call it May-day, for the month goes out on
that day. We were discussing the propriety of asking
Elliott Le Roy. He is boarding at the Gilmans, you
know.”

“But we have always said we never would ask any
of the summer boarders, — birds of passage, here to-day,
there to-morrow, and caring nothing for any of us.
For my part, I think the one charm of the May picnic
has always been that we had only Lenox people, who
had known about one another all their lives. I don't
like strangers.”

“You think you don't, I know; but there isn't one
of us who longs to see the world as you do. After all,
Mr. Le Roy isn't exactly a stranger. He belongs to us
and to Lenox in a certain way. He is a cousin of Uncle
Henry's new wife. It's very different, don't you see,

from some one of whom we know nothing? I suppose
Aunt Julia's having settled here was what attracted
him to the place. He keeps house in New York, she
says, — has an elegant establishment, though he is a bachelor.
But he is an author, and he has so many associations
and engagements in the city that he couldn't
get on with his work there, and, as it was something
he was in a hurry to finish, he came here for the quiet.”

“An author!”

Elizabeth grew excited, though neither her face nor
her manner gave evidence of it. She was only eighteen
then, and full of enthusiasm; very young, too, of her
age, because she had lived so much in a world of fancy
and imagination, and known so little of the coarser realities
of actual life. To her dreaming soul an author
meant something a little less than divine, — a sort of
demi-god, to whom she could have offered incense like
a pagan.

“What does he write?” she asked, with suppressed
eagerness.

“Oh, political things, I believe, and essays on history.
I heard Aunt Julia say that he was a philosophical historian,
or a historical philosopher, I forget which. But
there's no doubt about his cleverness, any more than
about his money. She says he is a real man of the
world, too, — very fascinating to women, as it is, and
he might be very dangerous if he were not so cold. He
has never loved any one, and does not care to marry.
He is a good comrade, she says, and generous in a certain
way; but that comes of his brain, — his heart was
forgotten and left out when he was made.”

Long afterward Elizabeth remembered those words.

“I don't see why there should have been any question
about asking him,” she said, quietly. “Very likely he
will think the whole thing a bore; but his belonging to
Aunt Julia gives him a claim to the courtesy of an invitation.
For my part, I hope he'll come. I confess I
should like to see a real, live book-maker.”

Bell Fordyce, the second daughter, laughed merrily.

“There,” she cried, “you see Queen Bess is as very
a woman for curiosity as the rest of us. We will have
the picnic on Thursday, and we will ask the book-maker.
Dick, you must see about it to-morrow; and
you and Rob must give all the rest of the invitations.
We girls shall have enough to do in making our part
of the good things; for I don't suppose even authors
are above eating at a picnic.”

“Why haven't we seen this Mr. Le Roy before, since
he is a family connection?” Elizabeth interpolated,
pursuing, as her habit was, the subject which interested
her.

“Oh, he only came on Saturday. I suppose Aunt Julia
would soon have brought him round, or we should have
met him there, for I guess he goes to her house every
day; but now she will be as busy about the picnic as
we shall, and I suppose we shall see him first on the
shore of the Mountain Mirror.”

Then began a discussion about cakes and salads and
receipts; and Elizabeth turned back again to her window,
for in this direction no one expected any thing of
her. So she withdrew into herself, and began to fancy

what this man of the world, this scholar, this author,
would be like. How could people tell that he had no
heart? How unfair to pronounce such judgment when
they really knew nothing about it. Just because he
had never loved any one yet, — as if every line were
long enough to fathom a deep nature.

She was quite prepared to make a hero of him, and
hitherto she had known only book heroes. It was more
than twenty years ago, — I am writing in the year of
our Lord 1873, — and even then Lenox had begun to
be a tolerably well-known summer resort. But of the
people who came and went, the Fordyces, living at
some distance from the village, and taking no boarders,
saw very little. There were, among the stalwart Berkshiremen,
not a few in whom the elements of the heroic
were not wanting, — men of brains, and soul, and culture,
— but Elizabeth had seen them so often that she
had grown used to them, and so never paused to speculate
upon their possibilities. This new-comer represented
to her the unknown, which to a fine and fresh
imagination is always the admirable.