University of Virginia Library

31. CHAPTER XXXI.

Tone and color were wanting in the details of family
life which were now mechanically performed by Philippa
and Mary. Excepting these, each day was a disintegration,
and every person went apart to enjoy or suffer
an existence which appeared to depend upon itself
merely.

Mary was hypochondriacal, and the grasshopper was
a burden; her mental eyes were fixed upon the progress
of an imaginary liver complaint, an impending cancer,
or a slow consumption; the falling of the sky would
have been connected with her ailments, and noticeable
only on that account. She had long had an inclination
for chronic complaints, but Elsa's unsparing ridicule had
kept it under; when she left, it cropped out. Gilbert,
her husband, naturally a silent man, became more so under
this tic-douloureux influence; home was finally but a
deposit for clean shirts, his Bible, and the temple of his
meals. Year by year he had grown a part of the “choring”
institution which belongs to all respectable families,
for Jason had given him full power to trade, train and
work the live stock, and it was more interesting to him
than human beings. Any thing transpiring outside of
his occupation should be disposed of and forgotten as
soon as possible; death, marriage, religion, politics,
caused time to be lost, which must be made up by extra
diligence in his business. But Gilbert was most respectable

in all his ways, and bore a high reputation as
a “hired man.”

Mary made various comments on the subject of
Parke's leaving home, which he answered promptly,
and so completely that it was not renewed.

“Philippa thinks she feels bad about his being away,”
said Mary, “and she does; but she would feel worse if
she was me: besides, she is a young girl.”

“I expect she does,” Gilbert answered; “and what if
she does? Young gals always feel bad about something;
they haven't got any thing else to do; it's a pity there
is gals.”

“Mr. Auster does less than ever; but he is no trouble
at all in the house.”

“It isn't necessary for him to negotiate round—that's
my business. Folks that have learned trades never
amount to much. As for trouble, I should like to know
if men are ever troublesome? they don't meddle with
things of no concern to them.”

“Nothing must be meddled with but cattle, according
to your way of thinking. Cattle are not of much
importance.”

“If there was more attention paid to cattle, there
wouldn't be so much trouble among folks. If you
knew something about critturs, perhaps you would be
easier; take my advice at present, though, and just attend
to your house-work, and your ague, and let the
rest go.”

So Philippa was allowed to rest under a cloud, without
further notice. It was a murky, smothering vapor
which enveloped her; her sympathies were exhausted;
she found nothing efficacious in herself, or in those

about her. She said of herself, that the threads of her
being were ravelled, because that which had knit them
together into a consistent web had vanished, and could
nowhere be found.

Jason took to fancy-carpentering; day after day she
heard the whistling of his plane or the turning-lathe, in
a little room which he had converted into a workshop.
His labor must have been tedious and slow, for no article
appeared as its result; but, as Mary said, he was no
trouble. Philippa saw little of him, and the time she
passed in his presence belonged merely to the routine
with which he was connected. But the cold, dull,
spiritless sphere where she moved contained a vivid,
palpable core, which the virgin silence of his soul prevented
him from laying bare. To his simple mind it
appeared as if all nature now had his secret—or why
should he feel so strange a joy in those wild winter
days! The driving snows, the cold rains which dashed
round the walls, the misty sea sobbing under the rim
on the shore, or whirling on the tide the jagged ice, or
congealing in gray calm the northern gales which bore
the prolonged cries of the deep into the naked woods,
the wintry sunlight which fell on their delicate black
boughs—on the level, brown sodden fields, the moonlight
rolling over the ancient town in a tumult of
clouds—exhilarated him as with wine.

The winter was an awful one. Storm followed storm;
between December and February the roads were scarcely
passable, and no vessel put out to sea. The old people
talked of the memorial snows and gales in Crest,
and said none severer were in their annals. The house
was so cold that Philippa closed the parlor where the

piano was, and the dining-room connected with it, leaving
for occupation the small east parlor, which was attached
to the kitchen by a square passage—a bedroom
in the Squire's time. She gave no reason for selecting
this room, nor did she explain why she brought from the
garret a set of old Indian chintz curtains, whose deep yellow
ground was covered with long-tailed macaws in
brilliant dyes, and hung them before the windows—
there were three in the room, two facing the terrace,
beyond which, through the leafless shrubs, a line of sea
was visible, and one in the end wall, from which the
prospect was cut off by the row of Scotch firs which bordered
that side of the yard. To this window she brought
her work-basket, inkstand, portfolio, and a few books;
but she never looked out of the front windows, always
keeping the curtains down. Here she set up a methodical
system of passing all the hours of daylight, and to
Jason the spot grew more and more intelligible. His
meals were served there, and in the evening he allowed
himself a chair by the fire while he smoked a cigar.
Never in the habit of conversing with her, his silence
was not remarked, and she made no effort to break it.
As neither had discerned the beginning of the drama
which united them years ago, and as one was blind, and
the other dumb—“what sequel?” Fate, however, was
in her house, and as much at home in that insignificant
spot, with those insignificant persons, as she was when
she sat watching Napoleon on his march to Russia.
While Jason sat by the fire in the evening, Philippa remained
by the window sewing interminable seams;
when he left the room, she folded her work, and, after
turning down the lamp, moved to the hearth, and ruminated
by the firelight till bedtime. Her thoughts were
not confided to the portfolio even, for she never opened
it; perhaps their endless repetition required no aid.
Though the same ground was canvassed night after
night, the embers and ashes made no reply; they listened
in obstinate silence to her questioning cries. Why
was it ordered that she should have no wishes granted?
Had she asked so much? Were the environments of
her life so pleasant naturally that they must be beset
with crosses? Was it supposed that she could bear
these crosses with resignation, or cast them away as the
evils of a day? These she asked, with a dogged hate
towards the power she questioned. Jason guessed the
tenor of her feelings, and, until he heard her foot upon
the stairs, the signal that she was going to bed, he lurked
in some dark room or passage; and then went back to
her place, and looked into the fire, and round the walls,
as if he might find some clue by which to lead her from
the labyrinth of her misery. His soul at this period, and
in such moments, if delineated, would make a picture as
affecting and as incomprehensible as those which travellers
discover in strange lands, where Nature creates and
wastes things of beauty, which thus accidentally fall
under human vision for the first and last time.

Happily there is compensation for the soul for the loss
of all it can create. Jason's spirit, pure and simple as
the elements, was dominated by an absolute and profound
sentiment that made the life-long wilderness of his
heart blossom like the rose. He was not happy, he was
without hope; yet every hour was exquisitely dear and
necessary to him. Philippa, for whom he lived—his
consciousness now dared to own, for whom he would die

—existed in the exclusive atmosphere divided between
them only; so surely was she enclosed with him, that it
seemed as if the fact had been accomplished by a band
of conspirators, who carried out by intuition the wishes
he had never expressed. For the present this sentiment
sufficed him; its power paralyzed its inevitable growth.
But the time approached when it would no longer confine
him, when the symbols which now enchanted would
mock him to break them like straw.

Week glided after week, leaving the inmates of the
old mansion imprisoned in their ways, as fixed, to all appearance,
as

in the Sleeping Beauty's palace.

The last of February he launched his boat again, and,
while he sailed over the bay, he summed up the days
which had passed without an object, without intentions,
and thought their flight had been rapid as an arrow's,
while the flight of other, ordinary days was fluttering
and devious, like flocks of birds.