 | CHAPTER XLVII.
BEHIND THE CURTAIN. Oldtown folks |  |
47. CHAPTER XLVII.
BEHIND THE CURTAIN.
IN the creed of most story-tellers marriage is equal to translation.
The mortal pair whose fortunes are traced to the foot
of the altar forthwith ascend, and a cloud receives them out of
our sight as the curtain falls. Faith supposes them rapt away to
some unseen paradise, and every-day toil girds up its loins and
with a sigh prepares to return to its delving and grubbing.
But our story must follow the fortunes of our heroine beyond
the prescribed limits.
It had been arranged that the wedding pair, after a sunny afternoon's
drive through some of the most picturesque scenery in
the neighborhood of Boston, should return at eventide to their
country home, where they were to spend a short time preparatory
to sailing for Europe. Even in those early days the rocky glories
of Nahant and its dashing waves were known and resorted
to by Bostonians, and the first part of the drive was thitherward,
and Tina climbed round among the rocks, exulting like a sea-bird
with Ellery Davenport ever at her side, laughing, admiring, but
holding back her bold, excited footsteps, lest she should plunge
over by some unguarded movement, and become a vanished
dream.
So near lies the ever possible tragedy at the hour of our greatest
exultation; it is but a false step, an inadvertent movement,
and all that was joy can become a cruel mockery! We all
know this to be so. We sometimes start and shriek when we
see it to be so in the case of others, but who is the less triumphant
in his hour of possession for this gloomy shadow of possibility
that forever dogs his steps?
Ellery Davenport was now in the high tide of victory. The
pursuit of the hour was a success; he had captured the butterfly.
In his eagerness he had trodden down and disregarded many teachings
him hesitate; but now he felt that he had her; she was his, — his
alone and forever.
But already dark thoughts from the past were beginning to
flutter out like ill-omened bats, and dip down on gloomy wing between
him and the innocent, bright, confiding face. Tina he
could see had idealized him entirely. She had invested him
with all her conceptions of knighthood, honor, purity, religion,
and made a creation of her own of him; and sometimes he smiled
to himself, half amused and half annoyed at the very young and
innocent simplicity of the matter. Nobody knew better than himself
that what she dreamed he was he neither was nor meant to
be, — that in fact there could not be a bitterer satire on his real
self than her conceptions; but just now, with her brilliant beauty,
her piquant earnestness, her perfect freshness, there was an indescribable
charm about her that bewitched him.
Would it all pass away and get down to the jog-trot dustiness
of ordinary married life, he wondered, and then, ought he not
to have been a little more fair with her in exchange for the
perfect transparence with which she threw open the whole of
her past life to him? Had he not played with her as some villain
might with a little child, and got away a priceless diamond
for a bit of painted glass? He did not allow himself to think
in that direction.
“Come, my little sea-gull,” he said to her, after they had wandered
and rambled over the rocks for a while, “you must come
down from that perch, and we must drive on, if we mean to be at
home before midnight.”
“O Ellery, how glorious it is!”
“Yes, but we cannot build here three tabernacles, and so we
must say, Au revoir. I will bring you here again”; — and Ellery
half led, half carried her in his arms back to the carriage.
“How beautiful it is!” said Tina, as they were glancing along
a turfy road through the woods. The white pines were just putting
out their long fingers, the new leaves of the silvery birches
were twinkling in the light, the road was fringed on both sides with
great patches of the blue violet, and sweet-fern, and bayberry,
spicy perfume. “It seems as if we two alone were flying
through fairy-land.” His arm was around her, tightening its
clasp of possession as he looked down on her.
“Yes,” he said, “we two are alone in our world now; none
can enter it; none can see into it; none can come between us.”
Suddenly the words recalled to Tina her bad dream of the
night before. She was on the point of speaking of it, but hesitated
to introduce it; she felt a strange shyness in mentioning
that subject.
Ellery Davenport turned the conversation upon things in foreign
lands, which he would soon show her. He pictured to her
the bay of Naples, the rocks of Sorrento, where the blue
Mediterranean is overhung with groves of oranges, where they
should have a villa some day, and live in a dream of beauty.
All things fair and bright and beautiful in foreign lands were
evoked, and made to come as a sort of airy pageant around
them while they wound through the still, spicy pine-woods.
It was past sunset, and the moon was looking white and sober
through the flush of the evening sky, when they entered the
grounds of their own future home.
“How different everything looks here from what it did when
I was here years ago!” said Tina, — “the paths are all cleared, and
then it was one wild, dripping tangle. I remember how long we
knocked at the door, and could n't make any one hear, and the old
black knocker frightened me, — it was a black serpent with his
tail in his mouth. I wonder if it is there yet.”
“O, to be sure it is,” said Ellery; “that is quite a fine bit of
old bronze, after something in Herculaneum, I think; you know
serpents were quite in vogue among the ancients.”
“I should think that symbol meant eternal evil,” said Tina, —
“a circle is eternity, and a serpent is evil.”
“You are evidently prejudiced against serpents, my love,”
said Ellery. “The ancients thought better of them; they were
emblems of wisdom, and the ladies very appropriately wore them
for bracelets and necklaces.”
“I would n't have one for the world,” said Tina. “I always
hated them, they are so bright, and still, and sly.”
Mere prejudice,” said Ellery, laughing. “I must cure it
by giving you, one of these days, an emerald-green serpent for a
bracelet, with ruby crest and diamond eyes; you 've no idea what
pretty fellows they are. But here, you see, we are coming to the
house; you can smell the roses.”
“How lovely and how changed!” said Tina. “O, what a
world of white roses over that portico, — roses everywhere, and
white lilacs. It is a perfect paradise!”
“May you find it so, my little Eve,” said Ellery Davenport, as
the carriage stopped at the door. Ellery sprang out lightly, and,
turning, took Tina in his arms and set her down in the porch.
They stood there a moment in the moonlight, and listened to
the fainter patter of the horses' feet as they went down the drive.
“Come in, my little wife,” said Ellery, opening the door, “and
may the black serpent bring you good luck.”
The house was brilliantly lighted by wax candles in massive
silver candlesticks.
“O, how strangely altered!” said Tina, running about, and
looking into the rooms with the delight of a child. “How
beautiful everything is!”
The housekeeper, a respectable female, now appeared and offered
her services to conduct her young mistress to her rooms.
Ellery went with her, almost carrying her up the staircase on his
arm. Above, as below, all was light and bright. “This room is
ours,” said Ellery, drawing her into that chamber which Tina remembered
years before as so weirdly desolate. Now it was all
radiant with hangings and furniture of blue and silver; the
open windows let in branches of climbing white roses, the vases
were full of lilies. The housekeeper paused a moment at the
door.
“There is a lady in the little parlor below that has been waiting
more than an hour to see you and madam,” she said.
“A lady!” said both Tina and Ellery, in tones of surprise.
“Did she give her name?” said Ellery.
“She gave no name; but she said that you, sir, would know
her.”
“I can't imagine who it should be,” said Ellery. “Perhaps,
Ellery.
“Indeed, that would be a pretty way to do! No, sir, I allow
no private interviews,” said Tina, with authority, — “no, I am
all ready and quite dressed enough to go down.
“Well, then, little positive,” said Ellery, “be it as you will;
let 's go together.”
“Well, I must confess,” said Tina, “I did n't look for wedding
callers out here to-night; but never mind, it 's a nice little
mystery to see what she wants.”
They went down the staircase together, passed across the hall,
and entered the little boudoir, where Tina and Harry had spent
their first night together. The door of the writing cabinet stood
open, and a lady all in black, in a bonnet and cloak, stood in the
doorway.
As she came forward, Tina exclaimed, “O Ellery, it is she, —
the lady in the closet!” and sank down pale and half fainting.
Ellery Davenport turned pale too; his cheeks, his very lips
were blanched like marble; he looked utterly thunderstruck and
appalled.
“Emily!” he said. “Great God!”
“Yes, Emily!” she said, coming forward slowly and with
dignity. “You did not expect to meet ME here and now,
Ellery Davenport!”
There was for a moment a silence that was perfectly awful.
Tina looked on without power to speak, as in a dreadful dream.
The ticking of the little French mantel clock seemed like a
voice of doom to her.
The lady walked close up to Ellery Davenport, drew forth a
letter, and spoke in that fearfully calm way that comes from the
very white-heat of passion.
“Ellery,” she said, “here is your letter. You did not know
me — you could not know me — if you thought, after that letter, I
would accept anything from you! I live on your bounty! I
would sooner work as a servant!”
“Ellery, Ellery!” said Tina, springing up and clasping his
arm, “O, tell me who she is! What is she to you? Is she —
is she —”
“Be quiet, my poor child,” said the woman, turning to her with
an air of authority. “I have no claims; I come to make none.
Such as this man is, he is your husband, not mine. You
believe in him; so did I, — love him; so did I. I gave up all for
him, — country, home, friends, name, reputation, — for I thought
him such a man that a woman might well sacrifice her whole life
to him! He is the father of my child! But fear not. The world,
of course, will approve him and condemn me. They will say he
did well to give up his mistress and take a wife; it 's the world's
morality. What woman will think the less of him, or smile the
less on him, when she hears it? What woman will not feel herself
too good even to touch my hand?”
“Emily,” said Ellery Davenport, bitterly, “if you thought I
deserved this, you might, at least, have spared this poor child.”
“The truth is the best foundation in married life, Ellery,” she
said, “and the truth you have small faculty for speaking. I do
her a favor in telling it. Let her start fair from the commencement,
and then there will be no more to be told. Besides,” she
added, “I shall not trouble you long. There,” she said, putting
down a jewel-case, — “there are your gifts to me, — there are your
letters.” Then she threw on the table a miniature set in diamonds,
“There is your picture. And now God help me! Farewell.”
She turned and glided swiftly from the room.
Readers who remember the former part of this narrative will
see at once that it was, after all, Ellery Davenport with whom,
years before, Emily Rossiter had fled to France. They had resided
there, and subsequently in Switzerland, and she had devoted
herself to him, and to his interests, with all the single-hearted
fervor of a true wife.
On her part, there was a full and conscientious belief that the
choice of the individuals alone constituted a true marriage, and
that the laws of human society upon this subject were an oppression
which needed to be protested against.
On his part, however, the affair was a simple gratification of
passion, and the principles, such as they were, were used by him
carrying out his own purposes. Ellery Davenport spoke his own
convictions when he said that there was no subject which had not
its right and its wrong side, each of them capable of being unanswerably
sustained. He had played with his own mind in this
manner until he had entirely obliterated conscience. He could
at any time dazzle and confound his own moral sense with his
own reasonings; and it was sometimes amusing, but, in the long
run, tedious and vexatious to him, to find that what he maintained
merely for convenience and for theory should be regarded
by Emily so seriously, and with such an earnest eye to logical
consequences. In short, the two came, in the course of their
intimacy, precisely to the spot to which many people come who
are united by an indissoluble legal tie. Slowly, and through an
experience of many incidents, they had come to perceive an
entire and irrepressible conflict of natures between them.
Notwithstanding that Emily had taken a course diametrically
opposed to the principles of her country and her fathers, she retained
largely the Puritan nature. Instances have often been seen
in New England of men and women who had renounced every
particle of the Puritan theology, and yet retained in their
fibre and composition all the moral traits of the Puritans — their
uncompromising conscientiousness, their inflexible truthfulness,
and their severe logic in following the convictions of their understandings.
And the fact was, that while Emily had sacrificed
for Ellery Davenport her position in society, — while she
had exposed herself to the very coarsest misconstructions of the
commonest minds, and made herself liable to be ranked by her
friends in New England among abandoned outcasts, — she was
really a woman standing on too high a moral plane for Ellery
Davenport to consort with her in comfort. He was ambitious, intriguing,
unscrupulous, and it was an annoyance to him to be
obliged to give an account of himself to her. He was tired of
playing the moral hero, the part that he assumed and acted with
great success during the time of their early attachment. It
annoyed him to be held to any consistency in principles. The
very devotion to him which she felt, regarding him, as she
him.
Of late years he had taken long vacations from her society, in
excursions to England and America. When the prospect of
being ambassador to England dawned upon him, he began seriously
to consider the inconvenience of being connected with a
woman unpresentable in society. He dared not risk introducing
her into those high circles as his wife. Moreover, he knew that
it was a falsehood to which he never should gain her consent; and
running along in the line of his thoughts came his recollections
of Tina. When he returned to America, with the fact in his
mind that she would be the acknowledged daughter of a respectable
old English family, all her charms and fascinations had a
double power over him. He delivered himself up to them without
scruple.
He wrote immediately to a confidential friend in Switzerland,
enclosing money, with authority to settle upon Emily a villa near
Geneva, and a suitable income. He trusted to her pride for the
rest.
Never had the thought come into his head that she would
return to her native country, and brave all the reproach and
humiliation of such a step, rather than accept this settlement
at his hands.
| CHAPTER XLVII.
BEHIND THE CURTAIN. Oldtown folks | |