Chapter 6

Toward the more wayward and impulsive Emilia the good lady was far more merciful. With all Aunt Jane’s formidable keenness, she was a little apt to be disarmed by youth and beauty, and had no very stern retributions except for those past middle age. Emilia especially charmed her while she repelled. There was no getting beyond a certain point with this strange girl, any more than with Philip; but her depths tantalized, while his apparent shallows were only vexatious. Emilia was usually sweet, winning, cordial, and seemed ready to glide into one’s heart as softly as she glided into the room; she liked to please, and found it very easy. Yet she left the impression that this smooth and delicate loveliness went but an inch beyond the surface, like the soft, thin foam that enamels yonder tract of ocean, belongs to it, is a part of it, yet is, after all, but a bequest of tempests, and covers only a dark abyss of crossing currents and desolate tangles of rootless kelp. Everybody was drawn to her, yet not a soul took any comfort in her. Her very voice had in it a despairing sweetness, that seemed far in advance of her actual history; it was an anticipated miserere, a perpetual dirge, where nothing had yet gone down. So Aunt Jane, who was wont to be perfectly decisive in her treatment of every human being, was fluctuating and inconsistent with Emilia. She could not help being fascinated by the motherless child, and yet scorned herself for even the doubting love she gave.

“Only think, auntie,” said Kate, “how you kissed Emilia, yesterday!”

“Of course I did,” she remorsefully owned. “I have kissed her a great many times too often. I never will kiss her again. There is nothing but sorrow to be found in loving her, and her heart is no larger than her feet. Today she was not even pretty! If it were not for her voice, I think I should never wish to see her again.”

But when that soft, pleading voice came once more, and Emilia asked perhaps for luncheon, in tones fit for Ophelia, Aunt Jane instantly yielded. One might as well have tried to enforce indignation against the Babes in the Wood.

This perpetual mute appeal was further strengthened by a peculiar physical habit in Emilia, which first alarmed the household, but soon ceased to inspire terror. She fainted very easily, and had attacks at long intervals akin to faintness, and lasting for several hours. The physicians pronounced them cataleptic in their nature, saying that they brought no danger, and that she would certainly outgrow them. They were sometimes produced by fatigue, sometimes by excitement, but they brought no agitation with them, nor any development of abnormal powers. They simply wrapped her in a profound repose, from which no effort could rouse her, till the trance passed by. Her eyes gradually closed, her voice died away, and all movement ceased, save that her eyelids sometimes trembled without opening, and sweet evanescent expressions chased each other across her face,--the shadows of thoughts unseen. For a time she seemed to distinguish the touch of different persons by preference or pain; but soon even this sign of recognition vanished, and the household could only wait and watch, while she sank into deeper and yet deeper repose.

There was something inexpressibly sweet, appealing, and touching in this impenetrable slumber, when it was at its deepest. She looked so young, so delicate, so lovely; it was as if she had entered into a shrine, and some sacred curtain had been dropped to shield her from all the cares and perplexities of life. She lived, she breathed, and yet all the storms of life could but beat against her powerless, as the waves beat on the shore. Safe in this beautiful semblance of death,--her pulse a little accelerated, her rich color only softened, her eyelids drooping, her exquisite mouth curved into the sweetness it had lacked in waking,--she lay unconscious and supreme, the temporary monarch of the household, entranced upon her throne. A few hours having passed, she suddenly waked, and was a self-willed, passionate girl once more. When she spoke, it was with a voice wholly natural; she had no recollection of what had happened, and no curiosity to learn.

X. REMONSTRANCES.

IT had been a lovely summer day, with a tinge of autumnal coolness toward nightfall, ending in what Aunt Jane called a “quince-jelly sunset.” Kate and Emilia sat upon the Blue Rocks, earnestly talking.

“Promise, Emilia!” said Kate.

Emilia said nothing.

“Remember,” continued Kate, “he is Hope’s betrothed. Promise, promise, promise!”

Emilia looked into Kate’s face and saw it flushed with a generous eagerness, that called forth an answering look in her. She tried to speak, and the words died into silence. There was a pause, while each watched the other.

When one soul is grappling with another for life, such silence may last an instant too long; and Kate soon felt her grasp slipping. Momentarily the spell relaxed. Other thoughts swelled up, and Emilia’s eyes began to wander; delicious memories stole in, of walks through blossoming paths with Malbone,--of lingering steps, half-stifled words and sentences left unfinished;--then, alas! of passionate caresses,--other blossoming paths that only showed the way to sin, but had never quite led her there, she fancied. There was so much to tell, more than could ever be explained or justified. Moment by moment, farther and farther strayed the wandering thoughts, and when the poor child looked in Kate’s face again, the mist between them seemed to have grown wide and dense, as if neither eyes nor words nor hands could ever meet again. When she spoke it was to say something evasive and unimportant, and her voice was as one from the grave.

In truth, Philip had given Emilia his heart to play with at Neuchatel, that he might beguile her from an attachment they had all regretted. The device succeeded. The toy once in her hand, the passionate girl had kept it, had clung to him with all her might; he could not shake her off. Nor was this the worst, for to his dismay he found himself responding to her love with a self-abandonment of ardor for which all former loves had been but a cool preparation. He had not intended this; it seemed hardly his fault: his intentions had been good, or at least not bad. This piquant and wonderful fruit of nature, this girlish soul, he had merely touched it and it was his. Its mere fragrance was intoxicating. Good God! what should he do with it?

No clear answer coming, he had drifted on with that terrible facility for which years of self-indulged emotion had prepared him. Each step, while it was intended to be the last, only made some other last step needful.

He had begun wrong, for he had concealed his engagement, fancying that he could secure a stronger influence over this young girl without the knowledge. He had come to her simply as a friend of her Transatlantic kindred; and she, who was always rather indifferent to them, asked no questions, nor made the discovery till too late. Then, indeed, she had burst upon him with an impetuous despair that had alarmed him. He feared, not that she would do herself any violence, for she had a childish dread of death, but that she would show some desperate animosity toward Hope, whenever they should meet. After a long struggle, he had touched, not her sense of justice, for she had none, but her love for him; he had aroused her tenderness and her pride.

Without his actual assurance, she yet believed that he would release himself in some way from his betrothal, and love only her.

Malbone had fortunately great control over Emilia when near her, and could thus keep the sight of this stormy passion from the pure and unconscious Hope. But a new distress opened before him, from the time when he again touched Hope’s hand. The close intercourse of the voyage had given him for the time almost a surfeit of the hot-house atmosphere of Emilia’s love. The first contact of Hope’s cool, smooth fingers, the soft light of her clear eyes, the breezy grace of her motions, the rose-odors that clung around her, brought back all his early passion. Apart from this voluptuousness of the heart into which he had fallen, Malbone’s was a simple and unspoiled nature; he had no vices, and had always won popularity too easily to be obliged to stoop for it; so all that was noblest in him paid allegiance to Hope. From the moment they again met, his wayward heart reverted to her. He had been in a dream, he said to himself; he would conquer it and be only hers; he would go away with her into the forests and green fields she loved, or he would share in the life of usefulness for which she yearned. But then, what was he to do with this little waif from the heart’s tropics,--once tampered with, in an hour of mad dalliance, and now adhering in-separably to his life? Supposing him ready to separate from her, could she be detached from him?

Kate’s anxieties, when she at last hinted them to Malbone, only sent him further into revery. “How is it,” he asked himself, “that when I only sought to love and be loved, I have thus entangled myself in the fate of others? How is one’s heart to be governed? Is there any such governing? Mlle. Clairon complained that, so soon as she became seriously attached to any one, she was sure to meet somebody else whom she liked better. Have human hearts,” he said, “or at least, has my heart, no more stability than this?”

It did not help the matter when Emilia went to stay awhile with Mrs. Meredith. The event came about in this way. Hope and Kate had been to a dinner-party, and were as usual reciting their experiences to Aunt Jane.

“Was it pleasant?” said that sympathetic lady.

“It was one of those dreadfully dark dining-rooms,” said Hope, seating herself at the open window.

“Why do they make them look so like tombs?” said Kate.

“Because,” said her aunt, “most Americans pass from them to the tomb, after eating such indigestible things. There is a wish for a gentle transition.”

“Aunt Jane,” said Hope, “Mrs. Meredith asks to have a little visit from Emilia. Do you think she had better go?”

“Mrs. Meredith?” asked Aunt Jane. “Is that woman alive yet?”

“Why, auntie!” said Kate. “We were talking about her only a week ago.”

“Perhaps so,” conceded Aunt Jane, reluctantly. “But it seems to me she has great length of days!”

“How very improperly you are talking, dear!” said Kate. “She is not more than forty, and you are--”

“Fifty-four,” interrupted the other.

“Then she has not seen nearly so many days as you.”

“But they are such long days! That is what I must have meant. One of her days is as long as three of mine. She is so tiresome!”

“She does not tire you very often,” said Kate.

“She comes once a year,” said Aunt Jane. “And then it is not to see me. She comes out of respect to the memory of my great-aunt, with whom Talleyrand fell in love, when he was in America, before Mrs. Meredith was born. Yes, Emilia may as well go.”

So Emilia went. To provide her with companionship, Mrs. Meredith kindly had Blanche Ingleside to stay there also. Blanche stayed at different houses a good deal. To do her justice, she was very good company, when put upon her best behavior, and beyond the reach of her demure mamma. She was always in spirits, often good-natured, and kept everything in lively motion, you may be sure. She found it not unpleasant, in rich houses, to escape some of those little domestic parsimonies which the world saw not in her own; and to secure this felicity she could sometimes lay great restraints upon herself, for as much as twenty-four hours. She seemed a little out of place, certainly, amid the precise proprieties of Mrs. Meredith’s establishment. But Blanche and her mother still held their place in society, and it was nothing to Mrs. Meredith who came to her doors, but only from what other doors they came.

She would have liked to see all “the best houses” connected by secret galleries or underground passages, of which she and a few others should hold the keys. A guest properly presented could then go the rounds of all unerringly, leaving his card at each, while improper acquaintances in vain howled for admission at the outer wall. For the rest, her ideal of social happiness was a series of perfectly ordered entertainments, at each of which there should be precisely the same guests, the same topics, the same supper, and the same ennui.

XI. DESCENSUS AVERNI.

MALBONE stood one morning on the pier behind the house. A two days’ fog was dispersing. The southwest breeze rippled the deep blue water; sailboats, blue, red, and green, were darting about like white-winged butterflies; sloops passed and repassed, cutting the air with the white and slender points of their gaff-topsails. The liberated sunbeams spread and penetrated everywhere, and even came up to play (reflected from the water) beneath the shadowy, overhanging counters of dark vessels. Beyond, the atmosphere was still busy in rolling away its vapors, brushing the last gray fringes from the low hills, and leaving over them only the thinnest aerial veil. Farther down the bay, the pale tower of the crumbling fort was now shrouded, now revealed, then hung with floating lines of vapor as with banners.

Hope came down on the pier to Malbone, who was looking at the boats. He saw with surprise that her calm brow was a little clouded, her lips compressed, and her eyes full of tears.

“Philip,” she said, abruptly, “do you love me?”

“Do you doubt it?” said he, smiling, a little uneasily.

Fixing her eyes upon him, she said, more seriously: “There is a more important question, Philip. Tell me truly, do you care about Emilia?”

He started at the words, and looked eagerly in her face for an explanation. Her expression only showed the most anxious solicitude.

For one moment the wild impulse came up in his mind to put an entire trust in this truthful woman, and tell her all. Then the habit of concealment came back to him, the dull hopelessness of a divided duty, and the impossibility of explanations. How could he justify himself to her when he did not really know himself? So he merely said, “Yes.”

“She is your sister,” he added, in an explanatory tone, after a pause; and despised himself for the subterfuge. It is amazing how long a man may be false in action before he ceases to shrink from being false in words.

“Philip,” said the unsuspecting Hope, “I knew that you cared about her. I have seen you look at her with so much affection; and then again I have seen you look cold and almost stern. She notices it, I am sure she does, this changeableness. But this is not why I ask the question. I think you must have seen something else that I have been observing, and if you care about her, even for my sake, it is enough.”

Here Philip started, and felt relieved.

“You must be her friend,” continued Hope, eagerly. “She has changed her whole manner and habits very fast. Blanche Ingleside and that set seem to have wholly controlled her, and there is something reckless in all her ways. You are the only person who can help her.”

“How?”

“I do not know how,” said Hope, almost impatiently. “You know how. You have wonderful influence. You saved her before, and will do it again. I put her in your hands.”

“What can I do for her?” asked he, with a strange mingling of terror and delight.

“Everything,” said she. “If she has your society, she will not care for those people, so much her inferiors in character. Devote yourself to her for a time.”

“And leave you?” said Philip, hesitatingly.

“Anything, anything,” said she. “If I do not see you for a month, I can bear it. Only promise me two things. First, that you will go to her this very day. She dines with Mrs. Ingleside.”

Philip agreed.

“Then,” said Hope, with saddened tones, “you must not say it was I who sent you. Indeed you must not. That would spoil all. Let her think that your own impulse leads you, and then she will yield. I know Emilia enough for that.”

Malbone paused, half in ecstasy, half in dismay. Were all the events of life combining to ruin or to save him? This young girl, whom he so passionately loved, was she to be thrust back into his arms, and was he to be told to clasp her and be silent? And that by Hope, and in the name of duty?

It seemed a strange position, even for him who was so eager for fresh experiences and difficult combinations. At Hope’s appeal he was to risk Hope’s peace forever; he was to make her sweet sisterly affection its own executioner. In obedience to her love he must revive Emilia’s. The tender intercourse which he had been trying to renounce as a crime must be rebaptized as a duty. Was ever a man placed, he thought, in a position so inextricable, so disastrous? What could he offer Emilia? How could he explain to her his position? He could not even tell her that it was at Hope’s command he sought her.

He who is summoned to rescue a drowning man, knowing that he himself may go down with that inevitable clutch around his neck, is placed in some such situation as Philip’s. Yet Hope had appealed to him so simply, had trusted him so nobly! Suppose that, by any self-control, or wisdom, or unexpected aid of Heaven, he could serve both her and Emilia, was it not his duty? What if it should prove that he was right in loving them both, and had only erred when he cursed himself for tampering with their destinies? Perhaps, after all, the Divine Love had been guiding him, and at some appointed signal all these complications were to be cleared, and he and his various loves were somehow to be ingeniously provided for, and all be made happy ever after.

He really grew quite tender and devout over these meditations. Phil was not a conceited fellow, by any means, but he had been so often told by women that their love for him had been a blessing to their souls, that he quite acquiesced in being a providential agent in that particular direction. Considered as a form of self-sacrifice, it was not without its pleasures.

Malbone drove that afternoon to Mrs. Ingleside’s charming abode, whither a few ladies were wont to resort, and a great many gentlemen. He timed his call between the hours of dining and driving, and made sure that Emilia had not yet emerged. Two or three equipages beside his own were in waiting at the gate, and gay voices resounded from the house. A servant received him at the door, and taking him for a tardy guest, ushered him at once into the dining-room. He was indifferent to this, for he had been too often sought as a guest by Mrs. Ingleside to stand on any ceremony beneath her roof.

That fair hostess, in all the beauty of her shoulders, rose to greet him, from a table where six or eight guests yet lingered over flowers and wine. The gentlemen were smoking, and some of the ladies were trying to look at ease with cigarettes. Malbone knew the whole company, and greeted them with his accustomed ease. He would not have been embarrassed if they had been the Forty Thieves. Some of them, indeed, were not so far removed from that fabled band, only it was their fortunes, instead of themselves, that lay in the jars of oil.

“You find us all here,” said Mrs. Ingleside, sweetly. “We will wait till the gentlemen finish their cigars, before driving.”

“Count me in, please,” said Blanche, in her usual vein of frankness. “Unless mamma wishes me to conclude my weed on the Avenue. It would be fun, though. Fancy the dismay of the Frenchmen and the dowagers!”

“And old Lambert,” said one of the other girls, delightedly.

“Yes,” said Blanche. “The elderly party from the rural districts, who talks to us about the domestic virtues of the wife of his youth.”

“Thinks women should cruise with a broom at their mast-heads, like Admiral somebody in England,” said another damsel, who was rolling a cigarette for a midshipman.

“You see we do not follow the English style,” said the smooth hostess to Philip. “Ladies retiring after dinner! After all, it is a coarse practice. You agree with me, Mr. Malbone?”

“Speak your mind,” said Blanche, coolly. “Don’t say yes if you’d rather not. Because we find a thing a bore, you’ve no call to say so.”

“I always say,” continued the matron, “that the presence of woman is needed as a refining influence.”

Malbone looked round for the refining influences. Blanche was tilted back in her chair, with one foot on the rung of the chair before her, resuming a loud-toned discourse with Count Posen as to his projected work on American society. She was trying to extort a promise that she should appear in its pages, which, as we all remember, she did. One of her attendant nymphs sat leaning her elbows on the table, “talking horse” with a gentleman who had an undoubted professional claim to a knowledge of that commodity. Another, having finished her manufactured cigarette, was making the grinning midshipman open his lips wider and wider to receive it. Mrs. Ingleside was talking in her mincing way with a Jew broker, whose English was as imperfect as his morals, and who needed nothing to make him a millionnaire but a turn of bad luck for somebody else. Half the men in the room would have felt quite ill at ease in any circle of refined women, but there was not one who did not feel perfectly unembarrassed around Mrs. Ingleside’s board.

“Upon my word,” thought Malbone, “I never fancied the English after-dinner practice, any more than did Napoleon. But if this goes on, it is the gentlemen who ought to withdraw. Cannot somebody lead the way to the drawing-room, and leave the ladies to finish their cigars?”

Till now he had hardly dared to look at Emilia. He saw with a thrill of love that she was the one person in the room who appeared out of place or ill at ease. She did not glance at him, but held her cigarette in silence and refused to light it. She had boasted to him once of having learned to smoke at school.

“What’s the matter, Emmy?” suddenly exclaimed Blanche. “Are you under a cloud, that you don’t blow one?”

“Blanche, Blanche,” said her mother, in sweet reproof. “Mr. Malbone, what shall I do with this wild girl? Such a light way of talking! But I can assure you that she is really very fond of the society of intellectual, superior men. I often tell her that they are, after all, her most congenial associates. More so than the young and giddy.”

“You’d better believe it,” said the unabashed damsel. “Take notice that whenever I go to a dinner-party I look round for a clergyman to drink wine with.”

“Incorrigible!” said the caressing mother. “Mr. Malbone would hardly imagine you had been bred in a Christian land.”

“I have, though,” retorted Blanche. “My esteemed parent always accustomed me to give up something during Lent,--champagne, or the New York Herald, or something.”

The young men roared, and, had time and cosmetics made it possible, Mrs. Ingleside would have blushed becomingly. After all, the daughter was the better of the two. Her bluntness was refreshing beside the mother’s suavity; she had a certain generosity, too, and in a case of real destitution would have lent her best ear-rings to a friend.

By this time Malbone had edged himself to Emilia’s side. “Will you drive with me?” he murmured in an undertone.

She nodded slightly, abruptly, and he withdrew again.

“It seems barbarous,” said he aloud, “to break up the party. But I must claim my promised drive with Miss Emilia.”

Blanche looked up, for once amazed, having heard a different programme arranged. Count Posen looked up also. But he thought he must have misunderstood Emilia’s acceptance of his previous offer to drive her; and as he prided himself even more on his English than on his gallantry, he said no more. It was no great matter. Young Jones’s dog-cart was at the door, and always opened eagerly its arms to anybody with a title.

XII. A NEW ENGAGEMENT.