An Oldport Romance

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"Hushing you up, darling?" said Kate. "When we only spoil you
by praising and quoting everything you say."

"Only when it amuses you," said Aunt Jane. "So long as I sit
and cry my eyes out over a book, you all love me, and when I
talk nonsense, you are ready to encourage it; but when I begin
to utter a little sense, you all want to silence me, or else
run out of the room! Yesterday I read about a newspaper
somewhere, called the 'Daily Evening Voice'; I wish you would
allow me a daily morning voice."

"Do not interfere, Kate," said Hal. "Aunt Jane and I only wish
to understand each other."

"I am sure we don't," said Aunt Jane; "I have no desire to
understand you, and you never will understand me till you
comprehend Philip."

"Let us agree on one thing," Harry said. "Surely, aunt, you
know how he loves Hope?"

Aunt Jane approached a degree nearer the equator, and said,
gently, "I fear I do."

"Fear?"

"Yes, fear. That is just what troubles me. I know precisely
how he loves her. Il se laisse aimer. Philip likes to be
petted, as much as any cat, and, while he will purr, Hope is
happy. Very few men accept idolatry with any degree of grace,
but he unfortunately does."

"Unfortunately?" remonstrated Hal, as far as ever from being
satisfied. "This is really too bad. You never will do him any
justice."

"Ah?" said Aunt Jane, chilling again, "I thought I did. I
observe he is very much afraid of me, and there seems to be no
other reason."

"The real trouble is," said Harry, after a pause, "that you
doubt his constancy."

"What do you call constancy?" said she. "Kissing a woman's
picture ten years after a man has broken her heart? Philip
Malbone has that kind of constancy, and so had his father
before him."

This was too much for Harry, who was making for the door in
indignation, when little Ruth came in with Aunt Jane's
luncheon, and that lady was soon absorbed in the hopeless task
of keeping her handmaiden's pretty blue and white gingham
sleeve out of the butter-plate.

V.

A MULTIVALVE HEART.

PHILIP MALBONE had that perfectly sunny temperament which is
peculiarly captivating among Americans, because it is so rare.
He liked everybody and everybody liked him; he had a thousand
ways of affording pleasure, and he received it in the giving.
He had a personal beauty, which, strange to say, was recognized
by both sexes,--for handsome men must often consent to be
mildly hated by their own. He had travelled much, and had
mingled in very varied society; he had a moderate fortune, no
vices, no ambition, and no capacity of ennui.

He was fastidious and over-critical, it might be, in his
theories, but in practice he was easily suited and never vexed.

He liked travelling, and he liked staying at home; he was so
continually occupied as to give an apparent activity to all his
life, and yet he was never too busy to be interrupted,
especially if the intruder were a woman or a child. He liked
to be with people of his own age, whatever their condition; he
also liked old people because they were old, and children
because they were young. In travelling by rail, he would woo
crying babies out of their mothers' arms, and still them; it
was always his back that Irishwomen thumped, to ask if they
must get out at the next station; and he might be seen handing
out decrepit paupers, as if they were of royal blood and bore
concealed sceptres in their old umbrellas. Exquisitely nice in
his personal habits, he had the practical democracy of a
good-natured young prince; he had never yet seen a human being
who awed him, nor one whom he had the slightest wish to awe.
His courtesy, had, therefore, that comprehensiveness which we
call republican, though it was really the least republican
thing about him. All felt its attraction; there was really no
one who disliked him, except Aunt Jane; and even she admitted
that he was the only person who knew how to cut her
lead-pencil.

That cheerful English premier who thought that any man ought to
find happiness enough in walking London streets and looking at
the lobsters in the fish-markets, was not more easily satisfied
than Malbone. He liked to observe the groups of boys fishing
at the wharves, or to hear the chat of their fathers about
coral-reefs and penguins' eggs; or to sketch the fisher's
little daughter awaiting her father at night on some deserted
and crumbling wharf, his blue pea-jacket over her fair
ring-leted head, and a great cat standing by with tail
uplifted, her sole protector. He liked the luxurious indolence
of yachting, and he liked as well to float in his wherry among
the fleet of fishing schooners getting under way after a three
days' storm, each vessel slipping out in turn from the closely
packed crowd, and spreading its white wings for flight. He
liked to watch the groups of negro boys and girls strolling by
the window at evening, and strumming on the banjo,--the only
vestige of tropical life that haunts our busy Northern zone.
But he liked just as well to note the ways of well-dressed
girls and boys at croquet parties, or to sit at the club window
and hear the gossip. He was a jewel of a listener, and was not
easily bored even when Philadelphians talked about families, or
New Yorkers about bargains, or Bostonians about books. A man
who has not one absorbing aim can get a great many
miscellaneous things into each twenty-four hours; and there was
not a day in which Philip did not make himself agreeable and
useful to many people, receive many confidences, and give much
good-humored advice about matters of which he knew nothing. His
friends' children ran after him in the street, and he knew the
pet theories and wines of elderly gentlemen. He said that he
won their hearts by remembering every occurrence in their lives
except their birthdays.

It was, perhaps, no drawback on the popularity of Philip
Malbone that he had been for some ten years reproached as a
systematic flirt by all women with whom he did not happen at
the moment to be flirting. The reproach was unjust; he had
never done anything systematically in his life; it was his
temperament that flirted, not his will. He simply had that most
perilous of all seductive natures, in which the seducer is
himself seduced. With a personal refinement that almost
amounted to purity, he was constantly drifting into loves more
profoundly perilous than if they had belonged to a grosser man.
Almost all women loved him, because he loved almost all; he
never had to assume an ardor, for he always felt it. His heart
was multivalve; he could love a dozen at once in various modes
and gradations, press a dozen hands in a day, gaze into a dozen
pair of eyes with unfeigned tenderness; while the last pair
wept for him, he was looking into the next. In truth, he loved
to explore those sweet depths; humanity is the highest thing to
investigate, he said, and the proper study of mankind is woman.
Woman needs to be studied while under the influence of emotion;
let us therefore have the emotions. This was the reason he gave
to himself; but this refined Mormonism of the heart was not
based on reason, but on temperament and habit. In such matters
logic is only for the by-standers.

His very generosity harmed him, as all our good qualities may
harm us when linked with bad ones; he had so many excuses for
doing kindnesses to his friends, it was hard to quarrel with
him if he did them too tenderly. He was no more capable of
unkindness than of constancy; and so strongly did he fix the
allegiance of those who loved him, that the women to whom he
had caused most anguish would still defend him when accused;
would have crossed the continent, if needed, to nurse him in
illness, and would have rained rivers of tears on his grave.
To do him justice, he would have done almost as much for
them,--for any of them. He could torture a devoted heart, but
only through a sort of half-wilful unconsciousness; he could
not bear to see tears shed in his presence, nor to let his
imagination dwell very much on those which flowed in his
absence. When he had once loved a woman, or even fancied that
he loved her, he built for her a shrine that was never
dismantled, and in which a very little faint incense would
sometimes be found burning for years after; he never quite
ceased to feel a languid thrill at the mention of her name; he
would make even for a past love the most generous sacrifices of
time, convenience, truth perhaps,--everything, in short, but
the present love. To those who had given him all that an
undivided heart can give he would deny nothing but an undivided
heart in return. The misfortune was that this was the only
thing they cared to possess.

This abundant and spontaneous feeling gave him an air of
earnestness, without which he could not have charmed any woman,
and, least of all, one like Hope. No woman really loves a
trifler; she must at least convince herself that he who trifles
with others is serious with her. Philip was never quite serious
and never quite otherwise; he never deliberately got up a
passion, for it was never needful; he simply found an object
for his emotions, opened their valves, and then watched their
flow. To love a charming woman in her presence is no test of
genuine passion; let us know how much you long for her in
absence. This longing had never yet seriously troubled Malbone,
provided there was another charming person within an easy walk.

If it was sometimes forced upon him that all this ended in
anguish to some of these various charmers, first or last, then
there was always in reserve the pleasure of repentance. He was
very winning and generous in his repentances, and he enjoyed
them so much they were often repeated. He did not pass for a
weak person, and he was not exactly weak; but he spent his life
in putting away temptations with one hand and pulling them back
with the other. There was for him something piquant in being
thus neither innocent nor guilty, but always on some delicious
middle ground. He loved dearly to skate on thin ice,--that was
the trouble,--especially where he fancied the water to be just
within his depth. Unluckily the sea of life deepens rather
fast.

Malbone had known Hope from her childhood, as he had known her
cousins, but their love dated from their meetings beside the
sickbed of his mother, over whom he had watched with unstinted
devotion for weary months. She had been very fond of the young
girl, and her last earthly act was to place Hope's hand in
Philip's. Long before this final consecration, Hope had won his
heart more thoroughly, he fancied, than any woman he had ever
seen. The secret of this crowning charm was, perhaps, that she
was a new sensation. He had prided himself on his knowledge of
her sex, and yet here was a wholly new species. He was
acquainted with the women of society, and with the women who
only wished to be in society. But here was one who was in the
chrysalis, and had never been a grub, and had no wish to be a
butterfly, and what should he make of her? He was like a
student of insects who had never seen a bee. Never had he
known a young girl who cared for the things which this maiden
sought, or who was not dazzled by things to which Hope seemed
perfectly indifferent. She was not a devotee, she was not a
prude; people seemed to amuse and interest her; she liked them,
she declared, as much as she liked books. But this very way of
putting the thing seemed like inverting the accustomed order of
affairs in the polite world, and was of itself a novelty.

Of course he had previously taken his turn for a while among
Kate's admirers; but it was when she was very young, and,
moreover, it was hard to get up anything like a tender and
confidential relation with that frank maiden; she never would
have accepted Philip Malbone for herself, and she was by no
means satisfied with his betrothal to her best beloved. But
that Hope loved him ardently there was no doubt, however it
might be explained. Perhaps it was some law of opposites, and
she needed some one of lighter nature than her own. As her
resolute purpose charmed him, so she may have found a certain
fascination in the airy way in which he took hold on life; he
was so full of thought and intelligence; possessing infinite
leisure, and yet incapable of ennui; ready to oblige every one,
and doing so many kind acts at so little personal sacrifice;
always easy, graceful, lovable, and kind. In her just
indignation at those who called him heartless, she forgot to
notice that his heart was not deep. He was interested in all
her pursuits, could aid her in all her studies, suggest schemes
for her benevolent desires, and could then make others work for
her, and even work himself. People usually loved Philip, even
while they criticised him; but Hope loved him first, and then
could not criticise him at all.

Nature seems always planning to equalize characters, and to
protect our friends from growing too perfect for our deserts.
Love, for instance, is apt to strengthen the weak, and yet
sometimes weakens the strong. Under its influence Hope
sometimes appeared at disadvantage. Had the object of her love
been indifferent, the result might have been otherwise, but her
ample nature apparently needed to contract itself a little, to
find room within Philip's heart. Not that in his presence she
became vain or petty or jealous; that would have been
impossible. She only grew credulous and absorbed and blind. A
kind of gentle obstinacy, too, developed itself in her nature,
and all suggestion of defects in him fell off from her as from
a marble image of Faith. If he said or did anything, there was
no appeal; that was settled, let us pass to something else.

I almost blush to admit that Aunt Jane--of whom it could by no
means be asserted that she was a saintly lady, but only a very
charming one--rather rejoiced in this transformation.

"I like it better, my dear," she said, with her usual
frankness, to Kate. "Hope was altogether too heavenly for my
style. When she first came here, I secretly thought I never
should care anything about her. She seemed nothing but a
little moral tale. I thought she would not last me five
minutes. But now she is growing quite human and ridiculous
about that Philip, and I think I may find her very attractive
indeed."

VI.

"SOME LOVER'S CLEAR DAY."

"HOPE!" said Philip Malbone, as they sailed together in a
little boat the next morning, "I have come back to you from
months of bewildered dreaming. I have been wandering,--no
matter where. I need you. You cannot tell how much I need
you."

"I can estimate it," she answered, gently, "by my need of you."

"Not at all," said Philip, gazing in her trustful face. "Any
one whom you loved would adore you, could he be by your side.
You need nothing. It is I who need you."

"Why?" she asked, simply.

"Because," he said, "I am capable of behaving very much like a
fool. Hope, I am not worthy of you; why do you love me? why do
you trust me?"

"I do not know how I learned to love you," said Hope. "It is a
blessing that was given to me. But I learned to trust you in
your mother's sick-room."

"Ay," said Philip, sadly, "there, at least, I did my full
duty."

"As few would have done it," said Hope, firmly,--"very few.
Such prolonged self-sacrifice must strengthen a man for life."

"Not always," said Philip, uneasily. "Too much of that sort of
thing may hurt one, I fancy, as well as too little. He may come
to imagine that the balance of virtue is in his favor, and that
he may grant himself a little indulgence to make up for lost
time. That sort of recoil is a little dangerous, as I
sometimes feel, do you know?"

"And you show it," said Hope, ardently, "by fresh sacrifices!
How much trouble you have taken about Emilia! Some time, when
you are willing, you shall tell me all about it. You always
seemed to me a magician, but I did not think that even you
could restore her to sense and wisdom so soon."

Malbone was just then very busy putting the boat about; but
when he had it on the other tack, he said, "How do you like
her?"

"Philip," said Hope, her eyes filling with tears, "I wonder if
you have the slightest conception how my heart is fixed on that
child. She has always been a sort of dream to me, and the
difficulty of getting any letters from her has only added to
the excitement. Now that she is here, my whole heart yearns
toward her. Yet, when I look into her eyes, a sort of blank
hopelessness comes over me. They seem like the eyes of some
untamable creature whose language I shall never learn. Philip,
you are older and wiser than I, and have shown already that you
understand her. Tell me what I can do to make her love me?"

"Tell me how any one could help it?" said Malbone, looking
fondly on the sweet, pleading face before him.

"I am beginning to fear that it can be helped," she said. Her
thoughts were still with Emilia.

"Perhaps it can," said Phil, "if you sit so far away from
people. Here we are alone on the bay. Come and sit by me,
Hope."

She had been sitting amidships, but she came aft at once, and
nestled by him as he sat holding the tiller. She put her face
against his knee, like a tired child, and shut her eyes; her
hair was lifted by the summer breeze; a scent of roses came
from her; the mere contact of anything so fresh and pure was a
delight. He put his arm around her, and all the first ardor of
passion came back to him again; he remembered how he had longed
to win this Diana, and how thoroughly she was won.

"It is you who do me good," said she. "O Philip, sail as
slowly as you can." But he only sailed farther, instead of more
slowly, gliding in and out among the rocky islands in the light
north wind, which, for a wonder, lasted all that day,--dappling
the bare hills of the Isle of Shadows with a shifting beauty.
The tide was in and brimming, the fishing-boats were busy,
white gulls soared and clattered round them, and heavy
cormorants flapped away as they neared the rocks. Beneath the
boat the soft multitudinous jellyfishes waved their fringed
pendants, or glittered with tremulous gold along their pink,
translucent sides. Long lines and streaks of paler blue lay
smoothly along the enamelled surface, the low, amethystine
hills lay couched beyond them, and little clouds stretched
themselves in lazy length above the beautiful expanse. They
reached the ruined fort at last, and Philip, surrendering Hope
to others, was himself besieged by a joyous group.

As you stand upon the crumbling parapet of old Fort Louis, you
feel yourself poised in middle air; the sea-birds soar and
swoop around you, the white surf lashes the rocks far below,
the white vessels come and go, the water is around you on all
sides but one, and spreads its pale blue beauty up the lovely
bay, or, in deeper tints, southward towards the horizon line. I
know of no ruin in America which nature has so resumed; it
seems a part of the living rock; you cannot imagine it away.

It is a single round, low tower, shaped like the tomb of
Cacilia Metella. But its stately position makes it rank with
the vast sisterhood of wave-washed strongholds; it might be
King Arthur's Cornish Tyntagel; it might be "the teocallis
tower" of Tuloom. As you gaze down from its height, all things
that float upon the ocean seem equalized. Look at the crowded
life on yonder frigate, coming in full-sailed before the steady
sea-breeze. To furl that heavy canvas, a hundred men cluster
like bees upon the yards, yet to us upon this height it is all
but a plaything for the eyes, and we turn with equal interest
from that thronged floating citadel to some lonely boy in his
skiff.

Yonder there sail to the ocean, beating wearily to windward, a
few slow vessels. Inward come jubilant white schooners,
wing-and-wing. There are fishing-smacks towing their boats
behind them like a family of children; and there are slender
yachts that bear only their own light burden. Once from this
height I saw the whole yacht squadron round Point Judith, and
glide in like a flock of land-bound sea-birds; and above them,
yet more snowy and with softer curves, pressed onward the white
squadrons of the sky.

Within, the tower is full of debris, now disintegrated into one
solid mass, and covered with vegetation. You can lie on the
blossoming clover, where the bees hum and the crickets chirp
around you, and can look through the arch which frames its own
fair picture. In the foreground lies the steep slope overgrown
with bayberry and gay with thistle blooms; then the little
winding cove with its bordering cliffs; and the rough pastures
with their grazing sheep beyond. Or, ascending the parapet,
you can look across the bay to the men making hay picturesquely
on far-off lawns, or to the cannon on the outer works of Fort
Adams, looking like vast black insects that have crawled forth
to die.

Here our young people spent the day; some sketched, some played
croquet, some bathed in rocky inlets where the kingfisher
screamed above them, some rowed to little craggy isles for wild
roses, some fished, and then were taught by the boatmen to cook
their fish in novel island ways. The morning grew more and more
cloudless, and then in the afternoon a fog came and went again,
marching by with its white armies, soon met and annihilated by
a rainbow.

The conversation that day was very gay and incoherent,--little
fragments of all manner of things; science, sentiment,
everything: "Like a distracted dictionary," Kate said. At
last this lively maiden got Philip away from the rest, and
began to cross-question him.

"Tell me," she said, "about Emilia's Swiss lover. She shuddered
when she spoke of him. Was he so very bad?"

"Not at all," was the answer. "You had false impressions of
him. He was a handsome, manly fellow, a little
over-sentimental. He had travelled, and had been a merchant's
clerk in Paris and London. Then he came back, and became a
boatman on the lake, some said, for love of her."

"Did she love him?"

"Passionately, as she thought."

"Did he love her much?"

"I suppose so."

"Then why did she stop loving him?"

"She does not hate him?"

"No," said Kate, "that is what surprises me. Lovers hate, or
those who have been lovers. She is only indifferent. Philip,
she had wound silk upon a torn piece of his carte-de-visite,
and did not know it till I showed it to her. Even then she did
not care."

"Such is woman!" said Philip.

"Nonsense," said Kate. "She had seen somebody whom she loved
better, and she still loves that somebody. Who was it? She
had not been introduced into society. Were there any superior
men among her teachers? She is just the girl to fall in love
with her teacher, at least in Europe, where they are the only
men one sees."

"There were some very superior men among them," said Philip.
"Professor Schirmer has a European reputation; he wears blue
spectacles and a maroon wig."

"Do not talk so," said Kate. "I tell you, Emilia is not
changeable, like you, sir. She is passionate and constant. She
would have married that man or died for him. You may think
that your sage counsels restrained her, but they did not; it
was that she loved some one else. Tell me honestly. Do you not
know that there is somebody in Europe whom she loves to
distraction?"

"I do not know it," said Philip.

"Of course you do not KNOW it," returned the questioner. "Do
you not think it?"

"I have no reason to believe it."

"That has nothing to do with it," said Kate. "Things that we
believe without any reason have a great deal more weight with
us. Do you not believe it?"

"No," said Philip, point-blank.

"It is very strange," mused Kate. "Of course you do not know
much about it. She may have misled you, but I am sure that
neither you nor any one else could have cured her of a passion,
especially an unreasonable one, without putting another in its
place. If you did it without that, you are a magician, as Hope
once called you. Philip, I am afraid of you."

"There we sympathize," said Phil. "I am sometimes afraid of
myself, but I discover within half an hour what a very
commonplace land harmless person I am."

Meantime Emilia found herself beside her sister, who was
sketching. After watching Hope for a time in silence, she began
to question her.

"Tell me what you have been doing in all these years," she
said.

"O, I have been at school," said Hope. "First I went through
the High School; then I stayed out of school a year, and
studied Greek and German with my uncle, and music with my aunt,
who plays uncommonly well. Then I persuaded them to let me go
to the Normal School for two years, and learn to be a teacher."

"A teacher!" said Emilia, with surprise. "Is it necessary that
you should be a teacher?"

"Very necessary," replied Hope. "I must have something to do,
you know, after I leave school."

"To do?" said the other. "Cannot you go to parties?"

"Not all the time," said her sister.

"Well," said Emilia, "in the mean time you can go to drive, or
make calls, or stay at home and make pretty little things to
wear, as other girls do."

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