An Oldport Romance

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Sometimes he talked a little to his future brother-in-law,
Harry,--assuming, as lovers are wont, that brothers see sisters
on their ideal side. This was quite true of Harry and Hope,
but not at all true as regarded Emilia. She seemed to him
simply a beautiful and ungoverned girl whom he could not
respect, and whom he therefore found it very hard to idealize.
Therefore he heard with a sort of sadness the outpourings of
generous devotion from John Lambert.

"I don't know how it is, Henry," the merchant would gravely
say, "I can't get rightly used to it, that I feel so strange.
Honestly, now, I feel as if I was beginning life over again. It
ain't a selfish feeling, so I know there's some good in it. I
used to be selfish enough, but I ain't so to her. You may not
think it, but if it would make her happy, I believe I could lie
down and let her carriage roll over me. By -----, I would build
her a palace to live in, and keep the lodge at the gate myself,
just to see her pass by. That is, if she was to live in it
alone by herself. I couldn't stand sharing her. It must be me
or nobody."

Probably there was no male acquaintance of the parties, however
hardened, to whom these fine flights would have seemed more
utterly preposterous than to the immediate friend and
prospective bridesmaid, Miss Blanche Ingleside. To that young
lady, trained sedulously by a devoted mother, life was really a
serious thing. It meant the full rigor of the marriage market,
tempered only by dancing and new dresses. There was a stern
sense of duty beneath all her robing and disrobing; she
conscientiously did what was expected of her, and took her
little amusements meanwhile. It was supposed that most of the
purchasers in the market preferred slang and bare shoulders,
and so she favored them with plenty of both. It was merely the
law of supply and demand. Had John Lambert once hinted that he
would accept her in decent black, she would have gone to the
next ball as a Sister of Charity; but where was the need of it,
when she and her mother both knew that, had she appeared as the
Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, she would not have won him? So her
only resource was a cheerful acquiescence in Emilia's luck, and
a judicious propitiation of the accepted favorite.

"I wouldn't mind playing Virtue Rewarded myself, young woman,"
said Blanche, "at such a scale of prices. I would do it even
to so slow an audience as old Lambert. But you see, it isn't
my line. Don't forget your humble friends when you come into
your property, that's all." Then the tender coterie of
innocents entered on some preliminary consideration of
wedding-dresses.

When Emilia came home, she dismissed the whole matter lightly
as a settled thing, evaded all talk with Aunt Jane, and coolly
said to Kate that she had no objection to Mr. Lambert, and
might as well marry him as anybody else.

"I am not like you and Hal, you know," said she. "I have no
fancy for love in a cottage. I never look well in anything
that is not costly. I have not a taste that does not imply a
fortune. What is the use of love? One marries for love, and is
unhappy ever after. One marries for money, and perhaps gets
love after all. I dare say Mr. Lambert loves me, though I do
not see why he should."

"I fear he does," said Kate, almost severely.

"Fear?" said Emilia.

"Yes," said Kate. "It is an unequal bargain, where one side
does all the loving."

"Don't be troubled," said Emilia. "I dare say he will not love
me long. Nobody ever did!" And her eyes filled with tears
which she dashed away angrily, as she ran up to her room.

It was harder yet for her to talk with Hope, but she did it,
and that in a very serious mood. She had never been so open
with her sister.

"Aunt Jane once told me," she said, "that my only safety was in
marrying a good man. Now I am engaged to one."

"Do you love him, Emilia?" asked Hope, gravely.

"Not much," said Emilia, honestly. "But perhaps I shall, by
and by."

"Emilia," cried Hope, "there is no such thing as happiness in a
marriage without love."

"Mine is not without love," the girl answered. "He loves me.
It frightens me to see how much he loves me. I can have the
devotion of a lifetime, if I will. Perhaps it is hard to
receive it in such a way, but I can have it. Do you blame me
very much?"

Hope hesitated. "I cannot blame you so much, my child," she
said, "as if I thought it were money for which you cared. It
seems to me that there must be something beside that, and
yet--"

"O Hope, how I thank you," interrupted Emilia. "It is not
money. You know I do not care about money, except just to buy
my clothes and things. At least, I do not care about so much
as he has,--more than a million dollars, only think! Perhaps
they said two million. Is it wrong for me to marry him, just
because he has that?"

"Not if you love him."

"I do not exactly love him, but O Hope, I cannot tell you about
it. I am not so frivolous as you think. I want to do my duty.
I want to make you happy too: you have been so sweet to me."

"Did you think it would make me happy to have you married?"
asked Hope, surprised, and kissing again and again the young,
sad face. And the two girls went upstairs together, brought for
the moment into more sisterly nearness by the very thing that
had seemed likely to set them forever apart.

XIII.

DREAMING DREAMS.

SO short was the period between Emilia's betrothal and her
marriage, that Aunt Jane's sufferings over trousseau and visits
did not last long. Mr. Lambert's society was the worst thing to
bear.

"He makes such long calls!" she said, despairingly. "He should
bring an almanac with him to know when the days go by."

"But Harry and Philip are here all the time," said Kate, the
accustomed soother.

"Harry is quiet, and Philip keeps out of the way lately," she
answered. "But I always thought lovers the most inconvenient
thing about a house. They are more troublesome than the mice,
and all those people who live in the wainscot; for though the
lovers make less noise, yet you have to see them."

"A necessary evil, dear," said Kate, with much philosophy.

"I am not sure," said the complainant. "They might be excluded
in the deed of a house, or by the terms of the lease. The next
house I take, I shall say to the owner, 'Have you a good well
of water on the premises? Are you troubled with rats or
lovers?' That will settle it."

It was true, what Aunt Jane said about Malbone. He had changed
his habits a good deal. While the girls were desperately busy
about the dresses, he beguiled Harry to the club, and sat on
the piazza, talking sentiment and sarcasm, regardless of
hearers.

"When we are young," he would say, "we are all idealists in
love. Every imaginative boy has such a passion, while his
intellect is crude and his senses indifferent. It is the
height of bliss. All other pleasures are not worth its pains.
With older men this ecstasy of the imagination is rare; it is
the senses that clutch or reason which holds."

"Is that an improvement?" asked some juvenile listener.

"No!" said Philip, strongly. "Reason is cold and sensuality
hateful; a man of any feeling must feed his imagination; there
must be a woman of whom he can dream."

"That is," put in some more critical auditor, "whom he can love
as a woman loves a man."

"For want of the experience of such a passion," Malbone went
on, unheeding, "nobody comprehends Petrarch. Philosophers and
sensualists all refuse to believe that his dream of Laura went
on, even when he had a mistress and a child. Why not? Every
one must have something to which his dreams can cling, amid the
degradations of actual life, and this tie is more real than the
degradation; and if he holds to the tie, it will one day save
him."

"What is the need of the degradation?" put in the clear-headed
Harry.

"None, except in weakness," said Philip. "A stronger nature
may escape it. Good God! do I not know how Petrarch must have
felt? What sorrow life brings! Suppose a man hopelessly
separated from one whom he passionately loves. Then, as he
looks up at the starry sky, something says to him: 'You can
bear all these agonies of privation, loss of life, loss of
love,--what are they? If the tie between you is what you
thought, neither life nor death, neither folly nor sin, can
keep her forever from you.' Would that one could always feel
so! But I am weak. Then comes impulse, it thirsts for some
immediate gratification; I yield, and plunge into any happiness
since I cannot obtain her. Then comes quiet again, with the
stars, and I bitterly reproach myself for needing anything more
than that stainless ideal. And so, I fancy, did Petrarch."

Philip was getting into a dangerous mood with his
sentimentalism. No lawful passion can ever be so bewildering or
ecstatic as an unlawful one. For that which is right has all
the powers of the universe on its side, and can afford to wait;
but the wrong, having all those vast forces against it, must
hurry to its fulfilment, reserve nothing, concentrate all its
ecstasies upon to-day. Malbone, greedy of emotion, was drinking
to the dregs a passion that could have no to-morrow.

Sympathetic persons are apt to assume that every refined
emotion must be ennobling. This is not true of men like
Malbone, voluptuaries of the heart. He ordinarily got up a
passion very much as Lord Russell got up an appetite,--he, of
Spence's Anecdotes, who went out hunting for that sole purpose,
and left the chase when the sensation came. Malbone did not
leave his more spiritual chase so soon,--it made him too happy.
Sometimes, indeed, when he had thus caught his emotion, it
caught him in return, and for a few moments made him almost
unhappy. This he liked best of all; he nursed the delicious
pain, knowing that it would die out soon enough, there was no
need of hurrying it to a close. At least, there had never been
need for such solicitude before.

Except for his genius for keeping his own counsel, every
acquaintance of Malbone's would have divined the meaning of
these reveries. As it was, he was called whimsical and
sentimental, but he was a man of sufficiently assured position
to have whims of his own, and could even treat himself to an
emotion or so, if he saw fit. Besides, he talked well to
anybody on anything, and was admitted to exhibit, for a man of
literary tastes, a good deal of sense. If he had engaged
himself to a handsome schoolmistress, it was his fancy, and he
could afford it. Moreover she was well connected, and had an
air. And what more natural than that he should stand at the
club-window and watch, when his young half-sister (that was to
be) drove by with John Lambert? So every afternoon he saw them
pass in a vehicle of lofty description, with two wretched
appendages in dark blue broadcloth, who sat with their backs
turned to their masters, kept their arms folded, and nearly
rolled off at every corner. Hope would have dreaded the close
neighborhood of those Irish ears; she would rather have ridden
even in an omnibus, could she and Philip have taken all the
seats. But then Hope seldom cared to drive on the Avenue at
all, except as a means of reaching the ocean, whereas with most
people it appears the appointed means to escape from that
spectacle. And as for the footmen, there was nothing in the
conversation worth their hearing or repeating; and their
presence was a relief to Emilia, for who knew but Mr. Lambert
himself might end in growing sentimental?

Yet she did not find him always equally tedious. Their drives
had some variety. For instance, he sometimes gave her some
lovely present before they set forth, and she could feel that,
if his lips did not yield diamonds and rubies, his pockets did.
Sometimes he conversed about money and investments, which she
rather liked; this was his strong and commanding point; he
explained things quite clearly, and they found, with mutual
surprise, that she also had a shrewd little brain for those
matters, if she would but take the trouble to think about them.
Sometimes he insisted on being tender, and even this was not so
bad as she expected, at least for a few minutes at a time; she
rather enjoyed having her hand pressed so seriously, and his
studied phrases amused her. It was only when he wished the
conversation to be brilliant and intellectual, that he became
intolerable; then she must entertain him, must get up little
repartees, must tell him lively anecdotes, which he swallowed
as a dog bolts a morsel, being at once ready for the next. He
never made a comment, of course, but at the height of his
enjoyment he gave a quick, short, stupid laugh, that so jarred
upon her ears, she would have liked to be struck deaf rather
than hear it again.

At these times she thought of Malbone, how gifted he was, how
inexhaustible, how agreeable, with a faculty for happiness that
would have been almost provoking had it not been contagious.
Then she looked from her airy perch and smiled at him at the
club-window, where he stood in the most negligent of attitudes,
and with every faculty strained in observation. A moment and
she was gone.

Then all was gone, and a mob of queens might have blocked the
way, without his caring to discuss their genealogies, even with
old General Le Breton, who had spent his best (or his worst)
years abroad, and was supposed to have been confidential
adviser to most of the crowned heads of Europe.

For the first time in his life Malbone found himself in the
grasp of a passion too strong to be delightful. For the first
time his own heart frightened him. He had sometimes feared that
it was growing harder, but now he discovered that it was not
hard enough.

He knew it was not merely mercenary motives that had made
Emilia accept John Lambert; but what troubled him was a vague
knowledge that it was not mere pique. He was used to dealing
with pique in women, and had found it the most manageable of
weaknesses. It was an element of spasmodic conscience than he
saw here, and it troubled him.

Something told him that she had said to herself: "I will be
married, and thus do my duty to Hope. Other girls marry
persons whom they do not love, and it helps them to forget.
Perhaps it will help me. This is a good man, they say, and I
think he loves me."

"Think?" John Lambert had adored her when she had passed by
him without looking at him; and now when the thought came over
him that she would be his wife, he became stupid with bliss.
And as latterly he had thought of little else, he remained more
or less stupid all the time.

To a man like Malbone, self-indulgent rather than selfish, this
poor, blind semblance of a moral purpose in Emilia was a great
embarrassment. It is a terrible thing for a lover when he
detects conscience amidst the armory of weapons used against
him, and faces the fact that he must blunt a woman's principles
to win her heart. Philip was rather accustomed to evade
conscience, but he never liked to look it in the face and defy
it.

Yet if the thought of Hope at this time came over him, it came
as a constraint, and he disliked it as such; and the more
generous and beautiful she was, the greater the constraint. He
cursed himself that he had allowed himself to be swayed back to
her, and so had lost Emilia forever. And thus he drifted on,
not knowing what he wished for, but knowing extremely well what
he feared.

XIV.

THE NEMESIS OF PASSION.

MALBONE was a person of such ready, emotional nature, and such
easy expression, that it was not hard for Hope to hide from
herself the gradual ebbing of his love. Whenever he was fresh
and full of spirits, he had enough to overflow upon her and
every one. But when other thoughts and cares were weighing on
him, he could not share them, nor could he at such times, out
of the narrowing channel of his own life, furnish more than a
few scanty drops for her.

At these times he watched with torturing fluctuations the signs
of solicitude in Hope, the timid withdrawing of her fingers,
the questioning of her eyes, the weary drooping of her whole
expression. Often he cursed himself as a wretch for paining
that pure and noble heart. Yet there were moments when a vague
inexpressible delight stole in; a glimmering of shame-faced
pleasure as he pondered on this visible dawning of distrust; a
sudden taste of freedom in being no longer fettered by her
confidence. By degrees he led himself, still half ashamed, to
the dream that she might yet be somehow weaned from him, and
leave his conscience free. By constantly building upon this
thought, and putting aside all others, he made room upon the
waste of his life for a house of cards, glittering,
unsubstantial, lofty,--until there came some sudden breath that
swept it away; and then he began on it again.

In one of those moments of more familiar faith which still
alternated with these cold, sad intervals, she asked him with
some sudden impulse, how he should feel if she loved another?
She said it, as if guided by an instinct, to sound the depth of
his love for her. Starting with amazement, he looked at her,
and then, divining her feeling, he only replied by an
expression of reproach, and by kissing her hands with an
habitual tenderness that had grown easy to him,--and they were
such lovely hands! But his heart told him that no spent swimmer
ever transferred more eagerly to another's arms some precious
burden beneath which he was consciously sinking, than he would
yield her up to any one whom she would consent to love, and who
could be trusted with the treasure. Until that ecstasy of
release should come, he would do his duty,--yes, his duty.

When these flushed hopes grew pale, as they soon did, he could
at least play with the wan fancies that took their place. Hour
after hour, while she lavished upon him the sweetness of her
devotion, he was half consciously shaping with his tongue some
word of terrible revealing that should divide them like a
spell, if spoken, and then recalling it before it left his
lips. Daily and hourly he felt the last agony of a weak and
passionate nature,--to dream of one woman in another's arms.

She, too, watched him with an ever-increasing instinct of
danger, studied with a chilly terror the workings of his face,
weighed and reweighed his words in absence, agonized herself
with new and ever new suspicions; and then, when these had
accumulated beyond endurance, seized them convulsively and
threw them all away. Then, coming back to him with a great
overwhelming ardor of affection, she poured upon him more and
more in proportion as he gave her less.

Sometimes in these moments of renewed affection he half gave
words to his remorse, accused himself before her of unnamed
wrong, and besought her to help him return to his better self.
These were the most dangerous moments of all, for such appeals
made tenderness and patience appear a duty; she must put away
her doubts as sins, and hold him to her; she must refuse to see
his signs of faltering faith, or treat them as mere symptoms of
ill health. Should not a wife cling the closer to her husband
in proportion as he seemed alienated through the wanderings of
disease? And was not this her position? So she said within
herself, and meanwhile it was not hard to penetrate her
changing thoughts, at least for so keen an observer as Aunt
Jane. Hope, at length, almost ceased to speak of Malbone, and
revealed her grief by this evasion, as the robin reveals her
nest by flitting from it.

Yet there were times when he really tried to force himself into
a revival of this calmer emotion. He studied Hope's beauty
with his eyes, he pondered on all her nobleness. He wished to
bring his whole heart back to her--or at least wished that he
wished it. But hearts that have educated themselves into
faithlessness must sooner or later share the suffering they
give. Love will be avenged on them. Nothing could have now
recalled this epicure in passion, except, possibly, a little
withholding or semi-coquetry on Hope's part, and this was
utterly impossible for her. Absolute directness was a part of
her nature; she could die, but not manouvre.

It actually diminished Hope's hold on Philip, that she had at
this time the whole field to herself. Emilia had gone for a
few weeks to the mountains, with the household of which she was
a guest. An ideal and unreasonable passion is strongest in
absence, when the dream is all pure dream, and safe from the
discrepancies of daily life. When the two girls were together,
Emilia often showed herself so plainly Hope's inferior, that it
jarred on Philip's fine perceptions. But in Emilia's absence
the spell of temperament, or whatever else brought them
together, resumed its sway unchecked; she became one great
magnet of attraction, and all the currents of the universe
appeared to flow from the direction where her eyes were
shining. When she was out of sight, he needed to make no
allowance for her defects, to reproach himself with no overt
acts of disloyalty to Hope, to recognize no criticisms of his
own intellect or conscience. He could resign himself to his
reveries, and pursue them into new subtleties day by day.

There was Mrs. Meredith's house, too, where they had been so
happy. And now the blinds were pitilessly closed, all but one
where the Venetian slats had slipped, and stood half open as if
some dainty fingers held them, and some lovely eyes looked
through. He gazed so long and so often on that silent
house,--by day, when the scorching sunshine searched its pores
as if to purge away every haunting association, or by night,
when the mantle of darkness hung tenderly above it, and seemed
to collect the dear remembrances again,--that his fancy by
degrees grew morbid, and its pictures unreal. "It is
impossible," he one day thought to himself, "that she should
have lived in that room so long, sat in that window, dreamed on
that couch, reflected herself in that mirror, breathed that
air, without somehow detaching invisible fibres of her being,
delicate films of herself, that must gradually, she being gone,
draw together into a separate individuality an image not quite
bodiless, that replaces her in her absence, as the holy
Theocrite was replaced by the angel. If there are ghosts of the
dead, why not ghosts of the living also?" This lover's fancy so
pleased him that he brought to bear upon it the whole force of
his imagination, and it grew stronger day by day. To him,
thenceforth, the house was haunted, and all its floating traces
of herself visible or invisible,--from the ribbon that he saw
entangled in the window-blind to every intangible and fancied
atom she had imparted to the atmosphere,--came at last to
organize themselves into one phantom shape for him and looked
out, a wraith of Emilia, through those relentless blinds. As
the vision grew more vivid, he saw the dim figure moving
through the house, wan, restless, tender, lingering where they
had lingered, haunting every nook where they had been happy
once. In the windy moanings of the silent night he could put
his ear at the keyhole, and could fancy that he heard the wild
signals of her love and despair.

XV.

ACROSS THE BAY.

THE children, as has been said, were all devoted to Malbone,
and this was, in a certain degree, to his credit. But it is a
mistake to call children good judges of character, except in
one direction, namely, their own. They understand it, up to the
level of their own stature; they know who loves them, but not
who loves virtue. Many a sinner has a great affection for
children, and no child will ever detect the sins of such a
friend; because, toward them, the sins do not exist.

The children, therefore, all loved Philip, and yet they turned
with delight, when out-door pleasures were in hand, to the
strong and adroit Harry. Philip inclined to the daintier
exercises, fencing, billiards, riding; but Harry's vigorous
physique enjoyed hard work. He taught all the household to
swim, for instance. Jenny, aged five, a sturdy, deep-chested
little thing, seemed as amphibious as himself. She could
already swim alone, but she liked to keep close to him, as all
young animals do to their elders in the water, not seeming to
need actual support, but stronger for the contact. Her favorite
position, however, was on his back, where she triumphantly
clung, grasping his bathing-dress with one hand, swinging
herself to and fro, dipping her head beneath the water, singing
and shouting, easily shifting her position when he wished to
vary his, and floating by him like a little fish, when he was
tired of supporting her. It was pretty to see the child in her
one little crimson garment, her face flushed with delight, her
fair hair glistening from the water, and the waves rippling and
dancing round her buoyant form. As Harry swam farther and
farther out, his head was hidden from view by her small person,
and she might have passed for a red seabird rocking on the
gentle waves. It was one of the regular delights of the
household to see them bathe.

Kate came in to Aunt Jane's room, one August morning, to say
that they were going to the water-side. How differently people
may enter a room! Hope always came in as the summer breeze
comes, quiet, strong, soft, fragrant, resistless. Emilia never
seemed to come in at all; you looked up, and she had somehow
drifted where she stood, pleading, evasive, lovely. This was
especially the case where one person was awaiting her alone;
with two she was more fearless, with a dozen she was buoyant,
and with a hundred she forgot herself utterly and was a spirit
of irresistible delight.

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