A week had passed since the arrival of the city nieces at the
farmhouse. An early tea, one of Aunt Sarah's generous and appetizing
repasts, was over; and through the garden, out at the gate that
terminated the middle walk, and across the strip of meadow-land, danced
Charley and Jeannie, followed at a more sedate pace by Philip Benson
and Sarah. Seven days' rustication had wrought a marked change in the
town-bred girl. There was a lighter bound in her step, and in her
cheek a clear, pink glow, while her eyes looked softly, yet brightly,
from out the shadow of her gypsy hat, a look of half surprise, half
confidence in her companion's face.
"One week ago," he was saying, "how firmly I made up my mind that
you and I could never be anything but strangers to each other! How I
disliked you for coming down here to interfere with my liberty and
leisure!"
"But even then you thought that I would prove a 'nice companion for
Aunt Sarah'--perceived my suitableness to her society," was the demure
reply.
"Who told you that I said so?"
"Not Aunt Sarah herself, although she considered it honest praise. I
overheard it accidentally from my window, and I can assure you properly
appreciated the compliment, which, by the way, was more in the tone
than the words."
"And you were thereby piqued to a different style of behavior. Bravo!
did ever another seed so worthless bring forth so rich a harvest? I am
glad I said it! Here is the boat."
It was a pretty little affair--Charley's property and care, and he was
already in his seat at the bow, oar in hand. Philip helped Sarah in,
placed Jeannie beside her, and stationing himself upon the middle bench
took up a second pair of oars. A noiseless dip of the four, and the
craft glided out into the stream, then up against the tide, the water
rippling into a foamy wake on either side of the sharp bow. A row was
now the regular sequel to the day's enjoyments, and to Jeannie, at
least, the climax of its pleasures.
"Pull that way, please, Mr. Benson!" she cried. "There! right through
that beautiful red water!"
A skilful sweep brought them to the spot designated, but the crimson
deserted the wave as they neared it, and left dull gray in its stead.
"It is too bad!" complained the child, pointing back to the track
of their boat, quivering amidst the fickle radiance she had thought
to reach by this change of course. "It is behind us and before
us--everywhere but where we are!"
"Is there a moral in that?" questioned Philip, smiling at Sarah.
"Perhaps so."
A fortnight before, how assured would have been her reply! How gloomy
her recognition of the analogy! Changed as was her mood, a shade fell
over her countenance. Was it of apprehension, and did Philip thus
interpret it?
"I could not love life and this fair world as I do, if I conceded this
to be universally true," he said. "That there comes, sometimes, a glory
to the present, besides which the hues of past and future fade and are
forgotten, I must and will believe. Such, it seems to me, must be the
rapture of reciprocal and acknowledged affection; the joy of reunion
after long separation from the beloved one; the bliss of reconciliation
after estrangement. Have you ever thought how much happier we would be
if we were to live only in the Now we have, and never strain our eyes
with searching for, the lights and shades of what may be before us, or
with 'mournful looking' after what is gone?"
"Yet is this possible?" asked Sarah, earnestly. "Does not the very
constitution of our natures forbid it? To me that would be a miserably
tame, dead-level existence over which Hope sheds no enchanting
illusions; like this river, as we saw it three days ago, cold and
sombre as the rain-clouds that hung above it. Oh, no! give me anything
but the chill, neutral tint of such a life as thousands are content to
lead--people who expect nothing, fear nothing--I had almost said, feel
nothing!"
"That is because every principle of your being is at war with
common-places. Tell me frankly, Miss Sarah, did you ever meet another
woman who had as much character as yourself?"
"I do not know that I understand the full bearing of your question."
She leaned on the side of the boat, her hand playing in the water, her
lips working in an irresolute timidity that was oddly at variance with
their habitual firmness.
"I am aware," she began slowly and gravely, "that I express myself too
strongly at times; that I am more abrupt in language and action than
most other girls. I have always been told so; but it is natural to me.
My character has many rough and sharp edges that need softening and
rounding"--
"In order to render you one of the pretty automatons, the well-draped,
thoroughly-oiled pieces of human clockwork that decorates men's
homes--falsely so called--in these days of gloss and humbug!"
interrupted Philip with energy. "I am sick to death of the dollish
'sweet creatures' every boarding-school turns out by the score. I
understand all the wires that work the dear puppets--flatter myself
that I can put them through their paces (excuse the slang!) in as
short a time as any other man of my age in the country. The delightful
divinities! A little music, and a little less French; a skimming of
the arts and sciences; and it is a rare thing to meet one who can tell
an art from a science ten days after she has graduated--a stock of pet
phrases--all hyperbolical, consequently unmeaning--a glib utterance
of the same; a steady devotion to balls, beau-catching, gossip, and
fancy-work; voila the modern fine lady--the stuff we are expected to
make wives of! Wives! save the mark! I never think of the possibility
of being thus ensnared without an involuntary repetition of a portion
of the Litany--'From all such, etc., etc.!'"
He plied his oars with renewed activity for a moment, then suspended
them to continue, in a softer tone: "And this is the representative
woman of your Utopia, Miss Sarah?"
"Did I intimate, much less assert, such a heresy?" responded she,
laughing. "But there is a golden mean somewhere--a union of gentleness
and energy; of domestic and literary taste; of independence and
submission. I have seen such in my day dreams. She is my ideal."
"Which you will one day embody. No reproachful looks! This is the
sincerity of a friend. I have promised never to flatter you again, and
do not violate the pledge in speaking thus. From my boyhood, I have
made human nature my study, and it would be hard to convince me that I
err in this case."
"You do! indeed you do!" exclaimed Sarah, with a look of real pain. "I
lack the first characteristic of the portrait I have drawn. I am not
gentle! I never was. I fear that I never will be!"
"Let us hear a competent witness on that head. Jeannie!" to the child,
who was busy spelling on her fingers to Charley; his nods and smiles to
her, from the far end of the boat, being more intelligible to her than
were her attempts to signal her meaning to him. "Jeannie!" repeated
Philip, as he caught her eye. "Come, and whisper in my ear which of
your sisters you love the best. Maybe I won't tell tales out of school
to the one you care least for."
"I don't care who knows!" said the saucy, but affectionate child. "Sis'
Lucy is the prettiest, and she never scolds me either; but she doesn't
make my clothes, and tell me nice stories, and help me with my lessons,
and all that, you know. She isn't my dear, best sister!" And, springing
up suddenly, she threw her arms around Sarah's neck, with a kiss that
answered the question with emphasis.
Sarah's lip trembled. The share of affection she had hitherto dared to
claim as her own had barely sufficed to keep her heart from starving
outright. She had often dreamed of fulness of love as a stay and
comfort, as solace and nutriment in a world whose wrong side was ever
turned to her. Now there dawned upon her the sweetness and beauty of
a new revelation, the bliss of loving and being beloved. Over life
floated a warm, purple tinge, like the sunset light upon the river. For
the first time within the reach of her memory her heart rested!
In the smile whose overflowing gave a tender loveliness to her
features, Philip saw the effect he had wished and anticipated, and,
motioning to Charley to let the boat drift with the current, he picked
up the guitar, that by Sarah's request was always taken along in these
excursions.
"The dew is on the blossom,
And the young moon on the sea;
It is the twilight hour--
The hour for you and me;
The time when memory lingers
Across life's dreary track,
When the past floats up before us,
And the lost comes stealing back."
It was a love song, inimitable in its purity and tenderness, with just
the touch of sadness that insured its passage to the heart. Sarah's
smile was softer, but it was a smile still, as the melody arose on the
quiet air. When the ballad was concluded, she only said, "Another,
please!"
Philip sang more than well. Without extraordinary power, his voice had
a rich and flexible quality of tone and a delicacy of expression that
never failed to fascinate. To the rapt and listening girl it seemed
as if time could bring no more delicious fate than thus to glide on
ever upon this empurpled, enchanted stream, the summer heavens above
her, and, thrilling ear and soul, the witching lullaby that rocked her
spirit to dreams of the youth she had never had, the love for which she
had longed with all the wild intensity, the fervent yearning, her deep
heart could feel.
Still they floated on with the receding tide, its low washing against
the sides of their boat filling up the pauses of the music. The burning
red and gold of the sky cooled into the mellower tints of twilight,
and the pale curve of the young moon shone with increasing lustre.
Jeannie fell asleep, her head upon her sister's lap; the dumb boy sat
motionless as stone, his dark eyes fixed on the moon; there seemed
some spell upon the little party. Boat after boat passed them, almost
noiselessly, for far into the clear evening went the tones of the
singer's voice, and the dullest hearer could not withhold the tribute
of admiring silence until beyond its reach.
And Sarah, happy in the strange, restful languor that locked her senses
to all except the blessed present, dreamed on, the music but a part of
her ideal world, this new and beautiful life. Into it stole presently
a theme of sadness, a strain of grief, a heart-cry, that, ere she was
aware, wrung her own heart-strings with anguish.
"The long, long weary day
Is passed in tears away,
And still at evening I am weeping.
When from my window's height
I look out on the night,
I am still weeping,
My lone watch keeping.
"When I, his truth to prove,
Would trifle with my love,
He'd say, 'For me thou wilt be weeping,
When, at some future day,
I shall be far away;
Thou wilt be weeping,
Thy lone watch keeping.'
"Alas! if land or sea
Had parted him from me,
I would not these sad tears be weeping;
But hope he'd come once more,
And love me as before;
And say, 'Cease weeping,
Thy lone watch keeping.'
"But he is dead and gone,
Whose heart was mine alone,
And now for him I'm sadly weeping.
His face I ne'er shall see,
And naught is left to me
But bitter weeping,
My lone watch keeping."
If ever a pierced and utterly hopeless soul poured forth its plaint
in musical measure, it was in the wondrously simple and unspeakably
plaintive air to which these words are set. There breathes in it a
spirit wail so mournfully sincere that one recognizes its sob in the
very chords of the accompaniment. The mere murmur of the melody, were
no words uttered, tells the story of grieving desolation.
Sarah did not move or speak, yet upon her enchanted ground a cloud had
fallen. She saw the high casement and its tearful gazer into the night,
a night not of music, and moonlight, and love, but chill, and wet, and
dreary. Rain dripped from eaves and trees; stone steps and pavements
caught a ghastly gleam from street lamps; save that sorrowful watcher,
there was no living creature abroad or awake. She grew cold and sick
with looking into those despairing eyes; the gloom, the loneliness, the
woe of that vigil became her own, and her heart sank swooning beneath
the burden.
As he ceased the song, Philip looked up for some comment or request.
To his surprise, she only clasped her hands in a gesture that might
have been either relief from or abandonment to woe, and bowed her head
upon them. Puzzled, yet flattered by her emotion, he refrained from
interrupting her; and, resuming his oars, lent the impetus of their
stroke to that of the tide. Nothing was said until the keel grated upon
the shelly beach opposite the farmhouse. Then, as Philip stooped to
lift the unconscious Jeannie, he imagined that he discerned the gleam
of the sinking moon upon Sarah's dripping eyelashes.
The fancy pursued him after he had gone up to his room. Seated at his
window, looking out upon the now starlit sky, he smoked more than one
cigar before his musing fit was ended. It was not the love-reverie
of a smitten boy. He believed that he had passed that stage of
sentimentalism ten years before. That Southerner of the male gender
who has not been consumed by the fires and risen as good as new from
the ashes of half a dozen never-dying passions before he is eighteen,
who has not offered the heart and hand, which as often as otherwise
constitute his chiefest earthly possessions, to some elect fair one by
the time he is one-and-twenty, is voted "slow" invulnerable. If these
susceptible sons of a fervid clime did not take to love-making as
naturally as does a duckling to the pond by the time the eggshell is
fairly off its head, they would certainly be initiated while in the
callow state by the rules and customs of society. Courtship is at first
a pastime, then an art, then when the earnestness of a real attachment
takes hold of their impassioned natures, it is the one all-absorbing,
eager pursuit of existence, until rewarded by the acquisition of its
object or thwarted by the decided refusal of the hard-hearted Dulcinea.
This state of things, this code of Cupid, every Southern girl
understands, and shapes her conduct accordingly. Sportively, yet
warily, she plays around the hook, and he is a very fortunate angler
who does not in the moment of fancied success discover that she has
carried off the bait as a trophy upon which to feed her vanity, and
left him to be the laughing-stock of the curious spectators of this
double game. She is imperturbable to meaning equivoques, receives
pretty speeches and tender glances at their current value, and not
until the suit becomes close and ardent, the attachment palpable to
every one else, and is confessed in so many words, does she allow
herself to be persuaded that her adorer is "in earnest," and really
desires to awaken a sympathetic emotion in her bosom.
Philip Benson was no wanton trifler with woman's feelings. On the
contrary, he had gained the reputation in his circle of an invincible,
indifferent looker-on of the pseudo and real combats, in Love's name,
that were continually transpiring around him. Chivalrous in tone,
gallant in action, as he was, the girls feared while they liked and
admired him. They called him critical, fastidious, cold; and mockingly
wondered why he persisted in going into company that, judging the
future by the past, was so unlikely to furnish him with the consort
he must be seeking. In reality, he was what he had avowed himself to
Sarah--a student of human nature; an amateur in this species of social
research--than which no other so frequently results in the complete
deception of the inquirer. Certainly no other is so apt to find its
culmination of devotion in a cold-blooded dissection of motive, morals,
and sentiment; an unprincipled, reckless application of trial and test
to the hearts and lives of its victims and final infidelity in all
human good, except what is concentrated in the inspector's individual,
personal self. Grown dainty amid the abundant supply of ordinary
material, he comes at length to disdain common "subjects." Still less
would he touch one already loathsome in the popular estimation, through
excess of known and actual crime. But a character fresh and noble from
the Creator's hand; a soul that dares to think and feel according to
its innate sense of right; an intellect unhackneyed, not vitiated
by worldly policy or the dogmas of the schools; a heart, tender and
delicate--yet passionate in love or abhorrence; what an opportunity is
here presented for the scalpel, the detective acid, the crucible, the
microscope! It is not in fallible mortality to resist the temptation,
and even professors of this ennobling pursuit, whose motto is, "The
proper study of mankind is Man," are, as they allow with shame and
confusion of face, themselves mortal. Of all the dignified humbugs of
the solemn farce of life, deliver me from that creature self-styled "a
student and judge of character!"
In Sarah Hunt, Philip discovered, to his surprise, a rare "specimen;"
a volume, each leaf of which revealed new matter of interest. The
attentions he had considered himself bound to pay her, in order to
avoid wounding their kind hosts, were soon rendered from a widely
different motive. It did not occur to him that he was transcending the
limits of merely friendly courtesy, as prescribed by the etiquette
of the region in which he was now a sojourner. He was by no means
deficient in appreciation of his personal gifts; rated his powers of
pleasing quite as highly as did his warmest admirers, although he had
the common sense and tact to conceal this; but he would have repelled,
as an aspersion upon his honor, the charge that he was endeavoring to
win this young girl's affections, his heart being as yet untouched.
"Was it then altogether whole?" he asked himself to-night, with a
coolness that should have been an immediate reply to the suggestion.
Side by side, he set two mental portraits, and strove deliberately,
impartially, to discern any traces of resemblance between the two. The
future Mrs. Benson was a personage that engrossed much of his thoughts,
and by long practice in the portrayal of her lineaments, he had brought
his fancy sketch very nearly to perfection. A tall, Juno-like figure,
with raven locks, and large, melting eyes, unfathomable as clear;
features of classic mould; an elastic, yet stately form; a disposition
in which amiability tempered natural impetuosity, and generous impulse
gave direction to gentle word and deed; a mind profoundly imbued with
the love of learning, and in cultivation, if not strength, equal to his
own; discretion, penetration, and docility combined in such proportions
as should render her her husband's safest counsellor, yet willing
follower; and controlling and toning the harmonious whole, a devotion
to himself only second in degree, not inferior in quality, to worship
of her Creator. This was the ideal for whose embodiment our reasonable,
modest Coelebs was patiently waiting. Answer, oh ye expectant,
incipient Griseldas! who, from your beauteous ranks, will step into the
prepared niche, and make the goddess a reality?
And how appeared the rival picture in comparison?
"No, no!" he ejaculated, tossing the remnant of his third cigar into
the garden. "I must seek further for the 'golden mean.' Intellect and
heart are here, undoubtedly. I must have beauty and grace as well.
Yet," he continued, relentingly, "there are times when she would be
quite handsome if she dressed better. It is a pity her love for the
beautiful does not enter into her choice of wearing apparel!"
In ten minutes more he was asleep, and dreamed that he stood at the
altar with his long sought ideal, when, as the last binding words were
spoken, she changed to Sarah Hunt, arrayed in a light blue lawn of last
year's fashion, that made her look as sallow as a lemon, and, to his
taste, as little to be desired for "human nature's daily food."
Poor Sarah! The visionary robe was a faithful reflection upon the
dreamer's mental retina of a certain organdie which had formed a part
of Lucy's wardrobe the previous summer, and having become antiquated
in six months' time, was altogether inadmissible in the belle's outfit
of this season.
"Yet it cost an awful sum when it was new!" reasoned Mrs. Hunt, "and
will make you a very useful dress while you are with your Aunt Sarah.
It's too good to cut up for Jeannie!"
"But the color, mother?" objected the unwilling recipient.
"Pooh! who will notice that? Besides, if you had a good complexion, you
could wear blue as well as anybody."
Sarah's stock of thin dresses was not plentiful, and, recalling this
observation, she coupled it with the fact that she was growing rosy,
and dared to equip herself in the azure garment, with what effect she
did not dream and Mr. Philip Benson did!