Lewis Hammond had thrown the whole weight of his influence in the
family conclave into the Newport scale; and to this popular resort
Sarah went, in July, in company with the Bensons, her mother and
Jeannie, who was made one of the party at Lewis' request and expense.
The generous fellow acted in conformity with conscience and judgment in
this temporary exile of his treasures; and, consistent in his purpose
of rendering it a pleasure excursion to his wife, he made very light of
his prospects of lonely widowerhood, representing, instead, the benefit
she and the babe would draw from the sea-breezes, and his enhanced
enjoyment of his weekly visits, because they were so far apart. He
went with them to the shore, at their general flitting, and spent two
days; saw for himself that those whose comfort was nearest his heart
were properly accommodated; privately feed chambermaid and waiter,
with hints of future emolument to accrue to them from special regard
to the wants of Mrs. Hammond and her infant, and returned to town with
the unenviable consciousness of having left at least three-fourths of
himself behind him.
A brisk rush of business beguiled him of the aching, hollow void for
a few hours after he got back. Not even Baby Belle's accents could be
heard amid that roar and whir. But at luncheon-time, while waiting for
his order to be filled at a restaurant, the dreary, solitary void
overtook him--a fit of unmistakable home-sickness, that yet caused
him to recoil at the idea of entering the deserted house uptown, when
evening should oblige him to seek a lodging. How were Sarah and baby
getting along without him? He was afraid that Lucy was not, in all
respects, as congenial a companion as he could have wished his wife to
have, and that Mrs. Hunt's undisguised worldliness, her foolish love
of fashion and display, would often annoy and mortify her sensible and
right-judging daughter. Benson was capital company, though--a gentleman
every inch of him! and very friendly to Sarah. But for her reserved
manners he would act the part of a real brother to her; in any case, he
would be kind, and see that she wanted for nothing.
Then--shot into his head by some unseen and unaccountable
machinery--there darted across his mind a fragment of a conversation he
had overheard, at entering his parlor, the day before the Bensons left.
Philip and Lucy were standing before a miniature painting of Sarah and
her child, completed and brought home a short time previous. Although
seemingly intent upon the picture, their conversation must have strayed
far from the starting-point, for the first sentence that reached the
unintentional listener was a tart, scornful speech from Lucy, that
could by no stretch of the imagination be made to apply to her sister.
"If you admire her so much, why did you not marry her when you had the
opportunity? She was willing enough!"
"Take care you do not make me regret that I did not do so!" was
Philip's stern rejoinder as he turned from her.
The change of position showed him that Lewis was present, and for a
second his inimitable self-possession wavered. Recovering himself,
he reverted to the picture, and called upon his host to decide some
disputed point in its artistic execution which he and Lucy were
discussing.
"Poor fellow! he has learned that all is not gold that glitters!"
mused Lewis to the newspaper he was pretending to read. "Lucy had a
high reputation for amiability before she was Mrs. Benson. There is no
touchstone like the wedding ring to bring out one's true qualities."
He sat with his back to the entrance of the saloon, and the table
directly behind him was now taken possession of by three or four new
arrivals--all gentlemen, and apparently on familiar terms with one
another. They called for a bountiful lunch, including wine, and plunged
into a lively, rather noisy talk. Lewis closed his ears, and applied
himself in earnest to his paper. He started presently at a word he
could have declared was his name. Restraining the impulse to look
around and see who of the group was known to him, he yet could not help
trying to determine this point by their voices. One, a thin falsetto,
he fancied belonged to George Bond, who was no more of a favorite
with him than was his better half with Sarah. Lewis regarded him as
a conceited rattlepate, whose sole talent lay in the art of making
money--whose glory was his purse. "Why should he be talking about me
here? Nonsense; I was mistaken!" and another page of the newspaper was
turned.
"When I leave my wife at Newport, or anywhere else, in the particular
and brotherly care of one of her former flames, publish me as a crazy
fool!" said the wiry voice again, almost in the reader's ear.
"He doesn't know old stories as well as you do, perhaps," remarked some
one.
"I should think not! When my wife pulls the wool over my eyes in that
style, horsewhip me around town, and I won't cry 'Quarter!' Sister's
husband or not, I'll be hanged if I would have him in my house for two
weeks, and he is such a good-looking dog, too!"
He stopped, as if his neighbor had jogged him, as Lewis looked over his
shoulder in the direction of the gossip. A dead and awkward silence
ensued, ended at last by the pertinent observation that the "waiter was
a long time bringing their lunch."
In a maze of angry doubt and incredulity as to the evidence of his
senses and suspicions, Lewis finished his meal, and stalked out past
the subdued and now voracious quartette, favoring them with a searching
look as he went by, which they sustained with great meekness. All the
afternoon a heavy load lay upon his heart, an indefinable dread he dared
not analyze; a foreboding he would not face, yet could not dismiss.
"You are blue, Lewis," said Mr. Marlow, kindly, as they started uptown
together. "This is the worst of having a wife and children; you miss
them so terribly when they are away. But you will get used to it. Make
up your mind at the eleventh hour to cross the water, and stay abroad
three months. You will be surprised to find how easy your mind will
become after a couple of weeks."
"I am satisfied, sir, without making personal trial of the matter,
that men become inured to misery, which seemed in the beginning to be
insupportable."
Mr. Marlow laughed, and they separated.
Lewis sighed as he looked up at the blinds of his house, shut fast
and grim, and still more deeply as he admitted himself to the front
hall, that echoed dismally the sound of the closing door. His next
movement was to walk into the parlor, throw open a shutter, and let
in the evening light upon the portraits of the dear absent ones.
There he stood, scanning their faces--eyes and soul full of love and
longing--until the mellow glow passed away and left them in darkness.
The comfortless evening repast was over, and he betook himself to the
library, Sarah's favorite room, as it was also his. Her low easy-chair
stood in its usual place opposite his at the center-table, but her
workbasket was missing; likewise the book with its silver marker,
that he was wont to see lying side by side with some volume he had
selected for his own reading. But one lay there now, and there was
an odd choking in his throat as he read the title on the back. He
had expressed a wish for it in Sarah's hearing some days before, and
her delicate forethought had left it here as a solace and keepsake,
one that should, while reminding him of her, yet charm away sad
feelings in her absence. Even in the exterior of the gift, she had
been regardful of his taste. The binding was solid and rich; no gaudy
coloring or tawdry gilt; the thick smooth paper and clear type were a
luxury to touch and sight. Lewis was no sentimentalist in the ordinary
acceptation of the term, yet he kissed the name his wife had traced
upon the fly-leaf ere he sat down to employ the evening as she by her
gift tacitly requested him to do. But it was a useless attempt. The
book was not in fault, and he should have read it intently if only
because she had bestowed it; still the hand that held it sank lower and
lower, until it rested upon his knee, and the reader was the thinker
instead.
The most prosaic of human beings have their seasons of
reverie--pleasing or mournful, which are, unknown often to themselves,
the poetry of their lives. Such was the drama Lewis Hammond was now
rehearsing in his retrospective dreams.
The wan and weary mother, whom he remembered as always clothed in
widow's weeds, and toiling in painful drudgery to maintain herself
and her only boy; who had smiled and wept, rendered thanksgivings and
uttered prayers for strength, alternately, as she heard Mr. Marlow's
proposal to protect and help the lad through the world that had borne
so hardly upon her; who had strained him to her bosom, and shed fast,
hot tears of speechless anguish at their parting--a farewell that was
never to be forgotten in any meeting on this side of eternity; this was
the vision, hers the palladium of love, that had nerved him for the
close wrestle with fortune, guarded him amid the burning ploughshares
of temptation, carried him unscathed past the hundred mouths of hell,
that gape upon the innocent and unwary in all large cities. Cold and
unsusceptible as he was deemed in society, he kept unpolluted in his
breast a fresh living stream of genuine romantic feeling, such as we
are apt to think went out of fashion--aye, and out of being--with the
belted knights of yore; wealth he had vowed never to squander, never
reveal, until he should pour it, without one thought of self-reserve,
upon his wife! He never hinted this to a living creature before the
moment came for revealing it to the object of his choice. He was a
"predestined old bachelor!" and "infidel to love and the sex," said and
believed the gay and frivolous, and he let them talk. His ideal woman,
his mother's representative and successor--the beauty and crown of
his existence--was too sacred for the gaze and comment of indifferent
worldlings. For her he labored and studied and lived; confident in a
fatalistic belief that, at the right moment, the dream would become a
reality--the phantasm leave her cloudy height for his arms.
Love so beautiful and intense as this, like snow in its purity, like
fire in its fervor, cannot be won to full and eloquent utterance but
by answering love--a sentiment identical in kind, if not equal in
degree; and Sarah Hammond's estimate of her husband's affection was, in
consequence of this want in herself, cruelly unjust in its coldness and
poverty. His patience with her transient fits of gloom or waywardness
in the early months of their married life; his noble forgetfulness of
her faults, and grateful acknowledgment of her most trifling effort
to please him; his unceasing care; his lavish bounty--all these she
attributed too much to natural amiability and conscientious views
of duty; too little to his warm regard for her personally. In this
persuasion she had copied his conduct in externals so far as she
could; and applauding observers adjudged the mock gem to be a fair and
equitable equivalent for the rare pearl she had received.
Lest this digression, into which I have been inadvertently betrayed,
should mislead any with the idea that I have some design of dignifying
into a hero this respectable, but very commonplace personage, return
we to him as he hears eleven o'clock rung out by the monitor on the
mantel, and says to himself, "Baby Belle has been asleep these three
hours, and mamma, caring nothing for beaux and ball-room, is preparing
to follow her."
Beaux and ball-room! Pshaw! why should the nonsensical talk of that
jackanapes, George Bond, come to his mind just then? The whole tenor of
the remarks that succeeded the name that he imagined was his disproved
that imagination. But who had left his wife at Newport in the care of a
"good-looking" brother-in-law? who had been domesticated in the family
of the deluded husband for a fortnight?
Pshaw again! What concern had he with that scandalous, doubtless
slanderous tattle?
"Why did you not marry her when you had the opportunity? She was
willing enough!"
Could Lucy have spoken thus of her sister? Sarah was barely acquainted
with Philip Benson when Lucy wedded him, having met him but once prior
to the wedding day at the house of her aunt in the country, from which
place his own letter, penned by her father's sick-bed, recalled her.
How far from his thoughts then was the rapid train of consequences that
followed upon this preliminary act of their intercourse!
Did that scoundrel Bond say "Hammond"? It was not a common name, and
came quite distinctly to his ears in the high, unpleasant key he
so disliked. A flush of honest shame arose to his forehead at this
uncontrollable straying of his ideas to a topic so disagreeable, and so
often rejected by his mind.
"As if--even had I been the person insulted by his pity--I would
believe one syllable he said of a woman as far above him in virtue and
intellect, in everything good and lovable, as the heavens are above
the earth! I would despise myself as much as I do him if I could lend
my ear for an instant to so degrading a whisper! I wish I had faced
him and demanded the whole tale; yet no! that would have been rash and
absurd. Better as it is! By to-morrow I shall laugh at my ridiculous
fancies!"
"Scratch! scratch! scratch!" The house was so still in the approaching
midnight that the slight noise caused him a shock and quiver in the
excited state of his nerves. The interruption was something between a
scrape and a rap, three times repeated, and proceeding, apparently,
from the bookcase at his right. What could it be? He had never seen
or heard of a mouse on the premises, nor did the sound much resemble
the nibbling of that animal. Ashamed of the momentary thrill he had
experienced, he remained still and collected, awaiting its repetition.
"Scratch! scratch! rap!" It was in the bookcase--in the lower part
where were drawers shut in by solid doors. These he had never explored,
but knew that his wife kept pamphlets and papers in them. He opened
the outer doors cautiously, and listened again, until assured by the
scratching that his search was in the right direction. There were
three drawers--two deep, the third and upper shallow. This he drew out
and examined. It contained writing-paper and envelopes, all in good
order. Nor was there any sign of the intruder amongst the loose music
and periodicals in the second. The lower one was locked--no doubt
accidentally, for he had never seen Sarah lock up anything except
jewels and money. Their servants were honest, and she had no cause to
fear investigation on his part.
Feeling, rather than arguing thus, he removed the drawer above,
leaving exposed the locked one, and thrust his hand down into it. It
encountered the polished surface of a small box or case, which he was
in the act of drawing through the aperture left by the second drawer,
when something dark and swift ran over his hand and up his sleeve.
With a violent start, he dashed the casket to the floor, and another
energetic fling of his arm dislodged the mouse. His first care was
to pursue and kill it; his next to examine into the damage it had
indirectly produced. The box--ebony, lined with sandal-wood--had fallen
with such force as to loosen the spring, and lay on its side wide open;
its treasures strewed over the carpet. They were neither numerous, nor
in themselves valuable. A bouquet of dried flowers, enveloped in silver
paper, lay nearest Lewis' hand, as he knelt to pick up the scattered
articles. The paper was tied about the stalks of the flowers with black
ribbon, and to this was attached a card: "Will Miss Sarah accept this
trifling token of regard from one who is her stanch friend, and hopes,
in time, to have a nearer claim upon her esteem?"
The hand was familiar to the reader as Philip Benson's. Why should
Sarah preserve this, while the many floral tokens of his love which
she had received were flung away when withered like worthless weeds?
The pang of jealousy was new--sharp as the death-wrench to the
heart-strings, cruel as the grave! The card was without date, or he
would have read, with a different apprehension of its meaning, the
harmless clause--"And hopes in time to have a nearer claim upon her
esteem." There was a time, then, when, as Lucy had taunted her husband,
he might have married her sister! when Sarah loved him, and had reason
to think herself beloved in return! What was this sable badge but
the insignia of a bereaved heart, that mourned still in secret the
faithlessness of her early love, or the adverse fate that had sundered
him from her, and given him to another?
Crushing the frail, dead stems in his hand, he threw them back into the
box, and took up a bit of dark gray wood, rough on one side--smoothed
on the other into a rude tablet. "Philip Benson, Deal Beach, July 27th,
1856. Pensez a moi!" But ten days before he met her at the wharf in
New York to take her to her sick father! but three months before she
plighted her troth to him, promised to wed him, while in spirit she
was still weeping tears of blood over the inconstant! for he did not
forget that Philip's engagement to Lucy preceded his own to Sarah by
eight or nine weeks. There were other relics in the box; a half-worn
glove, retaining the shape of the manly hand it had inclosed--which, he
learned afterwards, Philip had left in his chamber at the farm-house
when he departed to seek gayer scenes; a white shell, upon whose rosy
lining were scratched with the point of a knife the ominous initials,
"P. B." and beneath them "S. B. H.," a faded rosebud, and several
printed slips, cut from the columns of newspapers. He unfolded but two
of these.
One was an extract from Tennyson's "Maud"--the invitation to the
garden. Breathlessly, by reason of the terrible stricture tightening
around his heart, Lewis ran his eyes over the charming whimsical
morceau. They rested upon and reviewed the last verse:
"She is coming--my own, my sweet!
Were it ever so airy a tread,
My heart would hear her and beat;
Were it earth in an earthy bed,
"My dust would hear her and beat;
Had I laid for a century dead,
Would start and tremble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red."
He did not discriminate now between printed and written verses. These
were love stanzas sent by another man to his wife, received and
cherished by her, hidden away with a care that, in itself, bordered
on criminality, for was not its object the deception of the injured
husband? The most passionate autograph love-letter could hardly have
stabbed him more keenly.
The other was Mrs. Browning's exquisite "Portrait."
And here the reader can have an explanation the tortured man could not
obtain. With the acumen for which Cupid's votaries are proverbial,
Philip Benson, then at the "summer heat" degree of his flame for
the Saratoga belle, had recognized in this poem the most correct
and beautiful description of his lady-love. Curiosity to see if the
resemblance were apparent to other eyes, and a desire for sympathy
tempted him to forward it to Sarah. She must perceive the likeness to
her divine sister, and surmise the sentiment that had induced him to
send it. A little alteration in the opening stanza was requisite to
make it a "perfect fit." Thus it was when the change was made:
"I will paint her as I see her:
---- times have the lilies blown
Since she looked upon the sun."
The poetess, guiltless of any intention to cater for the wants of
grown-up lovers, had written "Ten" in the space made blank by Philip's
gallantry and real ignorance of his charmer's age. For the rest, the
"lily-clear face," the "forehead fair and saintly," the "trail of
golden hair," the blue eyes, "like meek prayers before a shrine," the
voice that
"Murmurs lowly
As a silver stream may run,
Which yet feels you feel the sun,"
were, we may safely assert, quite as much like poor Sarah, when he sent
the poem, as they were now like the portrait he would--if put upon his
oath--sketch of his unidealized Lucy.
It was not unnatural then, in Lewis Hammond, to overlook in his present
state, these glaring discrepancies in the picture as applied by him.
With a blanched and rigid countenance he put all the things back in the
box, shut it, and restored it to its place. Then he knelt on the floor
and hid his face in his wife's chair; and there struggled out into the
still air of the desecrated hometemple, made sacred by his love and her
abiding, deep sobs from the strong man's stricken heart--a grief as
much more fearful than that of widowhood, as the desertion and dishonor
of the loved one are worse than death.