There were not wanting people who accused Dudley Venner of weakness
and bad judgment in his treatment of his daughter. Some were of
opinion that the great mistake was in not "breaking her will" when she
was a little child. There was nothing the matter with her, they said,
but that she had been spoiled by indulgence. If _they_ had had the
charge of her, they'd have brought her down. She'd got the upperhand
of her father now; but if he'd only taken hold of her in season! There
are people who think that everything may be done, if the doer, be he
educator or physician, be only called "in season." No doubt,--but _in
season_ would often be a hundred or two years before the child was
born; and people never send so early as that.
The father of Elsie Venner knew his duties and his difficulties too
well to trouble himself about anything others might think or say. So
soon as he found that he could not govern his child, he gave his life
up to following her and protecting her as far as he could. It was a
stern and terrible trial for a man of acute sensibility, and not
without force of intellect and will, and the manly ambition for
himself and his family-name which belonged to his endowments and his
position. Passive endurance is the hardest trial to persons of such a
nature.
What made it still more a long martyrdom was the necessity for bearing
his cross in utter loneliness. He could not tell his griefs. He could
not talk of them even with those who knew their secret spring. His
minister had the unsympathetic nature which is common in the meaner
sort of devotees,--persons who mistake spiritual selfishness for
sanctity, and grab at the infinite prize of the great Future and
Elsewhere with the egotism they excommunicate in its hardly more
odious forms of avarice and self-indulgence. How could he speak with
the old physician and the old black woman about a sorrow and a terror
which but to name was to strike dumb the lips of Consolation?
In the dawn of his manhood he had found that second consciousness for
which young men and young women go about looking into each other's
faces, with their sweet, artless aim playing in every feature, and
making them beautiful to each other, as to all of us. He had found his
other self early, before he had grown weary in the search and wasted
his freshness in vain longings: the lot of many, perhaps we may say of
most, who infringe the patent of our social order by intruding
themselves into a life already upon half-allowance of the necessary
luxuries of existence. The life he had led for a brief space was not
only beautiful in outward circumstance, as old Sophy had described it
to the Reverend Doctor. It was that delicious process of the tuning of
two souls to each other, string by string, not without little
half-pleasing discords now and then when some chord in one or the
other proves to be over-strained or over-lax, but always approaching
nearer and nearer to harmony, until they become at last as two
instruments with a single voice. Something more than a year of this
blissful doubled consciousness had passed over him when he found
himself once more alone,--alone, save for the little diamond-eyed
child lying in the old woman's arms, with the coral necklace round her
throat and the rattle in her hand.
He would not die by his own act. It was not the way in his family.
There may have been other, perhaps better reasons, but this was
enough; he did not come of suicidal stock. He must live for this
child's sake, at any rate; and yet,--oh, yet, who could tell with what
thoughts he looked upon her? Sometimes her little features would look
placid, and something like a smile would steal over them; then all his
tender feelings would rush up into his eyes, and he would put his arms
out to take her from the old woman,--but all at once her eyes would
narrow and she would throw her head back; and a shudder would seize
him as he stooped over his child,--he could not look upon her,--he
could not touch his lips to her cheek; nay, there would sometimes come
into his soul such frightful suggestions that he would hurry from the
room lest the hinted thought should become a momentary madness and he
should lift his hand against the helpless infant which owed him life.
In those miserable days he used to wander all over The Mountain in his
restless endeavor to seek some relief for inward suffering in outward
action. He had no thought of throwing himself from the summit of any
of the broken cliffs, but he clambered over them recklessly, as having
no particular care for his life. Sometimes he would go into the
accursed district where the venomous reptiles were always to be
dreaded, and court their worst haunts, and kill all he could come near
with a kind of blind fury that was strange in a person of his gentle
nature.
One overhanging cliff was a favorite haunt of his. It frowned upon his
home beneath in a very menacing way; he noticed slight seams and
fissures that looked ominous;--what would happen, if it broke off some
time or other and came crashing down on the fields and roofs below? He
thought of such a possible catastrophe with a singular indifference,
in fact with a feeling almost like pleasure. It would be such a swift
and thorough solution of this great problem of life he was working out
in ever-recurring daily anguish! The remote possibility of such a
catastrophe had frightened some timid dwellers beneath The Mountain to
other places of residence; here the danger was most imminent, and yet
he loved to dwell upon the chances of its occurrence. Danger is often
the best _counter-irritant_ in cases of mental suffering; he found a
solace in careless exposure of his life, and learned to endure the
trials of each day better by dwelling in imagination on the
possibility that it might be the last for him and the home that was
his.
Time, the great consoler, helped these influences, and he gradually
fell into more easy and less dangerous habits of life. He ceased from
his more perilous rambles. He thought less of the danger from the
great overhanging rocks and forests; they had hung there for
centuries; it was not very likely they would crash or slide in his
time. He became accustomed to all Elsie's strange looks and ways. Old
Sophy dressed her with ruffles round her neck, and hunted up the red
coral branch with silver bells which the little toothless Dudleys had
bitten upon for a hundred years. By an infinite effort, her father
forced himself to become the companion of this child, for whom he had
such a mingled feeling, but whose presence was always a trial to him
and often a terror.
At a cost which no human being could estimate, he had done his duty,
and in some degree reaped his reward. Elsie grew up with a kind of
filial feeling for him, such as her nature was capable of. She never
would obey him; that was not to be looked for. Commands, threats,
punishments, were out of the question with her; the mere physical
effects of crossing her will betrayed themselves in such changes of
expression and color that it would have been senseless to attempt to
govern her in any such way. Leaving her mainly to herself, she could
be to some extent indirectly influenced,--not otherwise. She called
her father "Dudley," as if he had been her brother. She ordered
everybody and would be ordered by none.
Who could know all these things, except the few people of the
household? What wonder, therefore, that ignorant and shallow persons
laid the blame on her father of those peculiarities which were freely
talked about,--of those darker tendencies which were hinted of in
whispers? To all this talk, so far as it reached him, he was supremely
indifferent, not only with the indifference which all gentlemen feel
to the gossip of their inferiors, but with a charitable calmness which
did not wonder or blame. He knew that his position was not simply a
difficult, but an impossible one, and schooled himself to bear his
destiny as well as he might and report himself only at Headquarters.
He had grown gentle under this discipline. His hair was just beginning
to be touched with silver, and his expression was that of habitual
sadness and anxiety. He had no counsellor, as we have seen, to turn
to, who did not know either too much or too little. He had no heart to
rest upon and into which he might unburden himself of the secrets and
the sorrows that were aching in his own breast. Yet he had not allowed
himself to run to waste in the long time since he was left alone to
his trials and fears. He had resisted the seductions which always
beset solitary men with restless brains overwrought by depressing
agencies. He disguised no misery to himself with the lying delusion of
wine. He sought no sleep from narcotics, though he lay with throbbing,
wide-open eyeballs through all the weary hours of the night.
It was understood between Dudley Venner and old Doctor Kittredge that
Elsie was a subject of occasional medical observation, on account of
certain mental peculiarities which might end in a permanent affection
of her reason. Beyond this nothing was said, whatever may have been in
the mind of either. But Dudley Venner had studied Elsie's case in the
light of all the books he could find which might do anything towards
explaining it. As in all cases where men meddle with medical science
for a special purpose, having no previous acquaintance with it, his
imagination found what it wanted in the books he read, and adjusted it
to the facts before him. So it was he came to cherish those two
fancies before alluded to: that the ominous birthmark she had carried
from infancy might fade and become obliterated, and that the age of
complete maturity might be signalized by an entire change in her
physical and mental state. He held these vague hopes as all of us
nurse our only half-believed illusions. Not for the world would he
have questioned his sagacious old medical friend as to the probability
or possibility of their being true. We are very shy of asking
questions of those who know enough to destroy with one word the hopes
we live on.
In this life of comparative seclusion to which the father had doomed
himself for the sake of his child, he had found time for large and
varied reading. The learned Judge Thornton confessed himself surprised
at the extent of Dudley Venner's information. Doctor Kittredge found
that he was in advance of him in the knowledge of recent physiological
discoveries. He had taken pains to become acquainted with agricultural
chemistry; and the neighboring farmers owed him some useful hints
about the management of their land. He renewed his old acquaintance
with the classic authors. He loved to warm his pulses with Homer and
calm them down with Horace. He received all manner of new books and
periodicals, and gradually gained an interest in the events of the
passing time. Yet he remained almost a hermit, not absolutely refusing
to see his neighbors, nor ever churlish towards them, but on the other
hand not cultivating any intimate relations with them.
He had retired from the world a young man, little more than a youth,
indeed, with sentiments and aspirations all of them suddenly
extinguished. The first had bequeathed him a single huge sorrow, the
second a single trying duty. In due time the anguish had lost
something of its poignancy, the light of earlier and happier memories
had begun to struggle with and to soften its thick darkness, and even
that duty which he had confronted with such an effort had become an
endurable habit.
At a period of life when many have been living on the capital of their
acquired knowledge and their youthful stock of sensibilities until
their intellects are really shallower and their hearts emptier than
they were at twenty, Dudley Venner was stronger in thought and
tenderer in soul than in the first freshness of his youth, when he
counted but half his present years. He was now on the verge of that
decade which marks the decline of men who have ceased growing in
knowledge and strength: from forty to fifty a man must move upward, or
the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly
downward. At the entrance of this decade his inward nature was richer
and deeper than in any earlier period of his life. If he could only be
summoned to action, he was capable of noble service. If his sympathies
could only find an outlet, he was never so capable of love as now; for
his natural affections had been gathering in the course of all these
years, and the traces of that ineffaceable calamity of his life were
softened and partially hidden by new growths of thought and feeling,
as the wreck left by a mountain-slide is covered over by the gentle
intrusion of the soft-stemmed herbs which will prepare it for the
stronger vegetation that will bring it once more into harmony with the
peaceful slopes around it.
Perhaps Dudley Venner had not gained so much in worldly wisdom as if
he had been more in society and less in his study. The indulgence with
which he treated his nephew was, no doubt, imprudent. A man more in
the habit of dealing with men would have been more guarded with a
person with Dick's questionable story and unquestionable physiognomy.
But he was singularly unsuspicious, and his natural kindness was an
additional motive to the wish for introducing some variety into the
routine of Elsie's life.
If Dudley Venner did not know just what he wanted at this period of
his life, there were a great many people in the town of Rockland who
thought they did know. He had been a widower long enough,--nigh twenty
year, wa'n't it? He'd been aout to Spraowles's party,--there wa'n't
anything to hender him why he shouldn't stir raound l'k other folks.
What was the reason he didn't go abaout to taown-meetin's, 'n'
Sahbath-meetin's, 'n' lyceums, 'n' school-'xaminations, 'n'
s'prise-parties, 'n' funerals,--and other entertainments where the
still-faced two-story folks were in the habit of looking round to see
if any of the mansion-house gentry were present?--Fac' was, he was
livin' too lonesome daown there at the mansion-haouse. Why shouldn't
he make up to the Jedge's daughter? She was genteel enough for him
and--let's see, haow old was she? Seven-'n'-twenty,--no,
six-'n'-twenty,--Born the same year we buried aour little Anny Marí.
There was no possible objection to this arrangement, if the parties
interested had seen fit to make it or even to think of it. But
"Portia," as some of the mansion-house people called her, did not
happen to awaken the elective affinities of the lonely widower. He met
her once in a while, and said to himself that she was a good specimen
of the grand style of woman; and then the image came back to him of a
woman not quite so large, not quite so imperial in her port, not quite
so incisive in her speech, not quite so judicial in her opinions, but
with two or three more joints in her frame and two or three soft
inflections in her voice which for some absurd reason or other drew
him to her side and so bewitched him that he told her half his secrets
and looked into her eyes all that, he could not tell, in less time
than it would have taken him to discuss the champion paper of the last
Quarterly with the admirable "Portia." _Heu, quanta minus!_ How much
more was that lost image to him than all it left on earth!
The study of love is very much like that of meteorology. We know that
just about so much rain will fall in a season; but on what particular
day it will shower is more than we can tell. We know that just about
so much love will be made every year in a given population; but who
will rain his young affections upon the heart of whom is not known
except to the astrologers and fortune-tellers. And why rain falls as
it does, and why love is made just as it is, are equally puzzling
questions.
The woman a man loves is always his own daughter, far more his
daughter than the female children born to him by the common law of
life. It is not the outside woman, who takes his name, that he loves:
before her image has reached the centre of his consciousness, it has
passed through fifty many-layered nerve-strainers, been churned over
by ten thousand pulse-beats, and reacted upon by millions of lateral
impulses which bandy it about through the mental spaces as a
reflection is sent back and forward in a saloon lined with mirrors.
With this altered image of the woman before him his preëxisting ideal
becomes blended. The object of his love is half the offspring of her
legal parents and half of her lover's brain. The difference between
the real and the ideal objects of love must not exceed a fixed
maximum. The heart's vision cannot unite them stereoscopically into a
single image, if the divergence passes certain limits. A formidable
analogy, much in the nature of a proof, with very serious
consequences, which moralists and match-makers would do well to
remember! Double vision with the eyes of the heart is a dangerous
physiological state, and may lead to missteps and serious falls.
Whether Dudley Venner would ever find a breathing image near enough to
his ideal one, to fill the desolate chamber of his heart, or not, was
very doubtful. Some gracious and gentle woman, whose influence would
steal upon him as the first low words of prayer after that interval of
silent mental supplication known to one of our simpler forms of public
worship, gliding into his consciousness without hurting its old
griefs, herself knowing the chastening of sorrow, and subdued into
sweet acquiescence with the Divine will,--some such woman as this, if
Heaven should send him such, might call him back to the world of
happiness, from which he seemed forever exiled. He could never again
be the young lover who walked through the garden-alleys all red with
roses in the old dead and buried June of long ago. He could never
forget the bride of his youth, whose image, growing phantom-like with
the lapse of years, hovered over him like a dream while waking and
like a reality in dreams. But if it might be in God's good providence
that this desolate life should come under the influence of human
affections once more, what an ecstasy of renewed existence was in
store for him! His life had not all been buried under that narrow
ridge of turf with the white stone at its head. It seemed so for a
while; but it was not and could not and ought not to be so. His first
passion had been a true and pure one; there was no spot or stain upon
it. With all his grief there blended no cruel recollection of any word
or look he would have wished to forget. All those little differences,
such as young married people with any individual flavor in their
characters must have, if they are tolerably mated, had only added to
the music of existence, as the lesser discords admitted into some
perfect symphony, fitly resolved, add richness and strength to the
whole harmonious movement. It was a deep wound that Fate, had
inflicted on him; nay, it seemed like a mortal one; but the weapon was
clean, and its edge was smooth. Such wounds must heal with time in
healthy natures, whatever a false sentiment may say, by the wise and
beneficent law of our being. The recollection of a deep and true
affection, is rather a divine nourishment for a life to grow strong
upon than a poison to destroy it.
Dudley Venner's habitual sadness could not be laid wholly to his early
bereavement. It was partly the result of the long struggle between
natural affection and duty, on one side, and the involuntary
tendencies these had to overcome, on the other,--between hope and
fear, so long in conflict that despair itself would have been like an
anodyne, and he would have slept upon some final catastrophe with the
heavy sleep of a bankrupt after his failure is proclaimed. Alas! some
new affection might perhaps rekindle the fires of youth in his heart;
but what power could calm that haggard terror of the parent which rose
with every morning's sun and watched with every evening star,--what
power save alone that of him who comes bearing the inverted torch, and
leaving after him only the ashes printed with his footsteps?
* * * * *