"AM I NOT A WOMAN AND A SISTER?"
But what was the mysterious bond between La Cordifiamma and the
American, which had prevented Scoutbush from following the example
of his illustrious progenitor, and taking a viscountess from off the
stage?
Certainly, any one who had seen her with him on the morning after
Scoutbush's visit to the Mellots, would have said that, if the cause
was love, the love was all on one side.
She was standing by the fireplace in a splendid pose, her arm resting
on the chimney-piece, the book from which she had been reciting in one
hand, the other playing in her black curls, as her eyes glanced back
ever and anon at her own profile in the mirror. Stangrave was half
sitting in a low chair by her side, half kneeling on the footstool
before her, looking up beseechingly, as she looked down tyrannically.
"Stupid, this reciting? Of course it is! I want realities, not shams;
life, not the stage; nature, not art."
"Throw away the book, then, and words, and art, and live!"
She knew well what he meant; but she answered as if she had
misunderstood him.
"Thanks, I live already, and in good company enough. My ghost-husbands
are as noble as they are obedient; do all which I demand of them, and
vanish on my errands when I tell them. Can you guess who my last
is? Since I tired of Egmont, I have taken Sir Galahad, the spotless
knight. Did you ever read the Mort d'Arthur?"
"A hundred times."
"Of course!" and she spoke in a tone of contempt so strong that it
must have been affected. "What have you not read! And what have you
copied. No wonder that these English have been what they have been for
centuries, while their heroes have been the Galahads, and their Homer
the Mort d'Arthur."
"Enjoy your Utopia!" said he bitterly. "Do you fancy they acted up to
their ideals? They dreamed of the Quest of the Sangreal: but which of
them ever went upon it?"
"And does it count for nothing that they felt it the finest thing in
the world to have gone on it, had it been possible? Be sure if their
ideal was so self-sacrificing, so lofty, their practice was ruled by
something higher than the almighty dollar."
"And so are some other men's, Marie," answered he reproachfully.
"Yes, forsooth;--when the almighty dollar is there already, and a man
has ten times as much to spend every day as he can possibly invest in
French cookery, and wines, and fine clothes, then he begins to lay out
his surplus nobly on self-education, and the patronage of art, and the
theatre--for merely aesthetic purposes, of course; and when the lust
of the flesh has been satisfied, thinks himself an archangel, because
he goes on to satisfy the lust of the eye and the pride of life.
Christ was of old the model, and Sir Galahad was the hero. Now the one
is exchanged for Goethe, and the other for Wilhelm Meister."
"Cruel! You know that my Goethe fever is long past. How would you have
known of its existence if I had not confessed it to you as a sin of
old years? Have I not said to you, again and again, show me the thing
which you would have me do for your sake, and see if I will not do
it!"
"For my sake? A noble reason! Show yourself the thing which you will
do for its own sake; because it ought to be done. Show it yourself, I
say; I cannot show you. If your own eyes cannot see the Sangreal, and
the angels who are bearing it before you, it is because they are dull
and gross; and am I Milton's archangel, to purge them with euphrasy
and rue? If you have a noble heart, you will find for yourself the
noblest Quest. If not, who can prove to you that it is noble?" And
tapping impatiently with her foot, she went on to herself--
"'A gentle sound, an awful light!
Three angels bear the holy Grail;
With folded feet, in stoles of white,
On sleeping wings they sail.
Ah, blessed vision! blood of God!
The spirit beats her mortal bars,
As down dark tides, the glory slides,
And star-like mingles with the stars.'
"Why, there was not a knight of the round table, was there, who did
not give up all to go upon that Quest, though only one was found
worthy to fulfil it? But now-a-days, the knights sit drinking hock
and champagne, or drive sulky-wagons, and never fancy that there is a
Quest at all."
"Why talk in these parables?"
"So the Jews asked of their prophets. They are no parables to my
ghost-husband, Sir Galahad. Now go, if you please; I must be busy, and
write letters."
He rose with a look, half of disappointment, half amused, and yet his
face bore a firmness which seemed to say, "You will be mine yet." As
he rose, he cast his eye upon the writing-table, and upon a letter
which lay there: and as he did so, his cheek grew pale, and his brows
knitted.
The letter was addressed to "Thomas Thurnall, Esq., Aberalva."
"Is this, then, your Sir Galahad?" asked he, after a pause, during
which he had choked down his rising jealousy, while she looked first
at herself in the glass, and then at him, and then at herself again,
with a determined and triumphant air.
"And what if it be?"
"So he, then, has achieved the Quest of the Sangreal?"
Stangrave spoke bitterly, and with an emphasis upon the "he;" and--
"What if he have? Do you know him?" answered she, while her face
lighted up with eager interest, which she did not care to conceal,
perhaps chose, in her woman's love of tormenting, to parade.
"I knew a man of that name once," he replied, in a carefully careless
tone, which did not deceive her; "an adventurer--a doctor, if I
recollect--who had been in Texas and Mexico, and I know not where
besides. Agreeable enough he was; but as for your Quest of the
Sangreal, whatever it may be, he seemed to have as little notion of
anything beyond his own interest as any Greek I ever met."
"Unjust! Your words only show how little you can see! That man, of all
men I ever met, saw the Quest at once, and followed it, at the risk of
his own life, as far at least as he was concerned with it:--ay, even
when he pretended to see nothing. Oh, there is more generosity in that
man's affected selfishness, than in all the noisy good-nature which I
have met with in the world. Thurnall! oh, you know his nobleness as
little as he knows it himself."
"Then he, I am to suppose, is your phantom-husband, for as long, at
least, as your present dream lasts?" asked he, with white, compressed
lips.
"He might have been, I believe," she answered carelessly, "if he had
even taken the trouble to ask me."
"Marie, this is too much! Do you not know to whom you speak? To one
who deserves, if not common courtesy, at least common mercy."
"Because he adores me, and so forth? So has many a man done; or told
me that he has done so. Do you know that I might be a viscountess
to-morrow, so Sabina informs me, if I but chose?"
"A viscountess? Pray accept your effete English aristocrat, and, as
far as I am concerned, accept my best wishes for your happiness."
"My effete English aristocrat, did I show him that pedigree of mine
which I have ere now threatened to show you, would perhaps be less
horrified at it than you are."
"Marie, I cannot bear this! Tell me only what you mean. What care I
for pedigree? I want you--worship you--and that is enough, Marie!"
"You admire me because I am beautiful. What thanks do I owe you for
finding out so patent a fact? What do you do more to me than I do to
myself?" and she glanced back once more at the mirror.
"Marie, you know that your words are false; I do more--"
"You admire me," interrupted she, "because I am clever. What thanks
to you for that, again? What do you do more to me than you do to
yourself?"
"And this, after all--"
"After what? After you found me, or rather I found you--you,
the critic, the arbiter of the greenroom, the highly-organised
do-nothings--teaching others how to do nothing most gracefully; the
would-be Goethe who must, for the sake of his own self-development,
try experiments on every weak woman whom he met. And I, the new
phenomenon, whom you must appreciate to show your own taste, patronise
to show your own liberality, develop to show your own insight into
character. You found yourself mistaken! You had attempted to play
with the tigress--and behold she was talons; to angle for the silly
fish--and behold the fish was the better angler, and caught you."
"Marie, have mercy! Is your heart iron?"
"No; but fire, as my name shows:" and she stood looking down on him
with a glare of dreadful beauty.
"Fire, indeed!"
"Yes, fire, that I may scorch you, kindle you, madden you, to do my
work, and wear the heart of fire which I wear day and night!"
Stangrave looked at her startled. Was she mad? Her face did not
say so; her brow was white, her features calm, her eye fierce and
contemptuous, but clear, steady, full of meaning.
"So you know Mr. Thurnall?" said she, after a while.
"Yes; why do you ask?"
"Because he is the only friend I have on earth."
"The only friend, Marie?"
"The only one," answered she calmly, "who, seeing the right, has gone
and done it forthwith. When did you see him last?"
"I have not been acquainted with Mr. Thurnall for some years," said
Stangrave, haughtily.
"In plain words, you have quarrelled with him?"
Stangrave bit his lip.
"He and I had a difference. He insulted my nation, and we parted."
She laughed a long, loud, bitter laugh, which rang through Stangrave's
ears.
"Insulted your nation? And on what grounds, pray?"
"About that accursed slavery question!"
La Cordifiamma looked at him with firm-closed lips a while.
"So then! I was not aware of this! Even so long ago you saw the
Sangreal, and did not know it when you saw it. No wonder that since
then you have been staring at it for months, in your very hands,
played with it, admired it, made verses about it, to show off your own
taste: and yet were blind to it the whole time! Farewell, then!"
"Marie, what do you mean?" and Stangrave caught both her hands.
"Hush, if you please. I know you are eloquent enough, when you choose,
though you have been somewhat dumb and monosyllabic to-night in the
presence of the actress whom you undertook to educate. But I know that
you can be eloquent, so spare me any brilliant appeals, which can only
go to prove that already settled fact. Between you and me lie two
great gulfs. The one I have told you of; and from it I shrink. The
other I have not told you of; from it you would shrink."
"The first is your Quest of the Sangreal."
She smiled assent, bitterly enough.
"And the second?"
She did not answer. She was looking at herself in the mirror; and
Stangrave, in spite of his almost doting affection, flushed with
anger, almost contempt, at her vanity.
And yet, was it vanity which was expressed in that face? No; but
dread, horror, almost disgust, as she gazed with side-long, startled
eyes, struggling, and yet struggling in vain, to turn her face from
some horrible sight, as if her own image had been the Gorgon's head.
"What is it? Marie, speak!"
But she answered nothing. For that last question she had no heart to
answer; no heart to tell him that in her veins were some drops, at
least, of the blood of slaves. Instinctively she had looked round at
the mirror--for might he not, if he had eyes, discover that secret for
himself? Were there not in her features traces of that taint? And as
she looked,--was it the mere play of her excited fancy,--or did her
eyelid slope more and more, her nostril shorten and curl, her lips
enlarge, her mouth itself protrude?
It was more than the play of fancy; for Stangrave saw it as well as
she. Her actress's imagination, fixed on the African type with an
intensity proportioned to her dread of seeing it in herself, had
moulded her features, for the moment, into the very shape which it
dreaded. And Stangrave saw it, and shuddered as he saw.
Another half minute, and that face also had melted out of the mirror,
at least for Marie's eyes; and in its place an ancient negress,
white-haired, withered as the wrinkled ape, but with eyes closed--in
death. Marie knew that face well; a face which haunted many a dream
of hers; once seen, but never forgotten since; for to that old dame's
coffin had her mother, the gay quadroon woman, flaunting in finery
which was the price of shame, led Marie when she was but a three
years' child; and Marie had seen her bend over the corpse, and call it
her dear old granny, and weep bitter tears.
Suddenly she shook off the spell, and looked round and down,
terrified, self-conscious. Her eye caught Stangrave's; she saw, or
thought she saw, by the expression of his face, that he knew all, and
burst away with a shriek.
He sprang up and caught her in his arms. "Marie! Beloved Marie!" She
looked up at him struggling; the dark expression had vanished, and
Stangrave's love-blinded eyes could see nothing in that face but the
refined and yet rich beauty of the Italian.
"Marie, this is mere madness; you excite yourself till you know not
what you say, or what you are--"
"I know what I am," murmured she: but he hurried on unheeding.
"You love me, you know you love me; and you madden yourself by
refusing to confess it!" He felt her heart throb as he spoke, and knew
that he spoke truth. "What gulfs are these you dream of? No; I will
not ask. There is no gulf between me and one whom I adore, who has
thrown a spell over me which I cannot resist, which I glory in not
resisting; for you have been my guide, my morning star, which has
awakened me to new life. If I have a noble purpose upon earth, if I
have roused myself from that conceited dream of self-culture which now
looks to me so cold, and barren, and tawdry, into the hope of becoming
useful, beneficent--to whom do I owe it but to you, Marie? No; there
is no gulf, Marie! You are my wife, and you alone!" And he held her
so firmly, and gazed down upon her with such strong manhood, that her
woman's heart quailed; and he might, perhaps, have conquered then and
there, had not Sabina, summoned by her shriek, entered hastily.
"Good heavens! what is the matter?"
"Wait but one minute, Mrs. Mellot," said he; "the next, I shall
introduce you to my bride."
"Never! never! never!" cried she, and breaking from him, flew into
Sabina's arms. "Leave me, leave me to bear my curse alone!"
And she broke out into such wild weeping, and refused so wildly to
hear another word from Stangrave, that he went away in despair, the
prize snatched from his grasp in the very moment of seeming victory.
He went in search of Claude, who had agreed to meet him at the
Exhibition in Trafalgar Square. Thither Stangrave rolled away in his
cab, his heart full of many thoughts. Marie's words about him, though
harsh and exaggerated, were on the whole true. She had fascinated him
utterly. To marry her was now the one object of his life: she had
awakened in him, as he had confessed, noble desires to be useful: but
the discovery that he was to be useful to the negro, that abolition
was the Sangreal in the quest of which he was to go forth, was as
disagreeable a discovery as he could well have made.
From public life in any shape, with all its vulgar noise, its petty
chicanery, its pandering to the mob whom he despised, he had always
shrunk, as so many Americans of his stamp have done. He had no wish to
struggle, unrewarded and disappointed, in the ranks of the minority;
while to gain place and power on the side of the majority was to lend
himself to that fatal policy which, ever since the Missouri Compromise
of 1820, has been gradually making the northern states more and more
the tools of the southern ones. He had no wish to be threatened in
Congress with having his Northerner's "ears nailed to the counter,
like his own base coin," or to be informed that he, with the
17,000,000 of the north, were the "White Slaves" of a southern
aristocracy of 350,000 slaveholders. He had enough comprehension
of, enough admiration for the noble principles of the American
Constitution to see that the democratic mobs of Irish and Germans,
who were stupidly playing into the hands of the Southerners, were not
exactly carrying them out; but he had no mind to face either Irish or
Southerners. The former were too vulgar for his delicacy; the latter
too aristocratic for his pride. Sprung, as he held (and rightly), from
as fine old English blood as any Virginian (though it did happen to be
Puritan, and not Cavalier), he had no lust to come into contact with
men who considered him much further below them in rank than an English
footman is below an English nobleman; who, indeed, would some of them
look down on the English nobleman himself as a mushroom of yesterday.
So he compounded with his conscience by ignoring the whole matter, and
by looking on the state of public affairs on his side of the Atlantic
with a cynicism which very soon (as is usual with rich men) passed
into Epicureanism. Poetry and music, pictures and statues, amusement
and travel, became his idols, and cultivation his substitute for the
plain duty of patriotism, and wandering luxuriously over the world, he
learnt to sentimentalise over cathedrals and monasteries, pictures and
statues, saints and kaisers, with a lazy regret that such "forms of
beauty and nobleness" were no longer possible in a world of scrip and
railroads: but without any notion that it was his duty to reproduce in
his own life, or that of his country, as much as he could of the said
beauty and nobleness. And now he was sorely tried. It was interesting
enough to "develop" the peculiar turn of Marie's genius, by writing
for her plays about liberty, just as he would have written plays
about jealousy, or anything else for representing which she had
"capabilities." But to be called on to act in that Slavery question,
the one in which he knew (as all sensible Americans do) that the life
and death of his country depended, and which for that very reason he
had carefully ignored till a more convenient season, finding in
its very difficulty and danger an excuse for leaving it to solve
itself:--to have this thrust on him, and by her, as the price of the
thing which he must have, or die! If she had asked for his right hand,
he would have given it sooner; and he entered the Royal Academy that
day in much the same humour as that of a fine lady who should find
herself suddenly dragged from the ball-room into the dust-hole, in her
tenderest array of gauze and jewels, and there peremptorily compelled
to sift the cinders, under the superintendence of the sweep and the
pot-boy.
Glad to escape from questions which he had rather not answer too
soon, he went in search of Claude, and found him before one of those
pre-Raphaelite pictures, which Claude does not appreciate as he ought.
"Desinit in Culicem mulier formosa supernè," said Stangrave, as he
looked over Claude's shoulder; "but I suppose he followed nature, and
copied his model."
"That he didn't," said Claude, "for I know who his model was: but if
he did he had no business to do so. I object on principle to these
men's notion of what copying nature means. I don't deny him talent.
I am ready to confess that there is more imagination and more honest
work in that picture than in any one in the room. The hysterical, all
but grinning joy upon the mother's face is a miracle of truth; I have
seen the expression more than once; doctors see it often, in the
sudden revulsion from terror and agony to certainty and peace; I only
marvel where he ever met it: but the general effect is unpleasing,
marred by patches of sheer ugliness, like that child's foot. There is
the same mistake in all his pictures. Whatever they are, they are not
beautiful; and no magnificence of surface-colouring will make up, in
my eyes, for wilful ugliness of form. I say that nature is beautiful;
and therefore nature cannot have been truly copied, or the general
effect would have been beautiful also. I never found out the fallacy
till the other day, when looking at a portrait by one of them. The
woman for whom it was meant was standing by my side, young and lovely;
the portrait hung there neither young nor lovely, but a wrinkled
caricature twenty years older than the model."
"I surely know the portrait you mean; Lady D----'s."
"Yes. He had simply, under pretence of following nature, caricatured
her into a woman twenty years older than she is."
"But did you ever see a modern portrait which more perfectly expressed
character; which more completely fulfilled the requirements which you
laid down a few evenings since?"
"Never; and that makes me all the more cross with the wilful mistake
of it. He had painted every wrinkle."
"Why not, if they were there?"
"Because he had painted a face not one-twentieth of the size of life.
What right had he to cram into that small space all the marks which
nature had spread over a far larger one?"
"Why not, again, if he diminished the marks in proportion?"
"Just what neither he nor any man could do, without making them so
small as to be invisible, save under a microscope: and the result was,
that he had caricatured every wrinkle, as his friend has in those
horrible knuckles of Shem's wife. Besides, I deny utterly your
assertion that one is bound to paint what is there. On that very
fallacy are they all making shipwreck."
"Not paint what is there? And you are the man who talks of art being
highest when it copies nature."
"Exactly. And therefore you must paint, not what is there, but what
you see there. They forget that human beings are men with two eyes,
and not daguerreotype lenses with one eye, and so are contriving and
striving to introduce into their pictures the very defect of the
daguerreotype which the stereoscope is required to correct."
"I comprehend. They forget that the double vision of our two eyes
gives a softness, and indistinctness, and roundness, to every
outline."
"Exactly so; and therefore, while for distant landscapes, motionless,
and already softened by atmosphere, the daguerreotype is invaluable
(I shall do nothing else this summer but work at it), yet for taking
portraits, in any true sense, it will be always useless, not only for
the reason I just gave, but for another one which the pre-Raphaelites
have forgotten."
"Because all the features cannot be in focus at once?"
"Oh no, I am not speaking of that. Art, for aught I know, may overcome
that; for it is a mere defect in the instrument. What I mean is this:
it tries to represent as still what never yet was still for the
thousandth part of a second: that is, the human face; and as seen by a
spectator who is perfectly still, which no man ever yet was. My dear
fellow, don't you see that what some painters call idealising a
portrait is, if it be wisely done, really painting for you the face
which you see, and know, and love; her ever-shifting features, with
expression varying more rapidly than the gleam of the diamond on
her finger; features which you, in your turn, are looking at with
ever-shifting eyes; while, perhaps, if it is a face which you love and
have lingered over, a dozen other expressions equally belonging to it
are hanging in your memory, and blending themselves with the actual
picture on your retina:--till every little angle is somewhat rounded,
every little wrinkle somewhat softened, every little shade somewhat
blended with the surrounding light, so that the sum total of what
you see, and are intended by Heaven to see, is something far softer,
lovelier--younger, perhaps, thank Heaven--than it would look if your
head was screwed down in a vice, to look with one eye at her head
screwed down in a vice also:--though even that, thanks to the muscles
of the eye, would not produce the required ugliness; and the only
possible method of fulfilling the pre-Raphaelite ideal would be, to
set a petrified Cyclops to paint his petrified brother."
"You are spiteful."
"Not at all. I am standing up for art, and for nature too. For
instance: Sabina has wrinkles. She says, too, that she has grey hairs
coming. The former I won't see, and therefore don't. The latter I
can't see, because I am not looking for them."
"Nor I either," said Stangrave smiling. "I assure you the announcement
is new to me."
"Of course. Who can see wrinkles in the light of those eyes, that
smile, that complexion?"
"Certainly," said Stangrave, "if I asked for her portrait, as I shall
do some day, and the artist sat down and painted the said 'wastes
of time,' on pretence of their being there, I should consider it an
impertinence on his part. What business has he to spy out what nature
has taken such charming trouble to conceal?"
"Again," said Claude, "such a face as Cordifiamma's. When it is at
rest, in deep thought, there are lines in it which utterly puzzle
one--touches which are Eastern, Kabyle, almost Quadroon."
Stangrave started. Claude went on unconscious:--
"But who sees them in the light of that beauty? They are defects, no
doubt, but defects which no one would observe without deep study of
the face. They express her character no more than a scar would; and
therefore when I paint her, as I must and will, I shall utterly ignore
them. If, on the other hand, I met the same lines in a face which I
knew to have Quadroon blood in it, I should religiously copy them;
because then they would be integral elements of the face. You
understand?"
"Understand?--yes," answered Stangrave, in a tone which made Claude
look up.
That strange scene of half an hour before flashed across him. What if
it were no fancy? What if Marie had African blood in her veins? And
Stangrave shuddered, and felt for the moment that thousands of pounds
would be a cheap price to pay for the discovery that his fancy was a
false one.
"Yes--oh--I beg your pardon," said he, recovering himself. "I was
thinking of something else. But, as you say, what if she had Quadroon
blood?"
"I? I never said so, or dreamt of it."
"Oh! I mistook. Do you know, though, where she came from?"
"I? You forget, my dear fellow, that you yourself introduced her to
us."
"Of course; but I thought Mrs. Mellot might--women always makes
confidences."
"All we know is, what I suppose you knew long ago, that her most
intimate friend, next to you, seems to be an old friend of ours, named
Thurnall."
"An old friend of yours?"
"Oh yes; we have known him these fifteen years. Met him first at
Paris; and after that went round the world with him, and saw infinite
adventures. Sabina and I spent three months with him once, among the
savages in a South-sea Island, and a very pretty romance our stay and
our escape would make. We were all three, I believe, to have been
cooked and eaten, if Tom had not got us off by that wonderful address
which, if you know him, you must know well enough."
"Yes," answered Stangrave, coldly, as in a dream; "I have known
Mr. Thurnall in past years; but not in connection with La Signora
Cordifiamma. I was not aware till this moment--this morning, I
mean--that they knew each other."
"You astound me; why, she talks of him to us all day long, as of one
to whom she has the deepest obligations; she was ready to rush into
our arms when she first found that we knew him. He is a greater hero
in her eyes, I sometimes fancy, than even you are. She does nothing
(or fancies that she does nothing, for you know her pretty wilfulness)
without writing for his advice."
"I a hero in her eyes? I was really not aware of that fact," said
Stangrave, more coldly than ever; for bitter jealousy had taken
possession of his heart. "Do you know, then, what this same obligation
may be?"
"I never asked. I hate gossiping, and I make a rule to inquire into no
secrets but such as are voluntarily confided to me; and I know that
she has never told Sabina."
"I suppose she is married to him. That is the simplest explanation of
the mystery."
"Impossible! What can you mean? If she ever marries living man, she
will marry you."
"Then she will never marry living man," said Stangrave to himself.
"Good-bye, my dear fellow; I have an engagement at the Traveller's."
And away went Stangrave, leaving Claude sorely puzzled, but little
dreaming of the powder-magazine into which he had put a match.
But he was puzzled still more that night, when by the latest post a
note came--
"From Stangrave!" said Claude. "Why, in the name of all wonders!"--and
he read:--
"Good-bye. I am just starting for the Continent, on sudden and urgent
business. What my destination is I hardly can tell you yet. You will
hear from me in the course of the summer."
Claude's countenance fell, and the note fell likewise. Sabina snatched
it up, read it, and gave La Cordifiamma a look which made her spring
from the sofa, and snatch it in turn.
She read it through, with trembling hands, and blanching cheeks, and
then dropped fainting upon the floor.
They laid her on the sofa, and while they were recovering her, Claude
told Sabina the only clue which he had to the American's conduct,
namely, that afternoon's conversation.
Sabina shook her head over it; for to her, also, the American's
explanation had suggested itself. Was Marie Thurnall's wife? Or did
she--it was possible, however painful--stand to him in some less
honourable relation, which she would fain forget now, in a new passion
for Stangrave? For that Marie loved Stangrave, Sabina knew well
enough.
The doubt was so ugly that it must be solved; and when she had got the
poor thing safe into her bedroom she alluded to it as gently as she
could.
Marie sprang up in indignant innocence.
"He! Whatever he may be to others, I know not: but to me he has been
purity and nobleness itself--a brother, a father! Yes; if I had no
other reason for trusting him, I should love him for that alone; that
however tempted he may have been, and Heaven knows he was tempted,
he could respect the honour of his friend, though that friend lay
sleeping in a soldier's grave ten thousand miles away."
And Marie threw herself upon Sabina's neck, and under the pressure of
her misery sobbed out to her the story of her life. What it was need
not be told. A little common sense, and a little knowledge of human
nature, will enable the reader to fill up for himself the story of a
beautiful slave.
Sabina soothed her, and cheered her; and soothed and cheered her most
of all by telling her in return the story of her own life; not so dark
a one, but almost as sad and strange. And poor Marie took heart, when
she found in her great need a sister in the communion of sorrows.
"And you have been through all this, so beautiful and bright as you
are! You whom I should have fancied always living the life of the
humming-bird: and yet not a scar or a wrinkle has it left behind!"
"They were there once, Marie! but God and Claude smoothed them away."
"I have no Claude,--and no God, I think, at times."
"No God, Marie! Then how did you come hither?"
Marie was silent, reproved; and then passionately--
"Why does He not right my people?"
That question was one to which Sabina's little scheme of the universe
had no answer; why should it, while many a scheme which pretends to be
far vaster and more infallible has none as yet?
So she was silent, and sat with Marie's head upon her bosom, caressing
the black curls, till she had soothed her into sobbing exhaustion.
"There; lie there and rest: you shall be my child, my poor Marie. I
have a fresh child every week; but I shall find plenty of room in my
heart for you, my poor hunted deer."
"You will keep my secret?"
"Why keep it? No one need be ashamed of it here in free England."
"But he--he--you do not know, Sabina! Those Northerners, with all
their boasts of freedom, shrink from us just as much as our own
masters."
"Oh, Marie, do not be so unjust to him! He is too noble, and you must
know it yourself."
"Ay, if he stood alone; if he were even going to live in England; if
he would let himself be himself; but public opinion," sobbed the poor
self-tormentor--"It has been his God, Sabina, to be a leader of
taste and fashion--admired and complete--the Crichton of Newport and
Brooklyn. And he could not bear scorn, the loss of society. Why should
he bear it for me? If he had been one of the abolitionist party, it
would have been different: but he has no sympathy with them, good,
narrow, pious people, or they with him: he could not be satisfied
in their society--or I either, for I crave after it all as much
as he--wealth, luxury, art, brilliant company, admiration,--oh,
inconsistent wretch, that I am! And that makes me love him all the
more, and yet makes me so harsh to him, wickedly cruel, as I was
to-day; because when I am reproving his weakness, I am reproving
my own, and because I am angry with myself, I grow angry with him
too--envious of him, I do believe at moments, and all his success and
luxury!"
And so poor Marie sobbed out her confused confession of that strange
double nature which so many Quadroons seem to owe to their mixed
blood; a strong side of deep feeling, ambition, energy, an intellect
rather Greek in its rapidity than English in sturdiness; and withal
a weak side, of instability, inconsistency, hasty passion, love of
present enjoyment, sometimes, too, a tendency to untruth, which is
the mark, not perhaps of the African specially, but of every enslaved
race.
Consolation was all that Sabina could give. It was too late to act.
Stangrave was gone, and week after week rolled by without a line from
the wanderer.