"Well, Sir, Hazel is very pretty"----
"It is Hazel, then? Would you like her to be made more distinctly yours,
Miss Éloise?"
"Oh, dear, no, Sir, thank you. That isn't it at all. Hazel is in love."
"Indeed!"
"She is in love with Vane, a boy of Mr. Marlboro's: you may have seen
him; he is here a good deal,--by stealth: and they want to be married.
But Mr. Marlboro' is their terror, he may put an end to everything, and
they are afraid, and--and--could you buy Vane, Mr. St. George?"
"I could, Miss Changarnier."
"And you will, then?" cried Éloise, springing up.
"If Mr. Marlboro' will sell him."
"Won't he?"
"It is a pride of the Marlboro's that there never was a hand sold off
the place."
"Oh, I had forgotten. They would tell too shocking stories."
"Not here. Not unless they were sold off the Cuban plantation, where the
vicious ones are transported."
"But perhaps he would give him to you."
"Miss Éloise, he would give him to _you_."
"Me? I have never seen him."
"That is of no consequence. He has seen you."
"I wonder where. Do you really suppose that Mr. Marlboro' would give
Vane to me?"
"Miss Éloise, I will see what I can do about it first."
"How kind you are! Thank you!"
And Éloise was about to go.
"One moment, if you please," said the other.
And Mr. St. George remained in meditation. When he spoke, it was not in
too assured a tone.
"I am quite aware," said he, "that you consider me in the light of an
enemy. Perhaps it is a magnanimity that would be pleasant to you, should
you in turn grant that enemy a favor."
"I should like to be able to serve you, Sir."
"Well, then,--I spoke very unwisely a few moments since,--promise me
now, that, if Hazel and Vane do not marry till Doomsday, you will not
ask Marlboro' for the gift. It places you, an unprotected girl, too much
under the weather with such a man as Marlboro'. You promise me?"
And he rose opposite her, smiling and gazing.
"A whole promise is rash," said Éloise, laughing. "Half a one I give
you."
"It is for yourself," said Mr. St. George, grimly; and he turned
abruptly away, because he knew he lied, and was afraid lest she would
know it too.
It was two or three weeks after this, that Mr. St. George, returning one
chilly night from some journey, found Mrs. Arles asleep in her chair, a
fire upon the hearth, and Éloise sitting on the floor before it with her
box and brushes, essaying to catch the shifting play of color opposite
her, and paint there one of the great cloven tongues of fire that went
soaring up the chimney.
"In pursuit of an _ignis-fatuus_?" asked he, stooping over her an
instant, and suddenly snatching himself erect, as she looked up with a
certain sweetness in her smile, and pushed back the drooping tress,
that, streaming along the temple and lying in one large curve upon the
cheek, sometimes fell too low for order, though never for grace.
"And all in vain," she said, laughingly. "I've worked an hour, I can get
the violet edges, I can get the changing bend,--but there 'a no lustre,
no flicker,--I can't find out the secret of painting flame."
"It is a secret you found out long ago!" muttered Mr. St. George,
unintelligibly, and strode out, banging the door behind him.
And Éloise, astonished and dismayed, abruptly put up her pencils, and
went to bed.
So that, when Mr. St. George returned a half-hour afterward for a
cheerful fireside-season over nuts and wine, there was nobody there but
Mrs. Arles, who picked herself up out of her nap, and went placidly on
with her tatting and contrivances.
Two stragglers on the ice-fields of the polar seas would have met each
other with less frozen chill than St. George and Éloise did on the
succeeding morning. And in that chill a long period elapsed, during
which Mr. St. George attended to his affairs, and Éloise silently cast
up her accounts.
* * * * *
One morning in the spring, after the last of the soft and balmy winter,
Mr. St. George said to Mrs. Arles, at breakfast,--
"A dozen rooms, or more, can be ready by Wednesday? There will be guests
at noon, for several weeks. That is the list. I rely on Miss
Changarnier's assistance." And he handed her a paper, and went out.
"It will be useless for you to keep your room now," said Mrs. Arles to
Éloise, on Wednesday morning. "It isn't like Mr. St. George's bachelor
parties with Marlboro' and Montgomery and Mavoisie, when I like to see
you keep to yourself as you do. These are all old friends."
"I shall still have my work to do," said Éloise; and she went into the
cabinet and sharpened her pens with a _vim_.
It would doubtless have relieved Mr. St. George of much annoyance and
perplexity, if Éloise would have assumed her old place in welcoming the
guests; but that was not set down in her part, and Éloise rightly felt
that it would be a preposterous thing for her to do. And though, when
she heard their voices in the hall, she longed just to open the door and
give one glance at Laura Murray sweeping by, or draw Lottie Humphreys in
through the crack and indulge in one quick squeeze, she heroically bent
herself upon the debit and credit beneath her eye, and tried to forget
all about it,--succeeding only in remembering who had lived and who had
died since the last time that hall had rung with their voices.
It was past noon when Éloise, having finished her task, and having
remained for a long time with her arms upon the desk and her hands upon
her eyes, suddenly glanced up and saw a gentleman entering the cabinet,
where no gentleman but one was ever allowed to enter. He was in search
of a book; and scanning the shelves, his eye fell on her.
He hesitated for a single atom of time, then stepped rapidly forward,
and said,--
"Miss Changarnier, I am quite sure."
"Allow me," said quickly another voice at his shoulder, "to present to
Miss Changarnier Mr. Marlboro'." For Mr. St. George had entered just in
time.
Mr. Marlboro' was a slight man, hardly to be called tall. He wore black,
of course, the coat fastened on the breast and letting out just a
glimpse of ruffled linen and glancing jewel below, while the lofty brow,
set in its fair curling hair, and the peaked beard curling and waving
about the throat, gave him the appearance of a Vandyck stepped from the
frame. He had the further peculiarity of eyes, dark hazel eyes, that
would have glowed like fever, if they were not perpetually wrapped in
dream. There was a certain air of careful breeding about him, different
from Earl St. George Erne's high-bred bearing, inasmuch as he insisted
upon his pedigree and St. George forgot his. Too fiery a Southerner to
seek the advantages of Northern colleges, he had educated himself in
England, and had contracted while at Oxford the habit of eating opium.
Returning home at his majority, and remaining long enough to establish
his own ideas, which were peculiarly despotic, upon his
property,--through many subsequent travels, tasting in each an
experience of all the folly and madness the great capitals of the world
afford, through all his life, indeed, this habit was the only thing
Marlboro' had not mastered. One other thing, albeit, there was, of which
Marlboro' was the slave, and that was the Marlboro' temper.
Éloise returned his salutation cordially, and with a certain naughty
pleasure, since Mr. St. George was looking on, and since that person,
constituting himself her grim guardian, had in a manner warned her of
the other. Then she displayed her pretty little ink-stained hands, and
ran away.
Mr. Marlboro' looked after her, and then turned to survey St. George.
"Who would not be the Abélard to such an Éloise?" he said.
There was no answer. St. George was filling a pipe, and whistling the
while a melancholy old tune.
"I'll tell you what, St. George"----
Here he paused, and thrummed on the book in time to the tune.
"You were about to impart some information?"
"Has your little nun taken the black veil?"
"It is no nun of my shriving."
"Are you King Ahasuerus himself, to have lived so long in the house with
Miss Changarnier, may I ask, and to have thrown no handkerchief?"
"There is some confusion in your rhetoric. But it is not I who am
tyrant,--it is she who stands for that;--I am only Mordecai the Jew
sitting in the king's gate. As so many Jews do to-day," muttered St.
George,--"ay, and on their thrones, too. I am afraid we are neither of
us very well up in our Biblical history. She is the Grand
Unapproachable."
"_Tant mieux._ My way is all the clearer."
"Your way to what?"
"To the altar!"
"Yes, you should have married long ago, Marlboro'," said Mr. St. George,
the pipe being lighted, the face looming out of azure wreaths, and the
heels taking an altitude.
"I came home," said Marlboro', "to marry Éloise Changarnier."
"That is exactly what I intend to do myself."
"You!"
Mr. Marlboro's eyes glistened like a topaz in the sun; but just then a
new guest arriving demanded Mr. St. George's attention.
Meantime Éloise had found a feminine conclave assembled in her room, all
having prepared their own toilets, and ready to inspect the preparation
of hers; and as the work proceeded, Lottie Humphreys added herself to
the group, in grand _tenue_, and pushed Hazel aside, that she might bind
up Éloise's already braided hair, and indulge herself in the interim
with sundry fervent ejaculations.
"Isn't he splendid?" whispered Lottie, while Laura compared bracelets
with Emma Houghton. "Oh, there, isn't he splendid? It's like the king
coming down from his throne, when he speaks to you; it puts my heart in
a flutter. How do you dare ask him to pass the butter? Now just tell
_me_. Are you engaged to him? Tell me truly, only shake your head, yes
or no. No? I don't believe a word you say. Mean to be? Then, I
declare----Suppose now, only just suppose, suppose he'd look at me?"
"Oh, what a silly little goose you are, Lottie Humphreys! And you've put
geraniums in my hair, when I meant to wear those beautiful blue
poison-bells!"
"I never saw any one so dark as you are wear so much blue."
"But it's becoming to me, isn't it?" said Éloise, turning with her
smile, as radiant for Lottie as for Marlboro'.
"St. George," said Marlboro', with a beaming face bent over his
shoulder, as he took Éloise out to dinner, "my intention was the
earlier; it will succeed!"
"As being the eldest born and heir to the succession. Does the good
general expose his campaign?"
"There we are quits. It is precisely as a good general that I exposed
it."
"But did the Levites unveil the sacred ark?" said Mr. St. George,
severely.
"We are talking freemasonry, Miss Changarnier," said Marlboro', and they
moved on.
* * * * *
Whether she would or not, Éloise found herself in exactly the same
position in the house as before her adopted father's death,--partly
because almost all the company, being old friends, recognized no
difference, partly because Mr. St. George silently chose it should be
so. She soon forgot herself entirely in the pleasure of it, and was
unconsciously, even towards Mr. St. George, so sweet and genial, so
blithe and bewitching, that his scanning glance would suddenly have to
fall, since an expression, he felt, entered it that he dared not have
her see. There was always a certain disarray about the costume of
Éloise; one tress of her hair was always drooping too low, or one thrust
back behind the beautiful temple and tiny ear, or a bracelet was half
undone, or a mantle dropping off,--trifles that only gave one the desire
to help her; she constantly wore, too, a scarf or shawl, or something of
the kind, and the drapery lent her a kind of tender womanliness, which
only such things do; then, too, she garnished her hair with flowers
always half falling away, somewhat faded with the warmth, and emitting
strong, rich fragrances in dying. When she laughed, and the brilliant
little teeth sparkled a contrast with the dark smooth skin, when she
thought, and her eyes glowed like tear-washed stars, Mr. St. George was
wont to turn abruptly away from the vision, unwilling to be so
controlled. But of that Éloise never dreamed.
As for Marlboro', on the other hand, he was the moth in the candle. Of
Mr. Marlboro's devotion Éloise was quite aware,--and whereas, playing
with it the least bit in the world, she had at first enjoyed it, it grew
to irk her sadly; she used to beg her friends, in all manner of pretty
ways, to take him off her hands, and would resort from her own rooms to
theirs, assisting at their awful rites, and endeavoring to get them up
as charmingly as possible, that they might lure away her trouble. It was
in vain that Marlboro' tried to reopen the subject of their mute warfare
with St. George. St. George would not condescend, neither would he sully
Éloise's name by bandying it about with another lover. If Marlboro'
begged him to toss up for chances, St. George answered that he never
threw up a chance; when he went further and offered to stake success or
loss, St. George told him he had cast his last die; when he would have
spoken her name to him directly, St. George withered him with flamy
eyes, and let his manner become too rigid for one to dare more with him.
But the ladies had already caught the spirit of the thing, and made
little situations of it among themselves. Then when St. George became
impregnable to his attacks, Marlboro' pulled his blonde moustache
savagely, and grew sullen, and fortunately Éloise did not try to dispel
the cloud. Nevertheless, Marlboro' fancied that he perceived victory
hovering nearer to St. George than himself, and a rivalry begun in
good-humor was likely to take a different cast. In his pique, Marlboro'
bade his host farewell, and returned to Blue Bluffs; but it was idle
riding, for every day found him again at The Rim, like the old riddle,--
"All saddled, all bridled, all fit for a fight,"
and constant as the magnet to its poles.
It was still the steps of Éloise that Marlboro' haunted. Yesterday, he
brought songs to teach her, and among them the chant to which long ago
they had once listened together in the old Norman cathedral; to-morrow,
he would show her a singular deposit on the beach, of rare silvery
shells underflushed with rose, kept there over a tide for her eyes;
to-day, he treated her to politics condensed into a single phrase whose
essence told all his philosophy:--"The great error in government," he
said, "is also inversely the great want in marriage: in government,
individuality should be supreme; in marriage, lost. In government, this
error is a triple-headed monster: centralization, consolidation, union."
Mr. St. George heard him, and paused a moment before them, one evening,
as Marlboro' thus harangued Éloise.
"Consolidation? Centralization?" said he. "The very things we all
oppose."
"Nullification is a good solvent."
"A ghost that is laid. There's a redder phantom than that on the
horizon, man!"
"What are you talking about, politics or marriage?"
"God forbid that I should soil a lady's ears with the first!" said Mr.
St. George, bowing to Éloise; "and as to the last,--I'll none of it!"
And after Mr. Marlboro' had gone that night, as Éloise was about to
ascend to her own rooms, Mr. St. George came along again, and, lightly
taking the candle, held up the tiny flame before her face.
"What has that _contrabandista_ been saying to you?" demanded Mr. St.
George.
Éloise looked ignorantly up.
"Gilding hell? Do not believe him! Never believe anything any one says,
when you know he is in love with you! Slavery is a curse! a curse that
we inherit for the sins of those drunken Cavaliers, our forefathers! Let
us make the best of it!"
"Ah, Mr. St. George," said she, gayly, "this from you, for whom the
disciples claim Calhoun's mantle? For what, then, do you contend?"
"For the right of being a free man myself! for the right of enduring
the dictation of no man in Maine or Louisiana! for the right to do as I
have the mind!" exclaimed Mr. St. George, in a ponderous and suppressed
under-voice that rang through her head half-way up-stairs.
Long before, Mr. St. George had very courteously begged Éloise to take a
vacation during the stay of their friends, but she had so peremptorily
and utterly refused to do so that it ended by his spending the long
morning with her in the cabinet, either over certain neglected arrears,
or while she wrote letters under his royal dictation, and Hazel sewed a
laborious seam between them, as always. Here, at length, after
sufficient tantalization by its means, Marlboro' venturously intruded
himself every day. Too familiar for interruption, he took another seat,
and watched her swift hand's graceful progress. If her pen delayed, she
found another awaiting her,--her posture wearied, a footstool was rolled
towards her feet,--her side cramped, behold, a cushion,--she looked for
fresh paper, it fell before her: all somewhat slavish service, and which
Hazel could have rendered as well. Used to slaves, would she have
preferred a master? Whether Miss Changarnier relished these abject
kindnesses better than Mr. St. George's imperious exactions was
precisely the thing that puzzled the two gentlemen.
Meanwhile, during all this gay season, if Éloise had thought of once
looking about her, which she never did, she would have seen, that, in
whatever group she was, there, too, was Mr. St. George,--that, if they
rode three abreast down the great park-avenues, though she laughed with
Evan Murray, it was to Mr. St. George's horse that her bridle was
secured,--and that, when she sang, it was St. George who jested and
smiled and lightly talked the while,--not that her music was not sweet,
but that its spell was too strong for him to endure beneath his mask.
Yet Éloise drew no deductions; if at first she noticed that it was he
who laid the shawl on her shoulders, if she remembered, that, when he
fastened her dropping bracelet, biting his lip and looking down, he held
the wrist an instant with a clasp that left its whitened pressure there,
she remembered, too, that he never spoke to her, were it avoidable, that
he failed in small politenesses of the footstool or the fan, and that,
if once he had looked at her in an instant's intentness of singular
expression, and let a smile well up and flood his eyes and lips and
face, in a heart-beat it had faded, and he was standing with folded arms
and looking sternly away beyond her, while she caught herself still
sitting there and bending forward and smiling up at him like a flower
beneath the sun;--to atone for her remissness, she was frowning and cool
and curt to Earl St. George for days.
* * * * *
It was about this time, that, one night, when Hazel passed the tea,
Éloise's eye, wandering a moment, suddenly woke from a little apathy and
observed that there was no widow's cap on Mrs. Arles's hair, that it had
refined away through various shades of lace till at last even the
delicate cobweb on the back of the head was gone and the glossy locks
lay bare, that the sables had become simply black gauze over a steely
shine of silk, that the little Andalusian foot lay relieved on a white
embroidered cushion, that its owner was glancing up and smiling at a
gentleman who bent above her, and that that gentleman was Mr. St.
George. When this change had taken place, and whether it had been abrupt
or gradual, her careless eye could not tell; and, forgetting her own
part momentarily in order to take in the whole of the drama in which
they were all acting, Éloise spilled her tea and made some work for
Hazel. As the girl rectified her mishap, it flashed on Éloise that she
had done nothing more about her suit; she noticed, too, how pale Hazel
was, and how subdued and still in all her movements; she remembered that
probably Vane had found it impossible to see her and to elude his
ever-present master; and she thereupon availed herself of his first
disengaged moment to stand at Mr. St. George's side, and ask him if he
had ever thought again of a request she had once made him.
"I was thinking of it at this moment," he replied, looking at her with
something like sunshine suffusing the brown depth of his eyes; "but the
truth is, I am not on such terms with Marlboro' that I may demand a
favor."
"Then _I_ shall."
"On your peril!" he cried, with hasty rigor.
But Éloise escaped, trailing one end of her scarf behind, looking back
at him, laughing, and shaking her threatening fan as he stepped after
her. And then Mr. St. George resumed his haughty silence.
Éloise went down the hall after Hazel. She found her in the empty
dining-room, having just set down the salver; the last light, that,
stealing in, illumined all the paintings of clusters of fruit and
bunches of flowers upon the white panelling, had yet a little ray to
spare for the girl where she crouched with her sobs, her apron flung
above her head; and when Éloise laid her hand gently on her shoulder,
she sprang as if one had struck her.
"Oh, Miss 'Loise! Miss 'Loise! I'm in such trouble!" she gasped.
It did not take long for the little story to find the air. Vane and
Hazel, secure of Éloise's efforts, had married. It was one of the
immutable Blue Bluffs laws that they had broken: there were no marriages
allowed off the place there. Vane was expiating his offence no one knew
where, and there were even rumors that he had already been sent away to
the Cuban plantation of the Marlboro's, whither all refractory slaves
were wont to journey.
Éloise went slowly back to the drawing-room, then out upon the piazza,
and with her went that bending grace that accompanied her least motion,
and always reminded you of a flower swaying on its stem. Mr. Marlboro'
leaned there, listening to Miss Murray's singing within. Éloise went and
took her place beside him, while his face brightened. He had been eating
opium again, and his eyes were full of dreams. From where they stood
upon the piazza they could see the creek winding, a strip of silvery
redness, along the coast, and far in the distance where it met the sea,
a film upon the sky, rose the dim castellated height of Blue Bluffs,
like an azure mist.
"There is something there that I want," said Éloise, archly, looking at
the Bluffs.
"There? you shall not wish twice."
Then Hazel approaching, as by signal, offered Mr. Marlboro' a cup, which
he declined without gesture or glance, while there gleamed in her eye a
subtle look that told how easy it would have been to brew poison for
this man who had such an ungodly power over her fate.
"That is my little maid," said Éloise. "I have lent her to Mrs. Arles
awhile, though. Is she not pretty,--Hazel?"
"That is Hazel, then? A very witch-hazel!"
"Yes."
"And you want Vane?"
"Yes, Mr. Marlboro'."
"I did not know she was your maid. But the offence of Vane, if
overlooked, would be a breach of discipline entailing too hazardous
effects. Authority should never relax. What creeps through the iron
fingers once can creep again. The gentle dews distilling through the
pores of the granite congeal in the first frost and rend the rock. I
would have difficulty, Miss Éloise, in pardoning such an offence to you,
yourself. Ah, yes, that would be impossible, by Heaven!"