the Pearmain windows--those pretty mullioned windows all opening on
the ground; he followed it. And he never knew what fate it was that
suddenly made him turn, and tiptoe towards a certain window of them
all, and pause there, looking in--whether some arresting sight had
caught his eye and directed his feet while his conscious thoughts were
otherwhere, or whether it was simply perverse curiosity. Whatever it
was, he delayed there some seconds, his eyes glaring out of his head,
his nose flattened against the pane of the narrow pantry window till it
shone leprously white and blue. And in that plight, as if magnetized by
the fixity of his gaze, Mrs. Pearmain turned and surveyed him.
“Oh, Mr. Morley! Mr. Morley!” she cried, as well as the circumstances
allowed her to enunciate. “Don’t, don’t betray me!”
Mr. Morley chuckled. It was a moment of glorious recompense. Here was
his sword. He pushed up the sash. “I’ll take a bite,” he said.
Mrs. Pearmain stared in a sort of stupor a moment. “I--I can’t help it,
Mr. Morley,” she stammered then, with pale and shaking lips.
“It’s very well done,” said Mr. Morley. “It shows a good deal of
experience--”
“Oh, the doctor ordered it long ago, and the habit grew upon me; and
although I gave up hope for myself, I’ve tried to keep the way straight
for the others--”
“Straight and narrow,” said Mr. Morley, wiping his mouth.
“--And I’ve talked and written about it, talked to every one, argued
with every one--you know I have, Mr. Morley,” she cried, breathlessly,
the tears gushing--“tried to convert every one--”
“Enough to strike a balance. I understand--whited sepulchres,
Pharisees, and all that. You’ve been like the hero of the ballad who
sat in the corner eating his Christmas-pie. You’ve been the means of
starving me for nearly twenty years on oatmeal mush, while you’ve
picked your bones and--”
“Mr. Morley! you can still insult--”
“Not at all, not at all. I don’t wish to insult you. On the contrary, I
think you’ve shown the first ray of sense I’ve seen in you for twenty
years. Only,” said Mr. Morley, lifting his finger impressively before
his victim’s eyes, “now there’s to be no backing down.”
A stormy half-hour afterwards Mr. Morley might have been seen springing
over the railing between the grounds as light as a boy, and he ate his
supper of oatmeal mush with the relish of Jack sitting at the foot of
the bean-stalk he was about to fell; for he never meant to partake of
that viand again in his life.
The phaeton was coming round to the door to take Mrs. Morley, in the
long twilight, to one of her poor women whom she helped on certain
vegetarian conditions. The pony was rather gay, and pranced a good deal
as Thomas held the bridle. “It is wonderful the strength these animals
get out of grains,” said Mr. Morley, artfully.
“Wonderful!” said Mrs. Morley, falling delightedly into the trap.
“And the weakness other animals get,” continued Mr. Morley. “My dear,
did you know that Mrs. Pearmain had been ailing for some time?”
“Triflingly,” said Mrs. Morley, drawing on her gauntlets.
“My dear, if you saw Mrs. Pearmain standing behind her pantry door,
holding in one hand part of a cold sausage, the rest of which was in
her mouth, and in the other hand a pickled martinoe--”
“Do talk common sense, Mr. Morley.”
“I call that very common sense--on Mrs. Pearmain’s part. As I was
saying, in such case what should you think?”
“I shouldn’t think at all; I can’t reason on impossibilities.”
“Do you believe it would make any difference as to your tyranny over
me?” urged Mr. Morley, with a laugh.
“Tyranny, George!” said Mrs. Morley, turning her still charming face
wonderingly upon her husband.
“I said it advisedly,” replied Mr. Morley, with sudden acrimony.
“Is that tyranny to which your reason so fully consents?” asked Mrs.
Morley, pulling off her gloves for a combat, in reverse of the custom
of those knights who, before the fray, “pulled their ringing gauntlets
on.”
“Teresa,” said Mr. Morley, with a firmness that surprised himself, “I
adore your principles, but I abhor your practice. Don’t pull off your
gloves, my love; that poor woman is famishing for her porridge. Go your
ways, child; but if on your return you run over to Mrs. Pearmain’s
I think you may learn something to--shall I say your?--no, to _my_
advantage.”
And little Mrs. Morley went her ways, with her mind in a state of
bewilderment, and shivering as she remembered that the ancients held
high spirits to be a presage of sudden death.
“Louie,” said Mr. Morley, when his wife was out of sight, “it is very
wrong to disobey your mother.”
“Yes, pa.”
“But if your mother has given no orders, you can’t disobey them.”
“No, pa.”
“And it is equally wrong to disobey your father.”
“Yes, indeed, pa, dear.”
“And if your father gives you orders, you can do nothing else than obey
them.”
“Certainly, pa, of course.”
“Very well, then, I order you to take a goose which you will find in
the servants’ larder, and tell Jane to dress it and roast it at once.
And when that is done I shall have some further orders to give you.”
When Mrs. Morley returned from her visit the house stood dark,
with open doors and windows, and the fragrance of the honeysuckles
blowing all about it, but with nobody inside it. She remembered what
her husband had said, and hastened across the lawn and up to Mrs.
Pearmain’s lighted mansion, arriving there just as Mr. Pearmain
descended from the coach that had brought him to the end of a long
journey. She spoke with the worthy man, looked up at him admiringly
in the dusk, and yet paused one instant to think that her George, of
whom no one stood in awe, was a pleasanter person for a husband after
all. In the next instant a sound of revelry smote her ears, smote Mr.
Pearmain’s too, and they went in together. The sound came from the
dining-room. What odor was this that never before had profaned that
pretty room? What sight was this that saluted the outraged eye?
There stood Mr. Morley, at one end of the freshly laid and glittering
table, with his fork in the breast-bone of the goose and his knife in
the air. There sat Mrs. Pearmain, pale, with traces of tears, daintily
picking apart, but with no appetite whatever, a slice of the brown
breast. There sat Fanny Farwell, blushing like a rose, with Harry’s
protecting arm just thrown across her shoulder. There stood Louie
Morley at one side of her father, flourishing a drumstick, and her
great black eyes dancing to the music of Dr. Bonnamy’s merry laughter
as he stood upon the other side.
“My dearest love,” said Mr. Morley, laying down his knife and waving
his hand towards the remnants of the goose, “allow me to reintroduce to
you an old but unforgotten acquaintance--”
“Oh, indeed!” cried Mrs. Morley, too much stupefied to express
indignation, “as if I had not seen a goose every day of my life for
twenty years!”
“Not roasted. Pardon me; your looking-glass reflects, but does not
roast. Permit me also to remark that in future this acquaintance shall
always be a welcome guest at our table, to which--while I accord you
personally all liberty of groats--so help me Heaven, I never mean
to sit down again without a joint! I told you this afternoon that I
admired your principles, my dear Teresa. If I had known Dr. Bonnamy
earlier and better, I never should have made so foolish a speech, and
we should have been spared some years of trouble. Let me see. You
declare that I inject dead flesh into my veins when I partake of this
delicious morsel,” refreshing himself with a bit of the goose. “Do you,
when you manure your hill of corn with barn-yard compost, inject that
disgusting material into your ear of corn? No; the chemistry of sun and
air absorbs from that compost only the proper constituents of corn.
The stomach is a fine laboratory; it acts in the same way; it sends no
dead flesh to the veins, but it separates that food into its elements,
and sends merely the proper constituents of life along to their
absorbents. Moreover,” continued Mr. Morley, wiping his forehead, and
amazed at his eloquence and temerity, “you urge me to live according
to your ideas, because comparative anatomy shows that animals with
cellulated colons are herbivorous, and man has a cellulated colon--man
and the ape. Is that right, Dr. Bonnamy? I am now convinced that the
first ape that forsook his herbivorous diet and smacked his lips over
some smoking flesh began to differentiate into man; and you may send
this cellulated colon to Mr. Darwin as the missing link--”
“Bravo, papa, bravo!”
“And now, Mrs. Pearmain,” said Mr. Morley, “shall I speak for you?”
“I--I can’t speak for myself,” said Mrs. Pearmain, bursting into tears,
and seeing twenty husbands with twenty valises all about to leave her
forever, and gazing at her with awful austerities of farewell.
“Mrs. Pearmain, as Dr. Bonnamy will assure you,” said Mr. Morley, “was
ordered by that physician, in whom you all believe so heartily, to
resume her pristine diet some years since. This she stoutly refused
to do; but learning that her life depended on it, I have brought this
bird over here, and, as I may say, have forced her to share it with us.
The rest,” continued Mr. Morley, happier than he had been for years,
“I hope explains itself. Let me introduce this young lady”--as the
little thing shrank closer and closer to her proud and defiant young
husband--“formerly Miss Fanny Farwell, but for this three months past
waiting an opportunity to confess herself Mrs. Harry Pearmain. And that
done, let me present to you, my dear wife, Dr. Bonnamy, who became your
son-in-law an hour ago.” And, quite out of breath, Mr. Morley sat down.
The whole English language failed to do justice to the occasion. There
was silence in heaven for half an hour--that silence echoed here for
half a moment, perhaps, but it seemed longer.
“I hope you will all be very happy,” said Mrs. Morley, then, with
majesty, but a tremulous voice. “And as you have shown yourselves so
capable of it without me, I--”
“Now, mother, mother,” said Mr. Morley, bending over the goose and
waving his knife and fork affectionately towards her, “you know it
would have been of no sort of use to talk with you, and it was a
great deal better to clear your skirts of all responsibility.” Mr.
Morley stopped and regarded the others. Mr. Pearmain, wide-eyed and
open-mouthed and silent till this juncture, had suddenly broken the
spell, dropped his valise, and bent and taken his wife in his arms.
“Emily, my darling,” he was saying, “why didn’t I hear of this before?
Do you suppose I would have sacrificed your precious health, your life,
for a whim?” And he kissed the weak woman tenderly before turning to
the others. “And as for these children,” said he.
“Hear! hear!” cried Mr. Morley, hilariously.
“Hear! hear!” cried Louie, who had never been afraid of Mr. Pearmain.
“And will you sacrifice us for a whim, ma?”
“My dear,” said Mr. Morley, pouring out a bumper, “here’s to the great
future perfect race. Let us wish it long life and--posterity. We have
only postponed it a generation.”
AN IDEAL
AN IDEAL
Age comes to some people only like the wider opening of the rose, the
gentle drooping of the creamy outer petal; and one must needs think
of this in looking at Mrs. Fernalde. “I have had my threescore and
ten,” she used to say. “I have had all that nature has to give, and
now I am living on grace.” It was a sunny spirit that informed her, a
lightsomeness that never let the substance of a tear penetrate beneath
the surface that could endure nothing but happiness. Her unfailing
good-nature was like a fairy wand that smoothed every trouble out of
her way and out of the way of every one about her. If her hair was
white, no great sorrow had made it so; and its contrast with the soft
brilliancy of a black eye and the velvet flush of a cheek unwritten by
many lines, made her perhaps as lovely as one standing in all the full
radiance of youth. As for Mr. Fernalde--tall, dark, spare--he was by no
means unattractive, and his courtly manners had a unique elegance. He
loved his ease; and annoyances, when they chanced to break through the
magic circle his wife drew about him, vexed him, as they usually do a
nervous person. For the rest, he was one of those men who, having led
a singularly fortunate life, maintain to themselves a fancy that they
have just missed the last stroke to make the crystal complete, who have
a vanishing ideal always just beyond sight and reach.
The Fernaldes were neighbors of ours. Wealth required no exertion of
them, and advancing age secluded them in some measure from general
society; their home was always cheerful; they were always in it; and if
there had been no such person as crabbed old Mrs. Talliafero, who had
spent the last six months with them, it would have been hard to see how
heaven itself could be much improvement on it. However, she was going
at once, and then where would be the crumple in the rose-leaf?
These old people loved young people. “The new generation lends us a
part of its freshness,” they used to say. They always welcomed any of
us, and indeed made me so particularly conscious of their flattering
favor that I spent a good portion of my time with them, threaded the
sweet little lady’s needles, read and wrote more or less for Mr.
Fernalde, and was gradually taken into their confidence, which I am
about to violate.
“Could I imagine a happier old age than this, my child, with my wife,
my health, my flowers, our birds and pets and friends?” he said once,
repeating my question. “Why, yes, my dear, it was much happier before
my wife brought Mrs. Talliafero to stay with us. Some old school-mate
or girl friend of hers--I don’t quite know--for the fact is she nettled
me so the first day she came that I wouldn’t ask Rosalie a word about
her, for fear I should show my displeasure at her having brought her
home when she turned up. It is astonishing how an invisibly small
thorn will destroy your equanimity. And then this woman has a quality
that would turn honey into vinegar, I do believe. She has changed
our quiet, peaceful, sunshiny life, that seemed like one long day
in June, into a sharp, raw day in November. There is something very
rasping about her. I don’t see what my wife invited her to spend such
a season with us for. I wonder if she thought that at the end of the
time I should press for a continuance? My dear, I have counted the
days--it sounds sadly against all hospitable rites--I have counted the
days till I should see her consult a railway time-table, as she did
yesterday, about going home to-day. I believe she is not in affluent
circumstances now. I would be glad to meet the expense of boarding
her at Buckingham Palace if that would keep her away! I am speaking
strongly. Yes, Rosalie,” looking at his laughing wife, “I know you say
too strongly. But it is argument, assertion, contradiction, differing,
bickering, finding fault with the servants who have suited us half a
lifetime, questioning the expenditure, disordering the arrangements
from one day to the next. Think of it, when she comes into my study and
inveighs about my wife’s patience in enduring such a den of disorder
in her house. She wonders that I do not wear a scratch. She warns me
of indigestions, she threatens me with nightmares, she reminds me of
my age, she interferes with my pipe! And then she wants so much fresh
air! Thank Heaven! her time is up to-day, and my wife will not invite
another guest for a half-year without giving me time to arrange a
residence elsewhere! And such a voice, too! When one hears it, one
longs for the proper infirmities of age that dull the hearing--sharp
as a file, piercing as a locust’s whirr! What are you laughing at,
Rosalie?”
“Ah, you are not quite just, my love,” said the sweet little old lady.
“Mrs. Talliafero has a fine mind. She is really waking us up. She
prevents our sinking down into a jelly-like existence, as so many of
our age do. She keeps us bubbling.”
“There, there, there, my dear! Don’t say another word about your Mrs.
Talliafero! Go and spend a season with her at Saratoga, if you ever
want to see her any more. I’ll go to Richfield. Bubble! She’d make
sulphuric acid bubble out of the sands of the desert! I’ve no doubt she
worried Talliafero, poor man, into the grave! But there, I’ve said too
much,” he added, directly. “I beg your pardon, my sweet, if I hurt your
feelings about an old friend, but really--Now, Rosalie, my love, if you
don’t care to go over these accounts, our young friend will.” And then
Mrs. Fernalde tripped off with as light a foot as a girl of seventeen,
and I drew up the great folding-screen around our chairs, stirred the
fire a little, and took pencil and paper to add up the figures Mr.
Fernalde was to read out to me.
But Mr. Fernalde was in a brown-study for a little, and I let him stay.
“It was strange you should have asked me that question, child,” he said
at length. “I used, at your time of life, to imagine a very different
old age from this, if I may so call that imagination, for, in fact,
old age never entered into my calculations. I imagined nothing about
the passage of time, only of the continuance of a condition. And that
condition was the perpetual paradise of Alicia’s smiles.”
“Rosalie, you mean,” said I.
“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Fernalde, shortly. “I mean Alicia.”
“Alicia?”
“Alicia, who, when I was twenty, was the light of my eyes and the
loadstar of my life.”
“I don’t know what you mean, sir.”
“Of course you don’t, of course you don’t. I’ve half the mind to tell
you, though. It’s a long time ago--a long time--and no harm done. One
is perhaps a fool at seventy,” said Mr. Fernalde presently again.
“I’m not quite eighty. One is certainly a fool at twenty. I was, at
any rate; but I didn’t know it, and I walked in a fool’s paradise.
And to be a fool and not know it! Is there, on the whole, any further
paradise? Pretty, pretty as a peach!” he began again, after another
pause. “Ah! that would have sounded to me then like profanity. That
heavenly fair face! those eyes like the stars in a blue midnight! that
smile of exquisite innocence and purity! I used to tremble before her
sometimes as before some young saint stepped from a shrine--one that I
dared to desecrate by loving. Ah, how I loved her! The sight of certain
flowers brings her back to me now! When the apples are in blossom,
that pink and white snow, that ineffable delicacy of perfume, calls
her before me like a revelation! There are times when this eternal
smoothness of things in my life palls on me--times when I cannot bear
the sound of evening bells coming across the water. It so renews for me
that evening--that evening when I lost her--when I lost her, if I found
Rosalie!”
“You lost her, then?” I said, to break the silence that followed.
“I will tell you. The two were inseparable. If I walked or rode or
sailed with one, the other was not far away. Rosalie was a little gay,
tormenting sprite; Alicia a pensive saint. It was Alicia’s home; her
father was a man of wealth, and Rosalie was visiting her. Rosalie
had no home, no fortune; she had just finished school and was to be
a governess, dreading it as a butterfly might dread being broken to
harness, dreading it all the more for this glimpse of luxurious life in
her friend’s home since school. I myself had a fortune in my own right,
and had been guilty of the follies of most of the _jeunesse dorée_
of that period, which, if comparatively innocent, were troublesome
enough to the authorities of my college to need discipline, and I was
passing a year of most unhappy rustication in the place adjoining
Alicia’s home. Never shall I forget the first moment in which I saw
Alicia running down one of the orchard aisles with her white garments
fluttering about her, and her fair head bent over the branch of
apple-blossoms in her hand. If lightning had fallen, the revolution
that seized me could not have come more quickly. I seemed to be changed
in a twinkling, to have been borne into another planet. I felt as if
sunshine had pierced and penetrated once impenetrable gloom. When I
fell asleep in the grass of that orchard, and woke with that heavenly
creature bending over me, I rose only to walk on air. The little brown
face of Rosalie, with its carnations, with the glint and glance of
its great brown eyes, with its flood of brown curls that had a touch
of gold on them, with the glittering teeth of its beautiful laugh,
was just over her shoulder, but I merely know I saw it by remembering
it afterwards. She was only a shadow to me in those days; and as for
me, I was only Alicia’s shadow myself. She lived and moved in some
exalted atmosphere, to my perception. She does now. Her father wore
the front of Jove; I could not say that he did not carry the thunders.
I felt myself a mote in the broad beam of their sunshine, as though I
were something hardly visible in their large range of vision, as if
it required an effort to make myself perceived by them. I hesitated
to make the effort--I worshipped from afar. When she spoke to me my
heart beat so I had hardly voice to answer; when she touched my hand
it thrilled me through and through. And I asked no more. I thought of
no more for a while than just to continue so forever; to see her from
my window walking under the long aisles of the low-branched orchard,
like some mediæval picture; to walk beside her sometimes; now and then
to venture reading from the same page with her, now and then to be her
partner in the dance. That Rosalie should be about with me, riding
here, strolling there, walking to church, reading with the old pastor,
in whose charge there was a fiction that I was, and so, in a way,
studying with me--that was all a matter of common-place; she was sweet,
she was fresh, she was charming. But what was all that when an angel
was in the room?
“One night I was on the gallery just outside their drawing-room,
looking in at the long window, and Alicia was singing. Ah, how
delicious was that voice! The cherubim and seraphim who continually do
sing, if I ever hear them, will not sing so sweetly. I wonder to whom
that voice is singing now! Beside her, that night, was the scamp who
had come to the place more than once--a proud, commanding fellow in
his undress uniform, a man whom her father plainly intended she should
marry. I can see the scene now--the rich and dimly lighted room full of
purple shadows, the air laden with the scent of flowers; Alicia in her
white drapery, more mystical, more beautiful, more holy, as she sang,
than if revealed in the glow of her beauty; outside, the violet depths
of the sky, and the moon just falling, like some great golden flower,
low in the west; and as Alicia’s voice became silent, a choir of
bell-tones coming far and fine and free across the water, like echoes
of her song in heaven. My heart swelled with a fulness of rapture, life
seemed too rich, too sweet, too sacred--and then I saw that man stoop
and kiss her brow!
“The action turned me to stone for a moment, till he came sauntering
to the window, and I knew no more what I was doing than that bronze
Perseus in the corner would if he moved. I lifted the hand that had
seemed stone, and as he passed me I struck him on the mouth--the mouth
that had done the profanation.”
And Mr. Fernalde was quiet a little while.
“And that was the end of all things,” he resumed. “The fellow laughed
at me for a mad boy. Her father launched one of the thunderbolts, and
forbade me the house. What a stricken day and night of wretchedness!
What a week of hopelessness, of annihilation! But perhaps Alicia felt
differently from these creatures. Why should I not discover? Why should
I suppose she had any other sympathy with that wretch than the sympathy
of the star with the worm? And if my glad peradventure were true--why
then we could fly from these places that should know us no more; the
world was before us, heaven’s gates were open to us. And I wrote--my
hand trembling at its sacrilegious daring--just a dozen lines, without
address, without signature. She would know what it meant. And I sent it
by the parson’s boy. And I waited for her, lying on the grass beneath
the orchard trees, in the deep gloom just gilded by the influence of
the unseen moon. There came the rustling of garments, the tripping of
a foot; my heart beat, my eyes grew dim. Was it she coming up behind
me, as I lay lifted on my elbow, kneeling and putting her arms about
me, raining swift kisses on my face?--wild sweet kisses in that shadow;
wild passionate whispers in that silence! And then a great pang smote
me; and I rose and went out with her into the less dim darkness--and it
was Rosalie.