star was melting back into the light like a pearl dissolving in a cup
of gold. Suddenly a ray lit all the mast-heads and tipped them every
one with fire. And it was in that moment, as they stood on the deck,
that Honor flung open her domino and let the sunshine kindle all the
radiance of her glory gown--a sheen of satin of an intense yellow,
embroidery of gold-thread rippling all over it in lines of lustre, the
breast, the throat, the hair, the waist, a blaze of deepest tinted
Spanish topazes, with here and there a ruby. So dark, so rich, so
splendid in the full light, the brown skin, the great luminous eyes,
the flash of the laughing teeth--Ted’s heart stood still as he glanced
at her and looked away and glanced back, finding it hard to believe he
was awake, that he saw her, that she was his.
But it was with no such eyes that Mr. Chipperley beheld her. That
yellow gown--it should be food for fishes as soon as they were in deep
water! Those burning topazes and rubies--he was very tired from want of
sleep, from hurry, from uncertainty, from emotion--they forced his eyes
open and pinned the lids back! As she stood there, for one swift second
she seemed to Mr. Chipperley an embodiment of the sin of the world.
And he was bound hand and foot at the chariot of the blazing creature.
He saw instinctively that he would never be master again. The three
Mrs. Chipperleys rose wavering before him, wringing their hands and
vanishing into thin air. He felt, while he gasped and tried to collect
himself, that he should like to go to sleep and never wake.
But Marian also had thrown off her domino and mask, and she stood, in a
soft moonlight-colored velvet, a shawl of white blond lace, pinned on
her blond hair, falling about her like a veil while she gazed at him.
“Ah, now,” thought Mr. Chipperley, “she looks like a bride, she does.
But that yellow abomination! Why, Ted Dane was right when he said of
her once she dazzled when, the sun is down and robs the world of rest.
She’s about to rob my world of rest!”
But all this was in the twinkling of an eye--intuition, not
thought--while Marian was hanging her domino over her arm and Honor
was folding hers about her again, as people came hurrying by, and the
confusion of starting became noticeable; no one pausing to think twice
of a gay party accustomed to going and coming, who had hastened on
board in their ball dresses.
“Well, Marian,” said Ted, “here is your certificate. No; this is
Honor’s and mine. You will find it all right, Mr. Chipperley. Honor and
I will be thinking of you in these moonlight nights as you go parting
the smooth seas. You’ll be quite in time for the carnival. You have
helped us in a way not to be forgotten, and we--we--Honor and I--shall
always associate you with the happiness of our lives.”
“I--who--what--what is this?” stammered Mr. Chipperley, hearing Ted’s
voice like a voice in a dream, and at the same time looking over
Marian’s shoulder at the scroll of paper she unfolded. “Theodore
Chipperley--Marian Marcy. There is a mistake here. There--”
“No, no,” said Ted, calmly. “Nothing of the sort. No mistake. That
would be impossible. I have married Honor and you have married Marian,
just as we intended. We could never have overcome Mamma Humphreys if
you hadn’t entered so fortunately into our scheme. It’s of no use to
try and thank you; we can’t. There go the last people off--there isn’t
a moment--good-bye, good-bye!” There was a hurried shaking of hands,
a hurried embrace of Marian and Honor, and Ted and one of the dominos
were on the pier waving farewells, and the _Utopia_ was slowly sliding
seaward.
For an instant Mr. Chipperley stared at them, at Marian, at sky and
water, all aghast, and then his eye rested on Marian again in her soft
pearl color and lace, and in the midst of the whirl in his brain the
words of an old, old lover came back to him: “And her eyes are doves.”
Yes, her eyes were doves. And then he was caught in a wild revulsion
of feeling, a sense of having cast off a gyve, a sense of having come
home into peaceful twilight after long revel and riot, with thick wines
honey sweet, flowers, and burning sunshine among Circe’s beasts. He
remembered the reds and yellows, the mastiff, the spitz, the poodle;
no more treading on a soft fur in the dark hall, and having it turn
and rend you; no more sitting down on some softly-cushioned seat,
and hearing a yell and a snarl from the cushion; no more tracing of
resemblances between yourself and a marmoset; no more starts, no more
dazzles, no more nips from the paroquet, no vociferation of canaries,
no staring out of countenance from the owl, no menagerie in his house,
no mother-in-law, with her courtship that always seemed to mask an
assault! He took Marian by the hand and led her into her state-room.
“May,” he said, “Mary--I beg your pardon--Maria--I mean Marian! you
have made a great sacrifice for me. You have perhaps saved me from a
great unhappiness. Let me recover my equipoise, and the devotion of a
lifetime shall repay you. You knew me better than I knew myself. I was
benumbed! I was bewitched! I was blind! It may take me a little time
to get that other image out of my mind, but I shall do it--it had not
become a habit. Be patient, and you shall find a tender husband. Great
powers! to think that I might have yielded to that sort of temptation,
and been disturbed, wearied, wretched for life! I thank Heaven for
your wisdom and courage that rescued me. You could never have done it
if you had not loved me. I thank Heaven that you are Mrs. Chipperley!”
And May’s smile played around Marian’s mouth, and Marian’s eyes looked
up with Mary’s gentle imploration, and echoes of Maria’s voice fluted
in Marian’s tone, and Marian’s lips trembled with a kiss he had known
before, and Mr. Chipperley, with a deep and quiet satisfaction, felt
again that he had never been a widower.
MR. VAN NORE’S DAUGHTER-IN-LAW
MR. VAN NORE’S DAUGHTER-IN-LAW
The Van Nores were present at the creation of the world. Some people
say they made it; but one really knows better than that. If it had not
been for their unaccountable belief that the builder of the ark that
rested on Mount Ararat was a Jew, and their unutterable contempt for
the race of Spinoza and Mendelssohn, of Heine, Auerbach, and Disraeli,
to mention no greater, they would not have hesitated to conceive that
the family name of the Patriarch was Van Nore.
At any rate, you may understand that the Van Nores were an immensely
ancient family, so old as to be really worm-eaten. In the dust of the
Van Nores there were soldiers and statesmen, and even a less regarded
author or two. In this century there was nothing at all to speak of.
If, however, any one says their family tree was like one of those old,
wide, and deep-rooted fir-trees sometimes seen, with but a single
gnarled and lichened branch left of all its forest glory, the best part
of it underground, you can see that the person is no friend of the
Van Nores, but one whose eyes have been hurt by the dazzle of their
splendor, who has been forgotten at their banquets, looked at with a
stony glare upon the street, or possibly knocked down and bruised and
ignored by their fast horses.
Being immensely ancient, immensely distinguished, and also immensely
wealthy, it goes without saying that the Van Nores thought immensely
well of themselves. They never soiled their garments by contact with
the crowd; they bought their pictures and statues straight from the
manufacturers before they had been profaned by the vulgar gaze; they
would have liked the gold they spent cast with a Van Nore device, and
the die broken. They could not hope to keep all the knowledge in the
universe to themselves; but they did not care so much for that--there
were always tutors and chaplains to be had, after the custom of certain
of the South Sea Island chiefs, who maintain a Fila-oma or Talking
Man of Knowledge. If, once in a while, they allowed themselves to
come before the public in a matter of suffrage, it was not altogether
without the sensation of some wicked scribe who has written the Sacred
Name with unwashed hands; and, being usually defeated, they relapsed
into a more profound contempt of the people than before, and talked
glibly of the advantages of a monarchy, although not without an
undercurrent of feeling that in the event of a monarchy the Van Nores
would be monarchs. They intermarried, of course, only with families of
a pedigree and assumption one degree less than--it could not be more
than, and could hardly be equal to--the Van Nores.
Judge, then, of the bewildered and amazed wrath of the Van Nore family
when the son of the house, the heir of the name, the last of the name,
the only male Van Nore left to go down the ages with the weight of the
family illustriousness upon his shoulders, married a young girl in the
West, unknown, obscure, poor, and a Jewess!
Nore Van Nore had a sister older than himself--a dark and imposing
creature with the Van Nore nose. He had a sister younger than himself,
pallid, bloodless, with her mother’s delicacy of feature, and with
nothing about her but her haughtiness to distinguish her from the herd
of young women. He had one Van Nore cousin, a little apple-blossom
hardly coming up to the family requirements. He had four Van Nore
spinster aunts, who, if they quarrelled among themselves like birds
in a wood, presented an unbroken phalanx of family integrity to the
public, and who, with the idea that they had the manners of duchesses,
really gave some reason to believe them directly descended from the
Patriarch, they looked so extremely like the wooden women in the
children’s toy arks. His father embodied all the dignity, pomposity,
and grandeur of all the Van Nores before him, as if he were the flame
of their ashes; he had but one gift, and that was a faculty for
satirical speech, which he exercised with impunity upon his wife--his
wife, the line of whose descent was so long that it had worn to a
colorless, attenuated thread in her; a thin, pale, languid woman, of
whose condition it expressed little to say she dared not call her soul
her own, because, in looking at her, or looking through her, rather, it
was not clear that she had a soul--a woman without intellect, without
individuality, and almost without vitality. Into this assemblage Nore
Van Nore had dared introduce a person absolutely without a grandfather,
and whose grandfather, had she had one, would have been named Shacabac!
Mr. Van Nore and his household would treat this vile and vulgar
intriguer, who had thrust herself upon them, and had thought to lift
herself by pulling them down, as she deserved. In their heart of hearts
they had a complete, if inarticulate, consciousness that no one could
have married the bridegroom in question for any other purpose. And Nore
Van Nore received a letter of repudiation from his father, disowning
and casting him forever into the outer darkness of the world of people
who were not Van Nores.
And who was Nore Van Nore? He was a young man of twenty-six years,
whose mental processes had mastered the rudiments of learning to such
an extent that he could read the newspaper and could make change. All
attempts to cultivate those mental processes much further had failed;
if he entered the university at last, it was because tutors and
proctors and family influence, a fortuitous chance, and perhaps money,
all wrought together. Entrance was all, however. Before the first term
closed Mr. Van Nore had private but authoritative information that
unless he wanted expulsion for--stupidity approaching imbecility were
not the exact words--he had better withdraw his son. In a hot and
self-righteous fury Mr. Van Nore turned the tables and expelled the
university. He withdrew his son with a wild show of anger and scorn
for faculty, curriculum, endowment, and career. “They have graduated
no man who comes to anything in the last twenty-five years!” he
said. And that the matter might be the sooner forgotten, he gave Mr.
Nore Van Nore a purse and a travelling companion, and despatched him
to the Far West. It was probably but a case of retarded development;
perhaps he would do a little exploring and discovering; when he should
return the affair would have quite blown over, and he would marry him
to some maiden who had been so well brought up that she would feel
herself taking a proper place among dominations, princes, and powers
by marrying a Van Nore of any calibre. All the same, he did not fail
to make his wife’s life a burden to her by sarcasms on her feeble wit
that had been strong enough to adulterate the strength of the Van Nore;
while the very sense of his son’s incapacity, thus forced upon him, was
another argument against the woman who would marry an imbecile for the
sake of climbing into his rank and position.
It was not altogether to be wondered at, then, if his wife did not
fully sympathize with him in this extremity, and if, being of an
affectionate disposition--so far as she had anything to impart,
having imparted that also to her son--she wrote a little surreptitious
letter--she who had usually not a thought nor a deed nor an emotion of
her own:
“MY DARLING BOY,--I send you all my love. Any wife you choose to
marry will be the dear daughter of your mother.”
That was the letter written so secretly; it meant volumes to her; it
meant volumes to her boy. She was frightened to a trembling ghost of
her ghost-like self when she stopped the carriage and asked the footman
to drop it in a street-box, for she felt that if her husband knew it
it would not be impossible for him to blow out her flickering flame of
life altogether, or stamp its feeble spark into the earth. He never had
struck her; but she never knew what he might do yet.
The father’s letter, when it came, was not at all unexpected by Hero
Van Nore; nor was the mother’s a surprise. She was a girl of twenty,
superbly tall and fair. Her mouldings would have fed a sculptor’s eye
with rapture, her coloring would have driven wild another than Titian;
the great braids upon her head seemed made of strands of spun gold;
she wore them like a crown, as became a daughter of the royal tribe
of Judah--she was undoubtedly a Jewess--but as Miriam, as Deborah, as
Susannah may have done she had the large beauty of that Clytie in her
sunflower whom some think to be Isis in her lotus. She waited in her
father’s shop; and she sold Mr. Van Nore a pair of gloves there.
He had given his purse, with his _congé_, some time since to his
travelling companion, and he was waiting in this little place till he
should receive a fresh remittance from his father. When he saw Hero he
had something else to wait for. He hung round the shop corners, and
when she went home he followed her. _Vera incessu patuit dea_--she
stepped as if the earth were air; he said to himself that it was
because his heart was under her feet. He knew intuitively that she
would not give him a second look. What were the Van Nores out here in
the wilderness? He was able to see, for all his deficiency, that she
was on a higher plane of being than his own. But if he could not hope
he could at least suffer; he could gaze at the star he might not win.
He bought another pair of gloves. Ah, heavens! to feel the touch of
those pointed fingers of hers as they stretched the kid from side to
side on his hand! The next day he bought another pair. Before he was
through he had bought the whole stock of gloves in the shop.
Of course this attracted her attention, and she made some inquiry
concerning him. “You had better go away,” she said, when he came in
again. “You do not need gloves, or ties, or any of our goods. You are
making yourself ridiculous.”
“I have nothing to do with it,” he replied. “I was made so when I was
born.”
And so one word led to another, and in the course of time he had
told his story, which somehow seemed full of wrongs--the story of a
rather feeble-minded youth who had been browbeaten and ill-used by a
disappointed father from his birth. Her heart was stirred with pity;
she let him come to the house. Hope bounded within him. If the star
should fall from the sky to his arms! He wrote his father--I forgot to
say that he could write--that he wanted his influence to help him marry
the most lovely, the most virtuous, the most brilliant of women, who
waited behind the counter of her father’s little Jew-shop. The answer
to his letter made his hair stand on end. Sneering, vindictive, cruel,
threatening. What should he do but show it to her? Her blood would have
been cold and thin stuff had that not made it boil. “I can never go
back to him,” said Nore. “I never will go back to him. It is the last
blow he shall strike me.”
“Would you be happier here in the shop helping me?” she asked.
“Beyond measure!” he cried.
So she told him to see her father that night. She meant about the
situation. He meant about a wife. And her father, in as good and strong
contempt as Mr. Van Nore himself could feel, ordered the fellow from
the house.
“The worthless varlet!” cried the old man. “Can he earn his salt? What
do I care for his name and his family and his entailed moneys--the dog
of a Christian! He can have them all; but he cannot marry my girl to an
idiot!”
“He is not an idiot, father,” said Hero. “There is more in him than any
see,” and she calmly canvassed the subject. “He has been made to look
up till he does not know how to look straight ahead. Some day he will
assert himself--”
“You?” said her father. “You? I believe you care for the lout! When you
have sweethearts to fill a regiment! When you can marry any man in the
county!”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I am sorry for him. I care to have him
happy--he has had so much unhappiness.” And at that moment they heard
a groan outside, and they ran to the door to pick up Nore Van Nore,
helpless and just returning to consciousness, with a broken leg.
Hero installed herself as his chief attendant. In the long hours
of patient pain, in the devotedness of his silent worship for her,
something stirred her heart that was not pity. Heaven knows what it
was! There are some strong natures that must wrap themselves about
the weak. The first time that he could stand upon his feet again they
were married. And then Nore Van Nore went down to help her wait behind
the counter in the shop, where she consulted him and referred to him
and honored him till she was likely to make others share the strange
respect she had for him. “He is single-hearted,” she said to one of her
old lovers in that primitive community, who felt the right to make some
outspoken complaint. “He is upright. He is unselfish. He is kind to the
fly on the wall. He loves me and no other. What more do I want in a
husband? He suits me. And as for his religion, what does that signify
when, at any rate, we both worship the same God?”
A year from that time Hero did not go to the shop much; she had
a little son--and not such a very little one either--a bouncing,
magnificent boy, with his mother’s colors and eyes, full of life and
joy and spirit, and quite the most remarkable baby in the world. And
so, when the child was six months old, it seemed to Nore Van Nore, in
his happiness, that he was wrong to deprive his family of the blessing
of knowing of such a blessing, and he wrote home for the third time;
but this time to his mother.
This was shaking the red rag in the face of the bull. Mr. Van Nore
trampled up and down his wife’s sitting-room awhile, reared and stamped
and snorted and bellowed, and not till he had reduced her to tears for
having brought such a son into the world, and had pursued it till she
gasped for breath, and had to have the maids and ether and hot bottles,
did he subside into silence and thought.
That this son of a beggarly shop-girl of a Jewess should be the Van
Nore! Never, never, if he had to put out the light of all the Van Nores
at once! Jocelyne, his eldest daughter, should marry young De Vere, and
he should take the name of Van Nore. For a sum of money Nore should
break the entail and renounce his name, taking, instead, that of his
low-born wife. And so Jocelyne’s son, who was a foregone conclusion
in Mr. Van Nore’s mind, should be the great Van Nore to come. He had a
satchel packed within an hour, and he slept that night, for the first
time in his life, in a vulgar sleeping-car, always before having left
the train at nightfall rather than be one of the promiscuous canaille
sleeping a common sleep. Days and nights and days and nights of this
wretched contiguity. It was a hard experience for Mr. Van Nore. He
added it all up against his son. And the selfishness of the modern
traveller did not tend to increase his appreciation of his kind. His
kind? Not the least bit his kind! Mr. Van Nore was more than ever
persuaded that he was a superior integer of the race--marking, perhaps,
one of those points of progress from which one development steps to a
higher.
At last he stood in the presence of his daughter-in-law.
A shapeless little greasy Jewess, selling old clothes--or a stately
young goddess assuming a human smile? One convulsive sensation thrilled
across him of pride in Nore’s taste at least, souring instantly to
anger to think that taste was all. And then he opened the subject.
“No, father-in-law,” said Hero, firmly, despite his wincing, and after
the fashion of speech in use among her people--“no, father-in-law. We
do not want your money. Nor will we surrender our name. It is our name
by all right and law that it is yours. And, as for your grandson, we
have no power to forswear his birthright for our mess of pottage.”
It was a will as strong as his own that opposed him. Storming was of
no use here. He left the house without another word, and left Hero
dancing her crowing boy in the broad transfiguring sunbeam, looking up
proudly at her husband, yet fondly, to see if really she and the boy
compensated him for all he had lost.
An hour afterwards Mr. Van Nore was brought back to his son on a
stretcher. Two trains had collided, and he was among the killed and
wounded. An artery had been nearly severed, and before a physician
could reach him he was bleeding to death.
When at length the flow was stanched, and he lay fainting and sinking
away, “It is almost hopeless,” said the surgeon. “There is little blood
left in his body.”
The sight of his dying father had changed the current of Nore’s irate
feeling. “If I could but give him mine!” he cried.
“It would do him small good,” said the doctor, looking at the pale and
spindling fellow with an anatomist’s contempt. And from him the glance
travelled to Hero, standing near in her abundant life, with the dancing
boy in her arms, still followed by the sunbeam. Hero read the glance in
a moment, and had given the child to her husband.
“Here, doctor,” she said, baring an arm that Hebe, carrying life and
nectar to the gods, might have lifted.
“Do you know what it means for you,” said the doctor, “and for your
child, perhaps? Loss of strength, it may be of health--”
“I know it is my husband’s father, my child’s grandparent,” she said,
slowly. “If my blood can save him, it is right that he should have it.”
And when she came to herself after the first fainting-fit of her life,
save for fatigue and languor, she did not know that she felt much the
worse, and her father-in-law was smiling at her with lustre in the eyes
that she so lately saw nearly set in death.
Strange and awful moment to Hero! She had given life to this man. She
had gone behind the veil of death and darkness, and worked with the
forces of creation. There was a bond between her and him such as there
could be between no other people in the world. For half a fainting
heart-beat she thought she had made him; for half as long again he
thought she had. She felt her heart irradiate with a tender warmth
towards her husband’s father. She fell on her knees beside him and
kissed his hand. “Oh, my father,” she said, “you must forgive us, for
we love you!”