BROOKLYN AND BABYLON.
Thirteen years passed. Bessie had three of her desired children and a
nice little flat in Brooklyn. Reverses and trials had come, but on the
whole Mordaunt was fairly prosperous, and they were happy. The children
did not wear white dresses and blue sashes; they were generally to be
seen in stout ginghams and woolen plaids, but they were chubby, healthy,
pretty things, and their mother was as proud of them as if they had
realized every detail of her youthful and ambitious dreams.
Bessie’s prettiness had gone with her first baby, as American prettiness
is apt to do, but the sweetness of her nature remained and shone through
her calm eyes and the lines of care about her mouth. She had long since
forgotten to sigh over the loss of her beauty, she had so little time;
but she still remembered to give a deft coil to her hair, and her plain
little gowns were never dowdy. She knew nothing about modern decorative
art, and had no interest in hard-wood floors or dados; but her house was
pretty and tasteful in the old-fashioned way, and in her odd moments she
worked at cross-stitch.
And Hermia? Poor girl! She had not found the beauty her sister had lost.
Her hair was still the same muddy blonde-brown, although with a latent
suggestion of color, and she still brushed it back with the severity of
her childhood. Nothing, she had long since concluded, could beautify
her, and she would waste no time in the attempt. She was a trifle above
medium height, and her thin figure bent a little from the waist. Her
skin was as sallow as of yore, and her eyes were dull. She had none of
Bessie’s sweetness of expression; her cold, intellectual face just
escaped being sullen. Her health was what might be expected of a girl
who exercised little and preferred thought to sleep. She had kept the
promise made the night she had scratched her sister’s face; during the
past fifteen years no one had seen her lose her self-control for a
moment. She was as cold as a polar night, and as impassive as an
Anglo-American. She was very kind to her sister, and did what she could
to help her. She taught the children; and, though with much private
rebellion, she frequently made their clothes and did the marketing.
Frank and Bessie regarded her with awe and distant admiration, but the
children liked her. The professor had taught her until he could teach
her no more, and then had earned his subsistence by reading aloud to
John Suydam. A year or two before, he had departed for less material
duties, with few regrets.
But, if Hermia no longer studied, she belonged to several free libraries
and read with unflagging vigor. Of late she had taken a deep interest in
art, and she spent many hours in the picture galleries of New York.
Moreover, she grasped any excuse which took her across the river. With
all the fervor of her silent soul she loved New York and hated Brooklyn.
She was sitting in the dining-room one evening, helping Lizzie, the
oldest child, with her lessons. Lizzie was sleepy, and was droning
through her multiplication table, when she happened to glance at her
aunt. “You are not paying attention,” she exclaimed, triumphantly; “I
don’t believe you’ve heard a word of that old table, and I’m not going
to say it over again.”
Hermia, whose eyes had been fixed vacantly on the fire, started and took
the book from Lizzie’s lap. “Go to bed,” she said; “you are tired, and
you know your tables very well.”
Lizzie, who was guiltily conscious that she had never known her tables
less well, accepted her release with alacrity, kissed her aunt
good-night, and ran out of the room.
Hermia went to the window and opened it. It looked upon walls and
fences, but lineaments were blotted out to-night under a heavy fall of
snow. Beyond the lower roofs loomed the tall walls of houses on the
neighboring street, momentarily discernible through the wind-parted
storm.
Hermia pushed the snow from the sill, then closed the window with a
sigh. The snow and the night were the two things in her life that she
loved. They were projected into her little circle from the grand whole
of which they were parts, and were in no way a result of her
environment.
She went into the sitting-room and sat down by the table. She took up a
book and stared at its unturned pages for a quarter of an hour. Then she
raised her eyes and looked about her. Mordaunt was sitting in an
easy-chair by the fire, smoking a pipe and reading a magazine story
aloud to his wife, who sat near him, sewing. Lizzie had climbed on his
lap, and with her head against his shoulder was fast asleep.
Hermia took up a pencil and made a calculation on the fly-leaf of her
book. It did not take long, but the result was a respectable sum—4,620.
Allowing for her sister’s brief illnesses and for several minor
interruptions, she had looked upon that same scene, varied in trifling
details, just about 4,620 times in the past thirteen years. She rose
suddenly and closed her book.
“Good-night,” she said, “I am tired. I am going to bed.”
Mordaunt muttered “good-night” without raising his eyes; but Bessie
turned her head with an anxious smile.
“Good-night,” she said; “I think you need a tonic. And would you mind
putting Lizzie to bed? I am so interested in this story. Frank, carry
her into the nursery.”
Hermia hesitated a moment, as if she were about to refuse, but she
turned and followed Frank into the next room.
She undressed the inert, protesting child and tucked her in bed. Then
she went to her room and locked the door. She lit the gas mechanically
and stood still for a moment. Then she threw herself on the bed, and
flung herself wildly about. After a time she clasped her hands tightly
about the top of her head and gazed fixedly at the ceiling. Her family
would not have recognized her in that moment. Her disheveled hair clung
about her flushed face, and through its tangle her eyes glittered like
those of a snake. For a few moments her limbs were as rigid as if the
life had gone out of them. Then she threw herself over on her face and
burst into a wild passion of weeping. The hard, inward sobs shook her
slender body as the screw shakes the steamer.
“How I hate it! How I hate it! How I hate it!” she reiterated, between
her paroxysms. “O God! is there nothing—nothing—nothing in life but
this? Nothing but hideous monotony—and endless days—and thousands and
thousands of hours that are as alike as grains of sand?”
She got up suddenly and filling a basin with water thrust her head into
it. The water was as cold as melting ice, and when she had dried her
hair she no longer felt as if her brain were trying to force its way
through the top of her skull.
Hermia, like many other women, lived a double life. On the night when,
under the dramatic illusion of Monte Cristo, her imagination had
awakened with a shock which rent the film of childhood from her brain,
she had found a dream-world of her own. The prosaic never suspected its
existence; the earth’s millions who dwelt in the same world cared
nothing for any kingdom in it but their own; she was sovereign of a vast
domain wrapped in the twilight mystery of dreamland, but peopled with
obedient subjects conceived and molded in her waking brain. She walked
stoically through the monotonous round of her daily life; she took a
grim and bitter pleasure in fulfilling every duty it developed, and she
never neglected the higher duty she owed her intellect; but when night
came, and the key was turned in her door, she sprang from the life she
abhorred into the world of her delight. She would fight sleep off for
hours, for sleep meant temporary death, and the morning a return to
material existence. A ray of light from the street-lamp struggled
through the window, and, fighting with the shadows, filled the ugly,
common little room with glamour and illusion. The walls swept afar and
rolled themselves into marble pillars that towered vaporously in the
gloom. Beyond, rooms of state and rooms of pleasure ceaselessly
multiplied. On the pictured floors lay rugs so deep that the echo of a
lover’s footfall would never go out into eternity. From the enameled
walls sprang a vaulted ceiling painted with forgotten art. Veils of
purple stuffs, gold-wrought, jewel-fringed, so dense that the roar of a
cannon could not have forced its way into the stillness of that room,
masked windows and doors. From beyond those pillars, from the far
perspective of those ever-doubling chambers came the plash of waters,
faint and sweet as the music of the bulbul. The bed, aloft on its dais,
was muffled in lace which might have fringed a mist. Hidden in the
curving leaves of pale-tinted lotus flowers were tiny flames of light,
and in an urn of agate burned perfumed woods. * * *
For this girl within her unseductive frame had all the instincts of a
beautiful woman, for the touch of whose lips men would dig the grave of
their life’s ambitions. That kiss it was the passionate cry of her heart
to give to lips as warm and imploring as her own. She would thrust
handfuls of violets between her blankets, and imagine herself lying by
the sea in a nest of fragrance. Her body longed for the softness of
cambric and for silk attire; her eye for all the beauty that the hand of
man had ever wrought.
When wandering among those brain-born shadows of hers, she was
beautiful, of course; and, equally inferable, those dreams had a hero.
This lover’s personality grew with her growth and changed with every
evolution of the mind that had given it birth; but, strangely enough,
the lover himself had retained his proportions and lineaments from the
day of his creation. Is it to be supposed that Hermia was wedded
peacefully to her ideal, and that together they reigned over a vast
dominion of loving and respectful subjects? Not at all. If there was one
word in the civilized vocabulary that Hermia hated it was that word
“marriage.” To her it was correlative with all that was commonplace;
with a prosaic grind that ate and corroded away life and soul and
imagination; with a dreary and infinite monotony. Bessie Mordaunt’s
peaceful married life was hideous to her sister. Year after
year,—neither change nor excitement, neither rapture nor anguish, nor
romance nor poetry, neither ambition nor achievement, nor recognition
nor power! Nothing of mystery, nothing of adventure; neither palpitation
of daring nor quiver of secrecy; nothing but kisses of calm affection,
babies, and tidies! 4,620 evenings of calm, domestic bliss; 4,620 days
of placid, housewifely duties! To Hermia such an existence was a tragedy
more appalling than relentless immortality. Bessie had her circle of
friends, and in each household the tragedy was repeated; unless, mayhap,
the couple were ill-mated, when the tragedy became a comedy, and a
vulgar one at that.
Hermia’s hatred of marriage sprang not from innate immorality, but from
a strongly romantic nature stimulated to abnormal extreme by the
constant, small-beer wave-beats of a humdrum, uniform, ever-persisting,
abhorred environment. If no marriage-bells rang over her cliffs and
waters and through her castle halls, her life was more ideally perfect
than any life within her ken which drowsed beneath the canopy of law and
church. Regarding the subject from the point of view to which her nature
and conditions had focused her mental vision, love needed the
exhilarating influence of liberty, the stimulation of danger, and the
enchantment of mystery.
Of men practically she knew little. There were young men in her sister’s
circle, and Mordaunt occasionally brought home his fellow clerks; but
Hermia had never given one of them a thought. They were limited and
commonplace, and her reputation for intellectuality had the effect of
making them appear at their worst upon those occasions when
circumstances compelled them to talk to her. And she had not the beauty
to win forgiveness for her brains. She appreciated this fact and it
embittered her, little as she cared for her brother’s uninteresting
friends, and sent her to the depths of her populous soul.
The books she read had their influence upon that soul-population. The
American novel had much the same effect upon her as the married life of
her sister and her sister’s friends. She cared for but little of the
literature of France, and the best of it deified love and scorned the
conventions. She reveled in mediæval and ancient history and loved the
English poets, and both poets and history held aloft, on pillars of
fragrant and indestructible wood, her own sad ideality.
* * * * *