IX

Ransom approached Mrs. Farrinder again, who had remained on her sofa

with Olive Chancellor; and as she turned her face to him he saw that she

had felt the universal contagion. Her keen eye sparkled, there was a

flush on her matronly cheek, and she had evidently made up her mind what

line to take. Olive Chancellor sat motionless; her eyes were fixed on

the floor with the rigid, alarmed expression of her moments of nervous

diffidence; she gave no sign of observing her kinsman's approach. He

said something to Mrs. Farrinder, something that imperfectly represented

his admiration of Verena; and this lady replied with dignity that it was

no wonder the girl spoke so well--she spoke in such a good cause. "She

is very graceful, has a fine command of language; her father says it's a

natural gift." Ransom saw that he should not in the least discover Mrs.

Farrinder's real opinion, and her dissimulation added to his impression

that she was a woman with a policy. It was none of his business whether

in her heart she thought Verena a parrot or a genius; it was perceptible

to him that she saw she would be effective, would help the cause. He

stood almost appalled for a moment, as he said to himself that she would

take her up and the girl would be ruined, would force her note and

become a screamer. But he quickly dodged this vision, taking refuge in a

mechanical appeal to his cousin, of whom he inquired how she liked Miss

Verena. Olive made no answer; her head remained averted, she bored the

carpet with her conscious eyes. Mrs. Farrinder glanced at her askance,

and then said to Ransom serenely:

"You praise the grace of your Southern ladies, but you have had to come

North to see a human gazelle. Miss Tarrant is of the best New England

stock--what _I_ call the best!"

"I'm sure from what I have seen of the Boston ladies, no manifestation

of grace can excite my surprise," Ransom rejoined, looking, with his

smile, at his cousin.

"She has been powerfully affected," Mrs. Farrinder explained, very

slightly dropping her voice, as Olive, apparently, still remained deaf.

Miss Birdseye drew near at this moment; she wanted to know if Mrs.

Farrinder didn't want to express some acknowledgment, on the part of the

company at large, for the real stimulus Miss Tarrant had given them.

Mrs. Farrinder said: Oh yes, she would speak now with pleasure; only she

must have a glass of water first. Miss Birdseye replied that there was

some coming in a moment; one of the ladies had asked for it, and Mr.

Pardon had just stepped down to draw some. Basil took advantage of this

intermission to ask Miss Birdseye if she would give him the great

privilege of an introduction to Miss Verena. "Mrs. Farrinder will thank

her for the company," he said, laughing, "but she won't thank her for

me."

Miss Birdseye manifested the greatest disposition to oblige him; she was

so glad he had been impressed. She was proceeding to lead him toward

Miss Tarrant when Olive Chancellor rose abruptly from her chair and laid

her hand, with an arresting movement, on the arm of her hostess. She

explained to her that she must go, that she was not very well, that her

carriage was there; also that she hoped Miss Birdseye, if it was not

asking too much, would accompany her to the door.

"Well, you are impressed too," said Miss Birdseye, looking at her

philosophically. "It seems as if no one had escaped."

Ransom was disappointed; he saw he was going to be taken away, and,

before he could suppress it, an exclamation burst from his lips--the

first exclamation he could think of that would perhaps check his

cousin's retreat: "Ah, Miss Olive, are you going to give up Mrs.

Farrinder?"

At this Miss Olive looked at him, showed him an extraordinary face, a

face he scarcely understood or even recognised. It was portentously

grave, the eyes were enlarged, there was a red spot in each of the

cheeks, and as directed to him, a quick, piercing question, a kind of

leaping challenge, in the whole expression. He could only answer this

sudden gleam with a stare, and wonder afresh what trick his Northern

kinswoman was destined to play him. Impressed too? He should think he

had been! Mrs. Farrinder, who was decidedly a woman of the world, came

to his assistance, or to Miss Chancellor's, and said she hoped very much

Olive wouldn't stay--she felt these things too much. "If you stay, I

won't speak," she added; "I should upset you altogether." And then she

continued, tenderly, for so preponderantly intellectual a nature: "When

women feel as you do, how can I doubt that we shall come out all right?"

"Oh, we shall come out all right, I guess," murmured Miss Birdseye.

"But you must remember Beacon Street," Mrs. Farrinder subjoined. "You

must take advantage of your position--you must wake up the Back Bay!"

"I'm sick of the Back Bay!" said Olive fiercely; and she passed to the

door with Miss Birdseye, bidding good-bye to no one. She was so agitated

that, evidently, she could not trust herself, and there was nothing for

Ransom but to follow. At the door of the room, however, he was checked

by a sudden pause on the part of the two ladies: Olive stopped and stood

there hesitating. She looked round the room and spied out Verena, where

she sat with her mother, the centre of a gratified group; then, throwing

back her head with an air of decision, she crossed over to her. Ransom

said to himself that now, perhaps, was his chance, and he quickly

accompanied Miss Chancellor. The little knot of reformers watched her as

she arrived; their faces expressed a suspicion of her social importance,

mingled with conscientious scruples as to whether it were right to

recognise it. Verena Tarrant saw that she was the object of this

manifestation, and she got up to meet the lady whose approach was so

full of point. Ransom perceived, however, or thought he perceived, that

she recognised nothing; she had no suspicions of social importance. Yet

she smiled with all her radiance, as she looked from Miss Chancellor to

him; smiled because she liked to smile, to please, to feel her

success--or was it because she was a perfect little actress, and this

was part of her training? She took the hand that Olive put out to her;

the others, rather solemnly, sat looking up from their chairs.

"You don't know me, but I want to know you," Olive said. "I can thank

you now. Will you come and see me?"

"Oh yes; where do you live?" Verena answered, in the tone of a girl for

whom an invitation (she hadn't so many) was always an invitation.

Miss Chancellor syllabled her address, and Mrs. Tarrant came forward,

smiling. "I know about you, Miss Chancellor. I guess your father knew my

father--Mr. Greenstreet. Verena will be very glad to visit you. We shall

be very happy to see you in _our_ home."

Basil Ransom, while the mother spoke, wanted to say something to the

daughter, who stood there so near him, but he could think of nothing

that would do; certain words that came to him, his Mississippi phrases,

seemed patronising and ponderous. Besides, he didn't wish to assent to

what she had said; he wished simply to tell her she was delightful, and

it was difficult to mark that difference. So he only smiled at her in

silence, and she smiled back at him--a smile that seemed to him quite

for himself.

"Where do you live?" Olive asked; and Mrs. Tarrant replied that they

lived at Cambridge, and that the horse-cars passed just near their door.

Whereupon Olive insisted "Will you come very soon?" and Verena said, Oh

yes, she would come very soon, and repeated the number in Charles

Street, to show that she had taken heed of it. This was done with

childlike good faith. Ransom saw that she would come and see any one who

would ask her like that, and he regretted for a minute that he was not a

Boston lady, so that he might extend to her such an invitation. Olive

Chancellor held her hand a moment longer, looked at her in farewell, and

then, saying, "Come, Mr. Ransom," drew him out of the room. In the hall

they met Mr. Pardon, coming up from the lower regions with a jug of

water and a tumbler. Miss Chancellor's hackney-coach was there, and when

Basil had put her into it she said to him that she wouldn't trouble him

to drive with her--his hotel was not near Charles Street. He had so

little desire to sit by her side--he wanted to smoke--that it was only

after the vehicle had rolled off that he reflected upon her coolness,

and asked himself why the deuce she had brought him away. She _was_ a

very odd cousin, was this Boston cousin of his. He stood there a moment,

looking at the light in Miss Birdseye's windows and greatly minded to

re-enter the house, now he might speak to the girl. But he contented

himself with the memory of her smile, and turned away with a sense of

relief, after all, at having got out of such wild company, as well as

with (in a different order) a vulgar consciousness of being very

thirsty.

X

Verena Tarrant came in the very next day from Cambridge to Charles

Street; that quarter of Boston is in direct communication with the

academic suburb. It hardly seemed direct to poor Verena, perhaps, who,

in the crowded street-car which deposited her finally at Miss

Chancellor's door, had to stand up all the way, half suspended by a

leathern strap from the glazed roof of the stifling vehicle, like some

blooming cluster dangling in a hothouse. She was used, however, to these

perpendicular journeys, and though, as we have seen, she was not

inclined to accept without question the social arrangements of her time,

it never would have occurred to her to criticise the railways of her

native land. The promptness of her visit to Olive Chancellor had been an

idea of her mother's, and Verena listened open-eyed while this lady, in

the seclusion of the little house in Cambridge, while Selah Tarrant was

"off," as they said, with his patients, sketched out a line of conduct

for her. The girl was both submissive and unworldly, and she listened to

her mother's enumeration of the possible advantages of an intimacy with

Miss Chancellor as she would have listened to any other fairy-tale. It

was still a part of the fairy-tale when this zealous parent put on with

her own hands Verena's smart hat and feather, buttoned her little jacket

(the buttons were immense and gilt), and presented her with twenty cents

to pay her car-fare.

There was never any knowing in advance how Mrs. Tarrant would take a

thing, and even Verena, who, filially, was much less argumentative than

in her civic and, as it were, public capacity, had a perception that her

mother was queer. She was queer, indeed--a flaccid, relaxed, unhealthy,

whimsical woman, who still had a capacity to cling. What she clung to

was "society," and a position in the world which a secret whisper told

her she had never had and a voice more audible reminded her she was in

danger of losing. To keep it, to recover it, to reconsecrate it, was the

ambition of her heart; this was one of the many reasons why Providence

had judged her worthy of having so wonderful a child. Verena was born

not only to lead their common sex out of bondage, but to remodel a

visiting-list which bulged and contracted in the wrong places, like a

country-made garment. As the daughter of Abraham Greenstreet, Mrs.

Tarrant had passed her youth in the first Abolitionist circles, and she

was aware how much such a prospect was clouded by her union with a young

man who had begun life as an itinerant vendor of lead-pencils (he had

called at Mr. Greenstreet's door in the exercise of this function), had

afterwards been for a while a member of the celebrated Cayuga community,

where there were no wives, or no husbands, or something of that sort

(Mrs. Tarrant could never remember), and had still later (though before

the development of the healing faculty) achieved distinction in the

spiritualistic world. (He was an extraordinarily favoured medium, only

he had had to stop for reasons of which Mrs. Tarrant possessed her

version.) Even in a society much occupied with the effacement of

prejudice there had been certain dim presumptions against this versatile

being, who naturally had not wanted arts to ingratiate himself with Miss

Greenstreet, her eyes, like his own, being fixed exclusively on the

future. The young couple (he was considerably her elder) had gazed on

the future together until they found that the past had completely

forsaken them and that the present offered but a slender foothold. Mrs.

Tarrant, in other words, incurred the displeasure of her family, who

gave her husband to understand that, much as they desired to remove the

shackles from the slave, there were kinds of behaviour which struck them

as too unfettered. These had prevailed, to their thinking, at Cayuga,

and they naturally felt it was no use for him to say that his residence

there had been (for him--the community still existed) but a momentary

episode, inasmuch as there was little more to be urged for the spiritual

picnics and vegetarian camp-meetings in which the discountenanced pair

now sought consolation.

Such were the narrow views of people hitherto supposed capable of

opening their hearts to all salutary novelties, but now put to a genuine

test, as Mrs. Tarrant felt. Her husband's tastes rubbed off on her soft,

moist moral surface, and the couple lived in an atmosphere of novelty,

in which, occasionally, the accommodating wife encountered the fresh

sensation of being in want of her dinner. Her father died, leaving,

after all, very little money; he had spent his modest fortune upon the

blacks. Selah Tarrant and his companion had strange adventures; she

found herself completely enrolled in the great irregular army of

nostrum-mongers, domiciled in humanitary Bohemia. It absorbed her like a

social swamp; she sank into it a little more every day, without

measuring the inches of her descent. Now she stood there up to her chin;

it may probably be said of her that she had touched bottom. When she

went to Miss Birdseye's it seemed to her that she re-entered society.

The door that admitted her was not the door that admitted some of the

others (she should never forget the tipped-up nose of Mrs. Farrinder),

and the superior portal remained ajar, disclosing possible vistas. She

had lived with long-haired men and short-haired women, she had

contributed a flexible faith and an irremediable want of funds to a

dozen social experiments, she had partaken of the comfort of a hundred

religions, had followed innumerable dietary reforms, chiefly of the

negative order, and had gone of an evening to a _séance_ or a lecture as

regularly as she had eaten her supper. Her husband always had tickets

for lectures; in moments of irritation at the want of a certain sequence

in their career, she had remarked to him that it was the only thing he

did have. The memory of all the winter nights they had tramped through

the slush (the tickets, alas! were not car-tickets) to hear Mrs. Ada T.

P. Foat discourse on the "Summer-land," came back to her with

bitterness. Selah was quite enthusiastic at one time about Mrs. Foat,

and it was his wife's belief that he had been "associated" with her

(that was Selah's expression in referring to such episodes) at Cayuga.

The poor woman, matrimonially, had a great deal to put up with; it took,

at moments, all her belief in his genius to sustain her. She knew that

he was very magnetic (that, in fact, was his genius), and she felt that

it was his magnetism that held her to him. He had carried her through

things where she really didn't know what to think; there were moments

when she suspected that she had lost the strong moral sense for which

the Greenstreets were always so celebrated.

Of course a woman who had had the bad taste to marry Selah Tarrant would

not have been likely under any circumstances to possess a very straight

judgement; but there is no doubt that this poor lady had grown

dreadfully limp. She had blinked and compromised and shuffled; she asked

herself whether, after all, it was any more than natural that she should

have wanted to help her husband, in those exciting days of his

mediumship, when the table, sometimes, wouldn't rise from the ground,

the sofa wouldn't float through the air, and the soft hand of a lost

loved one was not so alert as it might have been to visit the circle.

Mrs. Tarrant's hand was soft enough for the most supernatural effect,

and she consoled her conscience on such occasions by reflecting

that she ministered to a belief in immortality. She was glad,

somehow, for Verena's sake, that they had emerged from the phase of

spirit-intercourse; her ambition for her daughter took another form than

desiring that she, too, should minister to a belief in immortality. Yet

among Mrs. Tarrant's multifarious memories these reminiscences of the

darkened room, the waiting circle, the little taps on table and wall,

the little touches on cheek and foot, the music in the air, the rain of

flowers, the sense of something mysteriously flitting, were most

tenderly cherished. She hated her husband for having magnetised her so

that she consented to certain things, and even did them, the thought of

which to-day would suddenly make her face burn; hated him for the manner

in which, somehow, as she felt, he had lowered her social tone; yet at

the same time she admired him for an impudence so consummate that it had

ended (in the face of mortifications, exposures, failures, all the

misery of a hand-to-mouth existence) by imposing itself on her as a kind

of infallibility. She knew he was an awful humbug, and yet her knowledge

had this imperfection, that he had never confessed it--a fact that was

really grand when one thought of his opportunities for doing so. He had

never allowed that he wasn't straight; the pair had so often been in the

position of the two augurs behind the altar, and yet he had never given

her a glance that the whole circle mightn't have observed. Even in the

privacy of domestic intercourse he had phrases, excuses, explanations,

ways of putting things, which, as she felt, were too sublime for just

herself; they were pitched, as Selah's nature was pitched, altogether in

the key of public life.

So it had come to pass, in her distended and demoralised conscience,

that with all the things she despised in her life and all the things she

rather liked, between being worn out with her husband's inability to

earn a living and a kind of terror of his consistency (he had a theory

that they lived delightfully), it happened, I say, that the only very

definite criticism she made of him to-day was that he didn't know how to

speak. That was where the shoe pinched--that was where Selah was slim.

He couldn't hold the attention of an audience, he was not acceptable as

a lecturer. He had plenty of thoughts, but it seemed as if he couldn't

fit them into each other. Public speaking had been a Greenstreet

tradition, and if Mrs. Tarrant had been asked whether in her younger

years she had ever supposed she should marry a mesmeric healer, she

would have replied: "Well, I never thought I should marry a gentleman

who would be silent on the platform!" This was her most general

humiliation; it included and exceeded every other, and it was a poor

consolation that Selah possessed as a substitute--his career as a

healer, to speak of none other, was there to prove it--the eloquence of

the hand. The Greenstreets had never set much store on manual activity;

they believed in the influence of the lips. It may be imagined,

therefore, with what exultation, as time went on, Mrs. Tarrant found

herself the mother of an inspired maiden, a young lady from whose lips

eloquence flowed in streams. The Greenstreet tradition would not perish,

and the dry places of her life would, perhaps, be plentifully watered.

It must be added that, of late, this sandy surface had been irrigated,

in moderation, from another source. Since Selah had addicted himself to

the mesmeric mystery, their home had been a little more what the home of

a Greenstreet should be. He had "considerable many" patients, he got

about two dollars a sitting, and he had effected some most gratifying

cures. A lady in Cambridge had been so much indebted to him that she had

recently persuaded them to take a house near her, in order that Doctor

Tarrant might drop in at any time. He availed himself of this

convenience--they had taken so many houses that another, more or less,

didn't matter--and Mrs. Tarrant began to feel as if they really had

"struck" something.

Even to Verena, as we know, she was confused and confusing; the girl had

not yet had an opportunity to ascertain the principles on which her

mother's limpness was liable suddenly to become rigid. This phenomenon

occurred when the vapours of social ambition mounted to her brain, when

she extended an arm from which a crumpled dressing-gown fluttered back

to seize the passing occasion. Then she surprised her daughter by a

volubility of exhortation as to the duty of making acquaintances, and by

the apparent wealth of her knowledge of the mysteries of good society.

She had, in particular, a way of explaining confidentially--and in her

desire to be graphic she often made up the oddest faces--the

interpretation that you must sometimes give to the manners of the best

people, and the delicate dignity with which you should meet them, which

made Verena wonder what secret sources of information she possessed.

Verena took life, as yet, very simply; she was not conscious of so many

differences of social complexion. She knew that some people were rich

and others poor, and that her father's house had never been visited by

such abundance as might make one ask one's self whether it were right,

in a world so full of the disinherited, to roll in luxury. But except

when her mother made her slightly dizzy by a resentment of some slight

that she herself had never perceived, or a flutter over some opportunity

that appeared already to have passed (while Mrs. Tarrant was looking for

something to "put on"), Verena had no vivid sense that she was not as

good as any one else, for no authority appealing really to her

imagination had fixed the place of mesmeric healers in the scale of

fashion. It was impossible to know in advance how Mrs. Tarrant would

take things. Sometimes she was abjectly indifferent; at others she

thought that every one who looked at her wished to insult her. At

moments she was full of suspicion of the ladies (they were mainly

ladies) whom Selah mesmerised; then again she appeared to have given up

everything but her slippers and the evening-paper (from this publication

she derived inscrutable solace), so that if Mrs. Foat in person had

returned from the summer-land (to which she had some time since taken

her flight), she would not have disturbed Mrs. Tarrant's almost cynical

equanimity.

It was, however, in her social subtleties that she was most beyond her

daughter; it was when she discovered extraordinary though latent

longings on the part of people they met to make their acquaintance, that

the girl became conscious of how much she herself had still to learn.

All her desire was to learn, and it must be added that she regarded her

mother, in perfect good faith, as a wonderful teacher. She was perplexed

sometimes by her worldliness; that, somehow, was not a part of the

higher life which every one in such a house as theirs must wish above

all things to lead; and it was not involved in the reign of justice,

which they were all trying to bring about, that such a strict account

should be kept of every little snub. Her father seemed to Verena to move

more consecutively on the high plane; though his indifference to

old-fashioned standards, his perpetual invocation of the brighter day,

had not yet led her to ask herself whether, after all, men are more

disinterested than women. Was it interest that prompted her mother to

respond so warmly to Miss Chancellor, to say to Verena, with an air of

knowingness, that the thing to do was to go in and see her

_immediately_? No italics can represent the earnestness of Mrs.

Tarrant's emphasis. Why hadn't she said, as she had done in former

cases, that if people wanted to see them they could come out to their

home; that she was not so low down in the world as not to know there was

such a ceremony as leaving cards? When Mrs. Tarrant began on the

question of ceremonies she was apt to go far; but she had waived it in

this case; it suited her more to hold that Miss Chancellor had been very

gracious, that she was a most desirable friend, that she had been more

affected than any one by Verena's beautiful outpouring; that she would

open to her the best saloons in Boston; that when she said "Come soon"

she meant the very next day, that this was the way to take it, anyhow

(one must know when to go forward gracefully); and that in short she,

Mrs. Tarrant, knew what she was talking about.

Verena accepted all this, for she was young enough to enjoy any journey

in a horse-car, and she was ever-curious about the world; she only

wondered a little how her mother knew so much about Miss Chancellor just

from looking at her once. What Verena had mainly observed in the young

lady who came up to her that way the night before was that she was

rather dolefully dressed, that she looked as if she had been crying

(Verena recognised that look quickly, she had seen it so much), and that

she was in a hurry to get away. However, if she was as remarkable as her

mother said, one would very soon see it; and meanwhile there was nothing

in the girl's feeling about herself, in her sense of her importance, to

make it a painful effort for her to run the risk of a mistake. She had

no particular feeling about herself; she only cared, as yet, for outside

things. Even the development of her "gift" had not made her think

herself too precious for mere experiments; she had neither a particle of

diffidence nor a particle of vanity. Though it would have seemed to you

eminently natural that a daughter of Selah Tarrant and his wife should

be an inspirational speaker, yet, as you knew Verena better, you would

have wondered immensely how she came to issue from such a pair. Her

ideas of enjoyment were very simple; she enjoyed putting on her new hat,

with its redundancy of feather, and twenty cents appeared to her a very

large sum.