There are women at whom, after the first meeting, you forget to glance a
second time, they seem to be such indifferent creations, such imperfect
sketches of an idea to be fulfilled farther on in a clearer type, but
who, met once more and yet again, suddenly take you captive in bonds.
You find the sallow cheek to be but polished ivory, the heavy eye loaded
with fire, the irregular features chords of a harmony whose whole is
perfect; you find that this is the type itself; while in every gesture,
every word, every look, the soul is shed abroad, and the fascination is
what neither Campaspe, nor Jocasta, nor even Aspasia herself held in
fee. For you, she has blossomed into the one beauty of the world; you
hear her, and the Sirens sing in vain; she touches you, and makes you
the slave beneath her feet.
Such a one was Éloise Changarnier.
There was iron of the old Huguenot blood in her veins; late American
admixture had shot a racy sparkle through it; convent-care from her
tenth to her sixteenth year had softened and toned the whole into a
warm, generous life; and underneath all there slumbered that one atom of
integral individuality that was nothing at all but a spark: as yet, its
fire had never flashed; if it ever should do so, one might be safe in
prophesying a strange wayward blaze.
In one of her earliest summers her widowed mother had died and
bequeathed her sole legacy, a penniless orphan, to the care of the
survivor in an imperishable friendship, Disbrowe Erne. A childless,
thriftless, melancholy man, Mr. Erne had adopted her into his inmost
heart, but out of respect to his friend had suffered her to retain her
father's name, and had thoughtlessly delayed rendering the adoption
legal. One day it was found too late to remedy this delay; for Mr. Erne
died, just a year after Éloise's return from the distant Northern
convent whither at ten years old she had been despatched, when, wild and
witching as a wood-brier, there had been found nothing else to do with
her. There her adopted father had visited her twice a year in all her
exile, as she deemed it, sometimes taking up his residence for several
months in the neighborhood of the nunnery; and a long vacation of many
weeks she had every winter spent at home with him on the rich and
beautiful plantation poetically known as The Rim, because, seen from
several of the adjacent places, it occupied the whole southern horizon.
The last vacation, however, she had passed with her adopted father
travelling in France, whither some affairs called him; but, of all the
splendid monuments and records of civilization that she saw, almost the
only thing that had impressed itself distinctly upon her memory, through
the chicanery of chances, was that once in a cathedral-choir she had
seen the handsome, blonde-hued, Vandyck face of a gentleman with
dreaming eyes looking at her from a gallery-niche with the most singular
earnestness. So at sixteen she found that the nuns had exhausted their
slender lore, and had nothing more to teach her; and after her brief
travels, she returned home for a finality, and there had dallied a
twelvemonth, lapped in the Elysium of freedom and youth. Every want
anticipated, every whim gratified, servants prostrate before her, father
adoring her,--the year sped on wings of silent joy, and left her a shade
more imperious than it met her. Launched into society, wealthy and
winning, Éloise counted, too, her lovers; but she spurned them so gayly
that her hard heart became a proverb through all the region round,
wherever the rejected travelled. It is true that Mr. Erne had often
expressed his film of dissatisfaction with the conventual results, and
had planned an attack on matters of more solid learning; but, tricksy as
a sprite, Éloise had escaped his designs, broken through his
regulations, implored, just out of shackles, a year's gambol in liberty,
and had made herself too charming to be resisted in her plea; and if,
feeling his health fail, he had at first insisted,--in the fear that
there might be left but brief opportunity for him to make her pleasure,
he yielded. Nevertheless, with the best outlay in the world,
plantation-life is not all a gala, and there were, it must be confessed,
certain ennuisome moments in which Éloise made inroads on her father's
library, chiefly in wild out-of-the-way veins, all which, however,
romantic, unsystematic, and undigested, did nothing towards rendering
her one whit more independent of the world in time of future trial.
One afternoon, just reëntering the house from some gay farewell of
friends, she found her father sitting in the hall, and she stood
tiptoing in the door-way while smiling at him, with a fragrant vine half
twisted in her dark drooping hair, the heat making her cheek yet paler,
and the great blue-green eyes shining at him from under the black
straight brows, like aquamarine jewels. Mr. Erne leaned forward in the
chair, with hands clasped upon his knees, and eyes upbent.
"Éloise! Éloise!" he cried in a piercing voice, then grew white, and
fell back in the cushions.
The girl flew to him, took the head upon her shoulder, caressed the
deathly face, warmed the mouth with her own.
"Child!" he murmured, "I thought it was your mother!"
And by midnight, alone, and in the dark, he died, and went to find that
mother.
As for Éloise, she was like some one made dumb by a thunderbolt. Her
garden had become a desert. Ice had fallen in her summer. Death was too
large a fact for her to comprehend. She had seen the Medusa's head in
its terror, but not in its loveliness, and been stricken to stone. At
length in the heart of that stone the inner fountains broke,--broke in
rains of tempestuous tears, such gusts and gushes of grief as threatened
to wash away life itself; and when Éloise issued from this stormy deep,
the warmth and the wealth of being obscured, the effervescence and
bubble of the child destroyed, feeling like a flower sodden with
showers, if she had been capable of finding herself at all, she would
have found herself a woman.
Among Mr. Erne's disorderly papers, full of incipient schemes, sketches,
and schedules of gold-mining, steam-companies, and railways to the
nebulæ in Orion, was discovered after his death a scrap witnessed by two
signatures. The owner of one of these signatures was already dead, and
there were no means to prove its genuineness. The other was that of a
young man who had just enough of that remote taint in his descent which
incapacitates one, in certain regions, from bearing witness. It was
supposed that Mr. Erne had some day hurriedly executed this paper in the
absence of his lawyer, as being, possibly, better than no paper at all,
and he had certainly intended to have the whole matter arranged
legitimately; but these are among the things which, with a superstitious
loitering, some men linger long before doing, lest they prove to be,
themselves, a death-warrant.
By this paper, in so many words, Disbrowe Erne left to Éloise
Changarnier all the property of which he died possessed. An old friend
of her father's in the neighborhood assured her that the only relatives
were both distant, distinguished, and wealthy, unlikely to present any
claims, and that she would be justified in fulfilling her father's
desire. And so, without other forms, Éloise administered the affairs of
The Rim,--waiting until the autumn to consult the usual lawyer, who was
at present in England.
There had reigned over the domestic department of The Rim, for many
years, a person who was the widow of a maternal cousin of Mr. Erne's,
and who, when left destitute by the death of this young cousin, had
found shelter, support, and generous courtesy beneath the roof of her
late husband's kinsman. It was on the accession of this person, who was
not a saint, that Éloise had become so ungovernable as to require the
constraint of a nunnery. Mrs. Arles was a dark and quiet little lady,
with some of the elements of beauty which her name suggested, and with a
perfectly Andalusian foot and ankle. These being her sole wealth, it
was, perhaps, from economy of her charms that she hid the ankle in such
flowing sables, that she bound the black locks straightly under a little
widow's-cap, seldom parted the fine lips above the treasured pearls
beneath, disdained to distort the classic features, and graved no
wrinkles on the smooth, rich skin with any lavish smiling. She went
about the house, a self-contained, silent, unpleasant little vial of
wrath, and there was ever between her and Éloise a tacit feud, waiting,
perhaps, only for occasion to fling down the gage in order to become
open war. Mrs. Arles expected, therefore, that, so soon Éloise should
take the reins in hand herself, she would be lightly, but decisively
shaken off,--for the old friend had mentioned to Mrs. Arles that Mr.
Erne's will left Éloise heir, as she had always supposed it would. She
was, accordingly, silently amazed, when Éloise, softened by suffering,
hoped she would always find it convenient to make a home with herself,
and informed her that a certain section of the farm had been measured
off and allotted to her, with its laborers, as the source of a yearly
income. This delicacy, that endeavored to prevent her feeling the
perpetual recurrence of benefits conferred, touched the speechless Mrs.
Arles almost to the point of positive friendliness.
The plantation was one of those high and healthy spots that are ever
visited by land- and sea-breezes, and there Éloise determined to stay
that spring and summer; for this ground that her father had so often
trod, this air that had given and received his last breath, were dear to
her, and just now parting with them, for ever so short a time, would be
but a renewal of her loss. As she became able to turn her energy to the
business requiring attention, she discovered at last her sad ignorance.
Dancing, drawing, music, and languages were of small avail in managing
the interior concerns and the vexatious finance of a great estate. The
neighbors complained that her spoiled and neglected servants infected
theirs, and that her laxity of discipline was more ruinous in its
effects than the rigor of Blue Bluffs. But she just held out to them her
helpless little hands in so piteous and charming a way that they could
not cherish an instant's enmity. If she tried to remedy the evil
complained of, she fell into some fresh error; take what advice she
would, it invariably twisted itself round and worked the other way. The
plantation, always slackly managed, saw itself now on the high road to
destruction. Let her do the very best in her power, she found it
impossible to plan her season's campaign, to carry it out, to audit her
accounts, to study agricultural directions, to preserve the peace, to
keep her fences in order, to attend to the sick, to rule her household
and her spirit, to dispose of her harvest, and to bring either end of
the thread out of the tangled skein of her affairs.
Perhaps there could have been really no better thing for Éloise than the
diversion from her sorrow which all this perplexity necessarily in some
degree occasioned.
As for Mrs. Arles, so soon as Éloise had begun to move about again, she
had taken herself off on a long-promised visit to the West, and was but
just returning with the October weather.
Éloise, worn and thin, and looking nearly forty, as she had remarked to
herself that morning in the brief moment she could snatch for her
toilet, welcomed the cool and quiet little Mrs. Arles, who might _be_
forty, but looked any age between twenty and thirty, with affectionate
warmth, and made all the world bestir themselves for her comfort. It is
only justice to the owner of the little Andalusian foot to say that in
her specific domain things immediately changed for the better. But that
was merely within-doors, and because she tightened the reins and used
the whip in a manner which Éloise could not have done, if the whole
equipage tumbled to pieces about her ears.
Mrs. Arles had been at home a week or so; the evening was chilly with
rain, and a little fire flickered on the hearth. Mrs. Arles sat on one
side of the hearth, with her tatting in hand; Éloise bent above the
papers scattered over a small table.
"See what it is to go away!" said Éloise, cheerily. "It's like light in
a painting, as the Sisters used to say,--brings out all the shadows."
"Nobody knew how indispensable I was," said the other lady, with the
fragment of expression in the phantom of a smile.
"How pleasant it is to be missed! I _did_ miss you so,--it seemed as if
one of the four sides of the walls were gone. Now we stand--what is that
word of Aristotle's?--four-square again. Now our universe is on wheels.
Just tell me how you tamed Hazel so. She has conducted like a little
wild gorilla all summer,--and here, in the twinkling of an eye, she goes
about soberly, like a baptized Christian. How?"
"By a process of induction."
"You don't mean"--
"Oh, no. Nothing of the kind. I didn't touch her. I sent her into my
room, and told her to take down that little riding-switch hanging over
the mantel"--
"What,--the ebony and gold?"
"Yes. And to whip all the flies out of the air with it. It makes a
monstrous whizzing. There's no such thing as actual experience for these
imps of the vivid nerves. And when she came down I looked at her, and
asked her how she liked the singing. Her conduct now leads me to believe
that she has no desire to hear the tune again."