VOICES AND VISIONS.
Madame Bylles herself walked into the great work-room of Mesdames
Fillmer & Bylles, one Saturday morning.
Madame Bylles was a lady of great girth and presence. If Miss Tonker
were sub-aristocratic, Madame Bylles was almost super-aristocratic,
so cumulative had been the effect upon her style and manner of
constant professional contact with the élite. Carriages had rolled
up to her door, until she had got the roll of them into her very
voice. Airs and graces had swept in and out of her private
audience-room, that had not been able to take all of themselves away
again. As the very dust grows golden and precious where certain
workmanship is carried on, the touch and step and speech of those
who had come ordering, consulting, coaxing, beseeching, to her
apartments, had filled them with infinitesimal particles of a
sublime efflorescence, by which the air itself in which they floated
became--not the air of shop or business or down-town street--but the
air of drawing-room, and bon-ton, and Beacon Hill or the New Land.
And Madame Bylles breathed it all the time; she dwelt in the courtly
contagion. When she came in among her work-people, it was an advent
of awe. It was as if all the elegance that had ever been made up
there came floating and spreading and shining in, on one portly and
magnificent person.
But when Madame Bylles came in, in one of her majestic hurries!
Then it was as if the globe itself had orders to move on a little
faster, and make out the year in two hundred and eighty days or so,
and she was appointed to see it done.
She was in one of these grand and grave accelerations this morning.
Miss Pashaw's marriage was fixed for a fortnight earlier than had
been intended, business calling Mr. Soldane abroad. There were
dresses to be hurried; work for over-hours was to be given out. Miss
Tonker was to use every exertion; temporary hands, if reliable,
might be employed. All must be ready by Thursday next; Madame Bylles
had given her word for it.
The manner in which she loftily transmitted this grand intelligence,
warm from the high-born lips that had favored her with the
confidence,--the air of intending it for Miss Tonker's secondarily
distinguished ear alone, while the carriage-roll in her accents bore
it to the farthest corner in the room, where the meekest little
woman sat basting,--these things are indescribable. But they are in
human nature: you can call them up and scrutinize them for yourself.
Madame Bylles receded like a tidal wave, having heaved up, and
changed, and overwhelmed all things.
A great buzz succeeded her departure; Miss Tonker followed her out
upon the landing.
"I'll speak for that cashmere peignoir that is just cut out. I'll
make it nights, and earn me an ostrich band for my hat," said Elise
Mokey.
One spoke for one thing; one another; they were claimed beforehand,
in this fashion, by a kind of work-women's code; as publishers
advertise foreign books in press, and keep the first right by
courtesy.
Miss Proddle stopped her machine at last, and caught the news in her
slow fashion hind side before.
"We might some of us have overwork, I should think; shouldn't you?"
she asked, blandly, of Miss Bree.
Aunt Blin smiled. "They've been squabbling over it these five
minutes," she replied.
Aunt Blin was sure of some particular finishing, that none could do
like her precise old self.
Kate Sencerbox jumped up impatiently, reaching over for some fringe.
"I shall have to give it up," she whispered emphatically into Bel
Bree's ear. "It's no use your asking me to go to Chapel any more. I
ain't sanctified a grain. I did begin to think there was a kind of
work of grace begun in me,--but I _can't_ stand Miss Proddle! What
_are_ people made to strike ten for, always, when it's eleven?"
"I think _we_ are all striking _twelve_" said Bel Bree. "One's too
fast, and another's too slow, but the sun goes round exactly the
same."
Miss Tonker came back, and the talk hushed.
"Clock struck one, and down they run, hickory, dickory, dock," said
Miss Proddle, deliberately, so that her voice brought up the
subsiding rear of sound and was heard alone.
"What _under_ the sun?" exclaimed Miss Tonker, with a gaze of
mingled amazement, mystification, and contempt, at the poor old
maiden making such unwonted noise.
"Yes'm," said Kate Sencerbox. "It is 'under the sun,' that we're
talking about; the way things turn round, and clocks strike; some
too fast, and some too slow; and--whether there's anything new under
the sun. I think there is; Miss Proddle made a bright speech, that's
all."
Miss Tonker, utterly bewildered, took refuge in solemn and
supercilious disregard; as if she saw the joke, and considered it
quite beneath remark.
"You will please resume your work, and remember the rules," she
said, and sailed down upon the cutters' table.
There was a certain silk evening dress, of singular and
indescribably lovely tint,--a tea-rose pink; just the color of the
blush and creaminess that mingle themselves into such delicious
anonymousness in the exquisite flower. It was all puffed and fluted
till it looked as if it had really blossomed with uncounted curving
petals, that showed in their tender convolutions each possible
deepening and brightening of its wonderful hue.
It _looked_ fragrant. It conveyed a subtle sense of flavor. It fed
and provoked every perceptive sense.
It was not a dress to be hurried with; every quill and gather of its
trimming must be "set just so;" and there was still one flounce to
be made, and these others were only basted, as also the corsage.
After the hours were up that afternoon, Miss Tonker called Aunt Blin
aside. She uncovered the large white box in which it lay,
unfinished.
"You have a nice room, Miss Bree. Can you take this home and finish
it,--by Wednesday? In over-hours, I mean; I shall want you here
daytimes, as usual. It has been tried on; all but for the hanging of
the skirt; you can take the measures from the white one. _That_ I
shall finish myself."
Aunt Blin's voice trembled with humble ecstasy as she answered. She
thanked Miss Tonker in a tone timid with an apprehension of some
possible unacceptableness which should disturb or change the
favoring grace.
"Certainly, ma'am. I'll spread a sheet on the floor, and put a
white cloth on the table. Thank you, ma'am. Yes; I have a nice room,
and nothing gets meddled with. It'll be quite safe there. I'm sure
I'm no less than happy to be allowed. You're very kind, ma'am."
Miss Tonker said nothing at all to the meekly nervous outpouring.
She did not snub her, however; that was something.
Miss Bree and her niece, between them, carried home the large box.
On the way, a dream ran through the head of Bel. She could not help
it.
To have this beautiful dress in the house,--perhaps to have to stand
up and be tried to, for the fall of its delicate, rosy trail; with
the white cloth on the floor, and the bright light all through the
room,--why it would be almost like a minute of a ball; and what if
the door should be open, and somebody should happen to go by,
up-stairs? If she could be so, and be seen so, just one minute, in
that blush-colored silk! She should like to look like that, just
once, to somebody!
Ah, little Bel! behind all her cosy, practical living--all her busy
work and contentedness--all her bright notions of what might be
possible, for the better, in things that concerned her class,--she
had her little, vague, bewildering flashes of vision, in which she
saw impossible things; things that might happen in a book, things
that must be so beautiful if they ever did really happen!
A step went up and down the stairs and along the passage by her
aunt's room, day by day, that she had learned to notice every time
it came. A face had glanced in upon her now and then, when the door
stood open for coolness in the warm September weather, when they
had been obliged to have a fire to make the tea, or to heat an iron
to press out seams in work that they were doing. One or two days of
each week, they had taken work home. On those days, they did,
perhaps, their own little washing or ironing, besides; sewing
between whiles, and taking turns, and continuing at their needles
far on into the night. Once Mr. Hewland had come in, to help Aunt
Blin with a blind that was swinging by a single hinge, and which she
was trying, against a boisterous wind, to reset with the other.
After that, he had always spoken to them when he met them. He had
opened and shut the street-door for them, standing back,
courteously, with his hat in his hand, to let them pass.
Aunt Blin,--dear old simple, kindly-hearted Aunt Blin, who believed
cats and birds,--_her_ cat and bird, at least,--might be thrown
trustfully into each other's company, if only she impressed it
sufficiently upon the quadruped's mind from the beginning, that the
bird was "very, _very_ precious,"--thought Mr. Hewland was "such a
nice young man."
And so he was. A nice, genial, well-meaning, well-bred gentleman;
above anything ignoble, or consciously culpable, or common. His
danger lay in his higher tendencies. He had artistic tastes; he was
a lover of all grace and natural sweetness; no line of beauty could
escape him. More than that, he drew toward all that was most
genuine; he cared nothing for the elegant artificialities among
which his social position placed him. He had been singularly
attracted by this little New Hampshire girl, fresh and pretty as a
wild rose, and full of bright, quaint ways and speech, of which he
had caught glimpses and fragments in their near neighborhood. Now
and then, from her open window up to his had come her gay, sweet
laugh; or her raised, gleeful tone, as she said some funny, quick,
shrewd thing in her original fashion to her aunt.
Through the month of August, while work was slack, and the Hewland
family was away travelling, and other lodgers' rooms were vacated,
the Brees had been more at home, and Morris Hewland had been more in
his rooms above, than had been usual at most times. The music
mistress had taken a vacation, and gone into the country; only old
Mr. Sparrow, lame with one weak ankle, hopped up and down; and the
spare, odd-faced landlady glided about the passages with her prim
profile always in the same pose, reminding one of a badly-made
rag-doll, of which the nose, chin, and chest are in one invincible
flat line, interrupted feebly by an unsuccessful hint of drawing in
at the throat.
Mr. Hewland liked June for his travels; and July and August, when
everybody was out of the way, for his quiet summer work.
The Hewlands called him odd, and let him go; he stayed at home
sometimes, and he happened in and out, they knew where to find him,
and there was "no harm in Morris but his artistic peculiarities."
He had secured in these out-of-the way-lodgings in Leicester Place,
one of the best north lights that could be had in the city; he would
not take a room among a lot of others in a Studio Building. So he
worked up his studies, painted his pictures, let nobody come near
him except as he chose to bring them, and when he wanted anything of
the world, went out into the world and got it.
Now, something had come right in here close to him, which brought
him a certain sense of such a world as he could not go out into at
will, to get what he wanted. A world of simplicities, of blessed
contents, of unworn, joyous impulses, of little new, unceasing
spontaneities; a world that he looked into, as we used to do at
Sattler's Cosmoramas, through the merest peepholes, and comprehended
by the merest hints; but which the presence of this girl under the
roof with himself as surely revealed to him as the wind-flower
reveals the spring.
On her part, Bel Bree got a glimpse, she knew not how, of a world
above and beyond her own; a world of beauty, of power, of reach and
elevation, in which people like Morris Hewland dwelt. His step, his
voice, his words now and then to the friend or two whom he had the
habit of bringing in with him,--the mere knowledge that he "made
pictures," such pictures as she looked at in the windows and in
art-dealers' rooms, where any shop-girl, as freely as the most
elegant connoisseur, can go in and delight her eyes, and inform her
perceptions,--these, without the face even, which had turned its
magnetism straight upon hers only once or twice, and whose
revelation was that of a life related to things wide and full and
manifold,--gave her the stimulating sense of a something to which
she had not come, but to which she felt a strange belonging.
Beside,--alongside--in each mind, was the undeveloped mystery; the
spell under which a man receives such intuitions through a woman's
presence,--a woman through a man's. Yet these two individuals were
not, therefore, going to be necessary to each other, in the plan of
God. Other things might show that they were not meant, in rightness,
for each other; they represented mutually, something that each life
missed; but the something was in no special companionship; it was a
great deal wider and higher than that. They might have to learn that
it was so, nevertheless, by some briefly painful process of
experience. If in this process they should fall into mistake and
wrong,--ah, there would come the experience beyond the experience,
the depth they were not meant to sound, yet which, if they let their
game of life run that way, they could not get back from but through
the uttermost. They must play it out; the move could not be taken
back,--yet awhile. The possible better combinations are in God's
knowledge; how He may ever reset the pieces and give his good
chances again, remains the hidden hope, resting upon the Christ that
is in the heart of Him.
One morning Morris Hewland had come up the stairs with a handful of
tuberoses; he was living at home, then, through the pleasant
September, at his father's country place, whence the household would
soon remove to the city for the winter.
Miss Bree's door was open. She was just replacing her door-mat,
which she had been shaking out of the entry window. She had an old
green veil tied down over her head to keep the dust off; nobody
could suspect any harm of a wish or a willingness to have a word
with her; Morris Hewland could not have suspected it of himself, if
he had indeed got so far as to investigate his passing impulses.
There was something pitiful in the contrast, perhaps, of the pure,
fresh, exquisite blossoms, and the breath of sweet air he and they
brought with them in their swift transit from the places where it
blessed all things to the places where so much languished in the
need of it, not knowing, even, the privation. The old, trodden,
half-cleansed door-mat in her hands,--the just-created beauty in
his. He stopped, and divided his handful.
"Here, Miss Bree,--you would like a piece of the country, I imagine,
this morning! I couldn't have come in without it."
The voice rang blithe and bright into the room where Bel sat,
basting machine work; the eyes went after the voice.
The light from the east window was full upon the shining hair, the
young, unworn outlines, the fresh, pure color of the skin. Few city
beauties could bear such morning light as that. Nothing but the
morning in the face can meet it.
Morris Hewland lifted his hat, and bowed toward the young girl,
silently. Then he passed on, up to his room. Bel heard his step,
back and forth, overhead.
The tuberoses were put into a clear, plain tumbler. Bel would not
have them in the broken vase; she would not have them in a _blue_
vase, at all. She laid a white napkin over the red of the
tablecloth, and set them on it. The perfume rose from them and
spread all through the room.
"I am so glad we have work at home to-day," said Bel.
There had been nothing but little things like these; out into Bel's
head, as she and Aunt Blin carried home the tea-blush silk, and laid
it by with care in its white box upon the sofa-end, came that little
wish, with a spring and a heart-beat,--"If she might have it on for
a minute, and if in that minute he might happen to come by!"
She did not think she was planning for it; but when on the Tuesday
evening the step went down the stairs at eight o'clock, while they
sat busily working, each at a sleeve, by the drop-light over the
white-covered table, a little involuntary calculation ran through
her thoughts.
"He always comes back by eleven. We shall have two hours' work--or
more,--on this, if we don't hurry; and it's miserable to hurry!"
They stitched on, comfortably enough; yet the sleeves were finished
sooner than she expected. Before nine o'clock, Aunt Blin was sewing
them in. Then Bel wanted a drink of water; then they could not both
get at the waist together; there was no need.
"I'll do it," said Bel, out of her conscience, with a jump of fright
as she said it, lest Aunt Blin should take her at her word, and
begin gauging and plaiting the skirt.
"No, you rest. I shall want you by and by, for a figure."
"May I have it _all_ on?" says Bel eagerly. "Do, Auntie! I should
just like to be in such a dress once--a minute!"
"I don't see any reason why not. _You_ couldn't do any hurt to it,
if 'twas made for a queen," responded Aunt Blin.
"I'll do up my hair on the top of my head," said Bel.
And forthwith, at the far end of the room, away from the delicate
robe and its scattered material, she got out her combs and brushes,
and let down her gleaming brown hair.
It took different shades, from umber to almost golden, this "funny
hair" of hers, as she called it. She thought it was because she had
faded it, playing out in the sun when she was a child; but it was
more like having got the shine into it. It did not curl, or wave;
but it grew in lovely arches, with roots even set, around her
temple and in the curves of her neck; and now, as she combed it up
in a long, beautiful mass, over her grasping hand, raising it with
each sweep higher toward the crown of her pretty head, all this
vigorous, beautiful growth showed itself, and marked with its
shadowy outline the dainty shapings. One twist at the top for the
comb to go in, and then she parted it in two, and coiled it like a
golden-bronze cable; and laid it round and round till the foremost
turn rested like a wreath midway about her head. She pulled three
fresh geranium leaves and a pink-white umbel of blossom from the
plant in the window, and tucked the cluster among the soft front
locks against the coil above the temple.
Then she took off the loose wrapping-sack she had thrown over her
shoulders, washed her fingers at the basin, and came back to her
seat under the lamp.
Aunt Blin looked up at her and smiled. It was like having it all
herself,--this youth and beauty,--to have it belonging to her, and
showing its charming ways and phases, in little Bel. Why shouldn't
the child, with her fair, sweet freshness, and the deep-green,
velvety leaves making her look already like a rose against which
they leaned themselves, have on this delicate rose dress? If things
stayed, or came, where they belonged, to whom should it more
fittingly fall to wear it than to her?
Bel watched the clock and Aunt Blin's fingers.
It was ten when the plaits and gathers were laid, and the skirt
basted to its band for the trying. Bel was dilatory one minute, and
in a hurry the next.
"It would be done too soon; but he might come in early; and, O dear,
they hadn't thought,--there was that puffing to put round the
corsage, bertha-wise, with the blonde edging. 'It was all ready;
give it to her.'"
"Now!"
The wonderful, glistening, aurora-like robe goes over her head; she
stands in the midst, with the tender glowing color sweeping out from
her upon the white sheet pinned down above the carpet.
Was that anybody coming?
Aunt Blin left her for an instant to put up the window-top that had
been open to cool the lighted and heated room. Bel might catch cold,
standing like this.
"O, it is _so_ warm, Auntie! We can't have everything shut up!" And
with this swift excuse instantly suggesting itself and making
justification to her deceitful little heart that lay in wait for it,
Bel sprang to the opposite corner where the doorway opened full
toward her, diagonally commanding the room. She set it hastily just
a hand's length ajar. "There is no wind in the entry, and nobody
will come," she said.
When she was only excitedly afraid there wouldn't! I cannot justify
little Bel. I do not try to.
"Now, see! isn't it beautiful?"
"It sags just a crumb, here at the left," said Aunt Blin, poking and
stooping under Bel's elbow. "No; it is only a baste give way. You
shouldn't have sprung so, child."
The bare neck and the dimpled arms showed from among the cream-pink
tints like the high white lights upon the rose. Bel had not looked
in the glass yet: Aunt Blin was busy, and she really had not thought
of it; she was happy just in being in that beautiful raiment--in the
heart of its color and shine; feeling its softly rustling length
float away from her, and reach out radiantly behind. What is there
about that sweeping and trailing that all women like, and that
becomes them so? That even the little child pins a shawl about her
waist and walks to and fro, looking over her shoulder, to get a
sensation of?
The door _did_ shut, below. A step did come up the stairs, with a
few light springs.
Suddenly Bel was ashamed!
She did not want it, now that it had come! She had set a dreadful
trap for herself!
"O, Aunt Blin, let me go! Put something over me!" she whispered.
But Aunt Blin was down on the floor, far behind her, drawing out and
arranging the slope of the train, measuring from hem to band with
her professional eye.
The footstep suddenly checked; then, as if with an as swift
bethinking, it went by. But through that door ajar, in that bright
light that revealed the room, Morris Hewland had been smitten with
the vision; had seen little Bel Bree in all the possible flush of
fair array, and marvelous blossom of consummate, adorned loveliness.
Somehow, it broke down the safeguard he had had.
In what was Bel Bree different, really, from women who wore such
robes as that, with whom he had danced and chatted in drawing-rooms?
Only in being a thousand times fresher and prettier.
After that, he began to make reasons for speaking to them. He
brought Aunt Blin a lot of illustrated papers; he lent them a
stereoscope, with Alpine and Italian views; he brought down a
picture of his own, one day, to show them; before October was out,
he had spent an evening in Aunt Blin's room, reading aloud to them
"Mirèio."
Among the strange metaphysical doublings which human nature
discovers in itself, there is such a fact, not seldom experienced,
as the dreaming of a dream.
It is one thing to dream utterly, so that one believes one is
awake; it is another to sleep in one's dream, and in a vision give
way to vision. It is done in sleep, it is done also in life.
This was what Bel Bree--and it is with her side of the experience
that I have business--was in danger now of doing.
It is done in life, as to many forms of living--as to religion, as
to art. People are religious, not infrequently because they are in
love with the idea of being so, not because they are simply and
directly devoted to God. They are æsthetic, because "The Beautiful"
is so beautiful, to see and to talk of, and they choose to affect
artistic having and doing; but they have not come even into that
sheepfold by the door, by the honest, inevitable pathway that their
nature took because it must,--by the entrance that it found through
a force of celestial urging and guidance that was behind them all
the while, though they but half knew it or understood.
Women fall in love that way, so often! It is a lovely thing to be
loved; there is new living, which seems to them rare and grand, into
which it offers to lift them up. They fall into a dream about a
dream; they do not lay them down to sleep and give the Lord their
souls to keep, till He shall touch their trustful rest with a divine
fire, and waken them into his apocalypse.
It was this atmosphere in which Morris Hewland lived, and which he
brought about him to transfuse the heavier air of her lowly living,
that bewildered Bel. And she knew that she was bewildered. She knew
that it was the poetic side of her nature that was stirred, excited;
not the real deep, woman's heart of her that found, suddenly, its
satisfying. If women will look, they can see this.
She knew--she had found out--that she was a fair picture in the
artist's eyes; that the perception keen to discover and test and
analyze all harmonies of form and tint,--holding a hallowed,
mysterious kinship in this power to the Power that had made and
spoken by them,--turned its search upon her, and found her lovely in
the study. It was as if a daisy bearing the pure message and meaning
of the heavenly, could thrill with the consciousness of its
transmission; could feel the exaltation of fulfilling to a human
soul, grand in its far up mystery and waiting upon God,--one of his
dear ideas.
There was something holy in the spirit with which she thus realized
her possession of maidenly beauty; her gift of mental charm and
fitness even; it was the countersign by which she entered into this
realm of which Morris Hewland had the freedom; it belonged to her
also,--she to it; she had received her first recognition. It was a
look back into Paradise for this Eve's daughter, born to labor, but
with a reminiscence in her nature out of which she had built all her
sweetest notions of being, doing, abiding; from which came
the-home-picture, so simple in its outlines, but so rich and gentle
in all its significance, that she had drawn to herself as "her
wish"; the thing she would give most, and do most, to have come
true.
But all this was not necessarily love, even in its beginning,--though
she might come for a while to fancy it so,--for this one
man. It was a thing between her own life and the Maker of it; an
unfolding of herself toward that which waited for her in Him, and
which she should surely come to, whatever she might grasp at
mistakenly and miss upon the way.
Morris Hewland--young, honest-hearted, but full of a young man's
fire and impulse, of an artist's susceptibility to outward beauty,
of the ready delight of educated taste in fresh, natural, responsive
cleverness--was treading dangerous ground.
He, too, knew that he was bewildered; and that if he opened his eyes
he should see no way out of it. Therefore he shut his eyes and
drifted on.
Aunt Blin, with her simplicity,--her incapacity of believing, though
there might be wrong and mischief in the world, that anybody she
knew could ever do it, sat there between them, the most bewildered,
the most inwardly and utterly befooled of the three.