People will talk. 'Ciascun lo dice' is a tune that is played oftener
than the national air of this country or any other.
“That 's what they say. Means to marry her, if she is his cousin. Got
money himself,--that 's the story,--but wants to come and live in the
old place, and get the Dudley property by and by.” “Mother's folks was
wealthy.”--“Twenty-three to twenty-five year old.”--“He a'n't more 'n
twenty, or twenty-one at the outside.”--“Looks as if he knew too much
to be only twenty year old.”--“Guess he's been through the mill,--don't
look so green, anyhow, hey? Did y' ever mind that cut over his left
eyebrow?”
So they gossiped in Rockland. The young fellows could make nothing of
Dick Venner. He was shy and proud with the few who made advances to him.
The young ladies called him handsome and romantic, but he looked at them
like a many-tailed pacha who was in the habit of, ordering his wives by
the dozen.
“What do you think of the young man over there at the Veneers'?” said
Miss Arabella Thornton to her father.
“Handsome,” said the Judge, “but dangerous-looking. His face is
indictable at common law. Do you know, my dear, I think there is a blank
at the Sheriff's office, with a place for his name in it?”
The Judge paused and looked grave, as if he had just listened to the
verdict of the jury and was going to pronounce sentence.
“Have you heard anything against him?” said the Judge's daughter.
“Nothing. But I don't like these mixed bloods and half-told stories.
Besides, I have seen a good many desperate fellows at the bar, and I
have a fancy they all have a look belonging to them. The worst one I
ever sentenced looked a good deal like this fellow. A wicked mouth. All
our other features are made for us; but a man makes his own mouth.”
“Who was the person you sentenced?”
“He was a young fellow that undertook to garrote a man who had won his
money at cards. The same slender shape, the same cunning, fierce
look, smoothed over with a plausible air. Depend upon it, there is an
expression in all the sort of people who live by their wits when
they can, and by worse weapons when their wits fail them, that we old
law-doctors know just as well as the medical counsellors know the marks
of disease in a man's face. Dr. Kittredge looks at a man and says he is
going to die; I look at another man and say he is going to be hanged, if
nothing happens. I don't say so of this one, but I don't like his looks.
I wonder Dudley Veneer takes to him so kindly.”
“It's all for Elsie's sake,” said Miss Thornton. “I feel quite sure of
that. He never does anything that is not meant for her in some way. I
suppose it amuses her to have her cousin about the house. She rides a
good deal since he has been here. Have you seen them galloping about
together? He looks like my idea of a Spanish bandit on that wild horse
of his.”
“Possibly he has been one,--or is one,” said the Judge,--smiling as men
smile whose lips have often been freighted with the life and death of
their fellow-creatures. “I met them riding the other day. Perhaps Dudley
is right, if it pleases her to have a companion. What will happen,
though, if he makes love to her? Will Elsie be easily taken with such
a fellow? You young folks are supposed to know more about these matters
than we middle-aged people.”
“Nobody can tell. Elsie is not like anybody else. The girls who have
seen most of her think she hates men, all but 'Dudley,' as she calls her
father. Some of them doubt whether she loves him. They doubt whether
she can love anything human, except perhaps the old black woman who
has taken care of her since she was a baby. The village people have the
strangest stories about her; you know what they call her?”
She whispered three words in her father's ear. The Judge changed color
as she spoke, sighed deeply, and was silent as if lost in thought for a
moment.
“I remember her mother,” he said, “so well! A sweeter creature never
lived. Elsie has something of her in her look, but those are not her
mother's eyes. They were dark, but soft, as in all I ever saw of her
race. Her father's are dark too, but mild, and even tender, I should
say. I don't know what there is about Elsie's,--but do you know, my
dear, I find myself curiously influenced by them? I have had to face a
good many sharp eyes and hard ones,--murderers' eyes and pirates',--men
who had to be watched in the bar, where they stood on trial, for fear
they should spring on the prosecuting officers like tigers,--but I never
saw such eyes as Elsie's; and yet they have a kind of drawing virtue
or power about them,--I don't know what else to call it: have you never
observed this?”
His daughter smiled in her turn.
“Never observed it? Why, of course, nobody could be with Elsie Venner
and not observe it. There are a good many other strange things about
her: did you ever notice how she dresses?”
“Why, handsomely enough, I should think,” the Judge answered. “I suppose
she dresses as she likes, and sends to the city for what she wants. What
do you mean in particular? We men notice effects in dress, but not much
in detail.”
“You never noticed the colors and patterns of her dresses? You never
remarked anything curious about her ornaments? Well! I don't believe you
men know, half the time, whether a lady wears a nine-penny collar or a
thread-lace cape worth a thousand dollars. I don't believe you know a
silk dress from a bombazine one. I don't believe you can tell whether
a woman is in black or in colors, unless you happen to know she is a
widow. Elsie Venner has a strange taste in dress, let me tell you. She
sends for the oddest patterns of stuffs, and picks out the most curious
things at the jeweller's, whenever she goes to town with her father.
They say the old Doctor tells him to let her have her way about such
matters. Afraid of her mind, if she is contradicted, I suppose. You've
heard about her going to school at that place,--the 'Institoot,' as
those people call it? They say she's bright enough in her way,--has
studied at home, you know, with her father a good deal, knows some
modern languages and Latin, I believe: at any rate, she would have
it so,--she must go to the 'Institoot.' They have a very good female
teacher there, I hear; and the new master, that young Mr. Langdon, looks
and talks like a well-educated young man. I wonder what they 'll make of
Elsie, between them!”
So they talked at the Judge's, in the calm, judicial-looking
mansion-house, in the grave, still library, with the troops of wan-hued
law-books staring blindly out of their titles at them as they talked,
like the ghosts of dead attorneys fixed motionless and speechless, each
with a thin, golden film over his unwinking eyes.
In the mean time, everything went on quietly enough after Cousin
Richard's return. A man of sense,--that is, a man who knows perfectly
well that a cool head is worth a dozen warm hearts in carrying the
fortress of a woman's affections, (not yours, “Astarte,” nor yours,
“Viola,”)--who knows that men are rejected by women every day because
they, the men, love them, and are accepted every day because they do
not, and therefore can study the arts of pleasing,--a man of sense,
when he finds he has established his second parallel too soon, retires
quietly to his first, and begins working on his covered ways again.
The whole art of love may be read in any Encyclopaedia under the title
Fortification, where the terms just used are explained. After the little
adventure of the necklace, Dick retreated at once to his first parallel.
Elsie loved riding,--and would go off with him on a gallop now and then.
He was a master of all those strange Indian horseback-feats which shame
the tricks of the circus-riders, and used to astonish and almost amuse
her sometimes by disappearing from his saddle, like a phantom horseman
lying flat against the side of the bounding creature that bore him, as
if he were a hunting leopard with his claws in the horse's flank and
flattening himself out against his heaving ribs. Elsie knew a little
Spanish too, which she had learned from the young person who had taught
her dancing, and Dick enlarged her vocabulary with a few soft
phrases, and would sing her a song sometimes, touching the air upon an
ancient-looking guitar they had found with the ghostly things in the
garret,--a quaint old instrument, marked E. M. on the back, and supposed
to have belonged to a certain Elizabeth Mascarene, before mentioned in
connection with a work of art,--a fair, dowerless lady, who smiled and
sung and faded away, unwedded, a hundred years ago, as dowerless ladies,
not a few, are smiling and singing and fading now,--God grant each of
them His love,--and one human heart as its interpreter!
As for school, Elsie went or stayed away as she liked. Sometimes, when
they thought she was at her desk in the great schoolroom, she would
be on The Mountain,--alone always. Dick wanted to go with her, but
she would never let him. Once, when she had followed the zigzag path
a little way up, she looked back and caught a glimpse of him following
her. She turned and passed him without a word, but giving him a look
which seemed to make the scars on his wrist tingle, went to her room,
where she locked herself up, and did not come out again till evening,
Old Sophy having brought her food, and set it down, not speaking, but
looking into her eyes inquiringly, like a dumb beast trying to feel
out his master's will in his face. The evening was clear and the
moon shining. As Dick sat at his chamber-window, looking at the
mountain-side, he saw a gray-dressed figure flit between the trees
and steal along the narrow path which led upward. Elsie's pillow was
unpressed that night, but she had not been missed by the household,--for
Dick knew enough to keep his own counsel. The next morning she avoided
him and went off early to school. It was the same morning that the young
master found the flower between the leaves of his Virgil.
The girl got over her angry fit, and was pleasant enough with her cousin
for a few days after this; but she shunned rather than sought him.
She had taken a new interest in her books, and especially in certain
poetical readings which the master conducted with the elder scholars.
This gave Master Langdon a good chance to study her ways when her eye
was on her book, to notice the inflections of her voice, to watch for
any expression of her sentiments; for, to tell the truth, he had a
kind of fear that the girl had taken a fancy to him, and, though she
interested him, he did not wish to study her heart from the inside.
The more he saw her, the more the sadness of her beauty wrought upon
him. She looked as if she might hate, but could not love. She hardly
smiled at anything, spoke rarely, but seemed to feel that her natural
power of expression lay all in her bright eyes, the force of which so
many had felt, but none perhaps had tried to explain to themselves. A
person accustomed to watch the faces of those who were ailing in body or
mind, and to search in every line and tint for some underlying source
of disorder, could hardly help analyzing the impression such a face
produced upon him. The light of those beautiful eyes was like the lustre
of ice; in all her features there was nothing of that human warmth which
shows that sympathy has reached the soul beneath the mask of flesh it
wears. The look was that of remoteness, of utter isolation. There was
in its stony apathy, it seemed to him, the pathos which we find in the
blind who show no film or speck over the organs of sight; for Nature
had meant her to be lovely, and left out nothing but love. And yet the
master could not help feeling that some instinct was working in this
girl which was in some way leading her to seek his presence. She did not
lift her glittering eyes upon him as at first. It seemed strange that
she did not, for they were surely her natural weapons of conquest. Her
color did not come and go like that of young girls under excitement. She
had a clear brunette complexion, a little sun-touched, it may be,--for
the master noticed once, when her necklace was slightly displaced, that
a faint ring or band of a little lighter shade than the rest of the
surface encircled her neck. What was the slight peculiarity of her
enunciation, when she read? Not a lisp, certainly, but the least
possible imperfection in articulating some of the lingual sounds,--just
enough to be noticed at first, and quite forgotten after being a few
times heard.
Not a word about the flower on either side. It was not uncommon for
the schoolgirls to leave a rose or pink or wild flower on the teacher's
desk. Finding it in the Virgil was nothing, after all; it was a little
delicate flower, which looked as if it were made to press, and it was
probably shut in by accident at the particular place where he found it.
He took it into his head to examine it in a botanical point of view. He
found it was not common,--that it grew only in certain localities,--and
that one of these was among the rocks of the eastern spur of The
Mountain.
It happened to come into his head how the Swiss youth climb the sides
of the Alps to find the flower called the Edelweiss for the maidens
whom they wish to please. It is a pretty fancy, that of scaling some
dangerous height before the dawn, so as to gather the flower in its
freshness, that the favored maiden may wear it to church on Sunday
morning, a proof at once of her lover's devotion and his courage. Mr.
Bernard determined to explore the region where this flower was said to
grow, that he might see where the wild girl sought the blossoms of which
Nature was so jealous.
It was on a warm, fair Saturday afternoon that he undertook his
land-voyage of discovery. He had more curiosity, it may be, than he
would have owned; for he had heard of the girl's wandering habits, and
the guesses about her sylvan haunts, and was thinking what the chances
were that he should meet her in some strange place, or come upon traces
of her which would tell secrets she would not care to have known.
The woods are all alive to one who walks through them with his mind in
an excited state, and his eyes and ears wide open. The trees are always
talking, not merely whispering with their leaves, (for every tree talks
to itself in that way, even when it stands alone in the middle of
a pasture,) but grating their boughs against each other, as old
horn-handed farmers press their dry, rustling palms together, dropping
a nut or a leaf or a twig, clicking to the tap of a woodpecker, or
rustling as a squirrel flashes along a branch. It was now the season of
singing-birds, and the woods were haunted with mysterious, tender music.
The voices of the birds which love the deeper shades of the forest are
sadder than those of the open fields: these are the nuns who have taken
the veil, the hermits that have hidden themselves away from the
world and tell their griefs to the infinite listening Silences of the
wilderness,--for the one deep inner silence that Nature breaks with her
fitful superficial sounds becomes multiplied as the image of a star in
ruffled waters. Strange! The woods at first convey the impression of
profound repose, and yet, if you watch their ways with open ear, you
find the life which is in them is restless and nervous as that of a
woman: the little twigs are crossing and twining and separating like
slender fingers that cannot be still; the stray leaf is to be flattened
into its place like a truant curl; the limbs sway and twist, impatient
of their constrained attitude; and the rounded masses of foliage swell
upward and subside from time to time with long soft sighs, and, it may
be, the falling of a few rain-drops which had lain hidden among the
deeper shadows. I pray you, notice, in the sweet summer days which will
soon see you among the mountains, this inward tranquillity that belongs
to the heart of the woodland, with this nervousness, for I do not know
what else to call it, of outer movement. One would say, that Nature,
like untrained persons, could not sit still without nestling about or
doing something with her limbs or features, and that high breeding was
only to be looked for in trim gardens, where the soul of the trees
is ill at ease perhaps, but their manners are unexceptionable, and a
rustling branch or leaf falling out of season is an indecorum. The real
forest is hardly still except in the Indian summer; then there is death
in the house, and they are waiting for the sharp shrunken months to come
with white raiment for the summer's burial.
There were many hemlocks in this neighborhood, the grandest and most
solemn of all the forest-trees in the mountain regions. Up to a certain
period of growth they are eminently beautiful, their boughs disposed in
the most graceful pagoda-like series of close terraces, thick and dark
with green crystalline leaflets. In spring the tender shoots come out of
a paler green, finger-like, as if they were pointing to the violets at
their feet. But when the trees have grown old, and their rough boles
measure a yard and more through their diameter, they are no longer
beautiful, but they have a sad solemnity all their own, too full of
meaning to require the heart's comment to be framed in words. Below, all
their earthward-looking branches are sapless and shattered, splintered
by the weight of many winters' snows; above, they are still green and
full of life, but their summits overtop all the deciduous trees around
them, and in their companionship with heaven they are alone. On these
the lightning loves to fall. One such Mr. Bernard saw,--or rather, what
had been one such; for the bolt had torn the tree like an explosion
from within, and the ground was strewed all around the broken stump with
flakes of rough bark and strips and chips of shivered wood, into
which the old tree had been rent by the bursting rocket from the
thunder-cloud.
--The master had struck up The Mountain obliquely from the western side
of the Dudley mansion-house. In this way he ascended until he reached a
point many hundred feet above the level of the plain, and commanding
all the country beneath and around. Almost at his feet he saw the
mansion-house, the chimney standing out of the middle of the roof, or
rather, like a black square hole in it,--the trees almost directly over
their stems, the fences as lines, the whole nearly as an architect
would draw a ground-plan of the house and the inclosures round it. It
frightened him to see how the huge masses of rock and old forest-growths
hung over the home below. As he descended a little and drew near the
ledge of evil name, he was struck with the appearance of a long narrow
fissure that ran parallel with it and above it for many rods, not
seemingly of very old standing,--for there were many fibres of roots
which had evidently been snapped asunder when the rent took place, and
some of which were still succulent in both separated portions.
Mr. Bernard had made up his mind, when he set forth, not to come back
before he had examined the dreaded ledge. He had half persuaded himself
that it was scientific curiosity. He wished to examine the rocks, to
see what flowers grew there, and perhaps to pick up an adventure in
the zoological line; for he had on a pair of high, stout boots, and he
carried a stick in his hand, which was forked at one extremity, so as to
be very convenient to hold down a crotalus with, if he should happen to
encounter one. He knew the aspect of the ledge from a distance; for its
bald and leprous-looking declivities stood out in their nakedness from
the wooded sides of The Mountain, when this was viewed from certain
points of the village. But the nearer aspect of the blasted region had
something frightful in it. The cliffs were water-worn, as if they had
been gnawed for thousands of years by hungry waves. In some places they
overhung their base so as to look like leaning towers which might topple
over at any minute. In other parts they were scooped into niches or
caverns. Here and there they were cracked in deep fissures, some of them
of such width that one might enter them, if he cared to run the risk of
meeting the regular tenants, who might treat him as an intruder.
Parts of the ledge were cloven perpendicularly, with nothing but cracks
or slightly projecting edges in which or on which a foot could find
hold. High up on one of these precipitous walls of rock he saw some
tufts of flowers, and knew them at once for the same that he had found
between the leaves of his Virgil. Not there, surely! No woman would have
clung against that steep, rough parapet to gather an idle blossom. And
yet the master looked round everywhere, and even up the side of that
rock, to see if there were no signs of a woman's footstep. He peered
about curiously, as if his eye might fall on some of those fragments of
dress which women leave after them, whenever they run against each other
or against anything else,--in crowded ballrooms, in the brushwood after
picnics, on the fences after rambles, scattered round over every place
which has witnessed an act of violence, where rude hands have been laid
upon them. Nothing--Stop, though, one moment. That stone is smooth and
polished, as if it had been somewhat worn by the pressure of human feet.
There is one twig broken among the stems of that clump of shrubs. He put
his foot upon the stone and took hold of the close-clinging shrub. In
this way he turned a sharp angle of the rock and found himself on
a natural platform, which lay in front of one of the wider
fissures,--whether the mouth of a cavern or not he could not yet tell.
A flat stone made an easy seat, upon which he sat down, as he was
very glad to do, and looked mechanically about him. A small fragment
splintered from the rock was at his feet. He took it and threw it down
the declivity a little below where he sat. He looked about for a stem
or a straw of some kind to bite upon,--a country-instinct,--relic, no
doubt, of the old vegetable-feeding habits of Eden. Is that a stem or a
straw? He picked it up. It was a hair-pin.
To say that Mr. Langdon had a strange sort of thrill shoot through him
at the sight of this harmless little implement would be a statement not
at variance with the fact of the case. That smooth stone had been often
trodden, and by what foot he could not doubt. He rose up from his seat
to look round for other signs of a woman's visits. What if there is a
cavern here, where she has a retreat, fitted up, perhaps, as anchorites
fitted their cells,--nay, it may be, carpeted and mirrored, and with one
of those tiger-skins for a couch, such as they, say the girl loves to
lie on? Let us look, at any rate.
Mr. Bernard walked to the mouth of the cavern or fissure and looked into
it. His look was met by the glitter of two diamond eyes, small, sharp,
cold, shining out of the darkness, but gliding with a smooth, steady
motion towards the light, and himself. He stood fixed, struck dumb,
staring back into them with dilating pupils and sudden numbness of fear
that cannot move, as in the terror of dreams. The two sparks of light
came forward until they grew to circles of flame, and all at once lifted
themselves up as if in angry surprise. Then for the first time thrilled
in Mr. Bernard's ears the dreadful sound that nothing which breathes, be
it man or brute, can hear unmoved,--the long, loud, stinging whirr,
as the huge, thick bodied reptile shook his many-jointed rattle and
adjusted his loops for the fatal stroke. His eyes were drawn as with
magnets toward the circles of flame. His ears rung as in the overture
to the swooning dream of chloroform. Nature was before man with her
anaesthetics: the cat's first shake stupefies the mouse; the lion's
first shake deadens the man's fear and feeling; and the crotalus
paralyzes before he strikes. He waited as in a trance,--waited as one
that longs to have the blow fall, and all over, as the man who shall be
in two pieces in a second waits for the axe to drop. But while he looked
straight into the flaming eyes, it seemed to him that they were losing
their light and terror, that they were growing tame and dull; the charm
was dissolving, the numbness was passing away, he could move once more.
He heard a light breathing close to his ear, and, half turning, saw the
face of Elsie Venner, looking motionless into the reptile's eyes, which
had shrunk and faded under the stronger enchantment of her own.