There were not wanting people who accused Dudley VENNER of weakness and
bad judgment in his treatment of his daughter. Some were of opinion that
the great mistake was in not “breaking her will” when she was a little
child. There was nothing the matter with her, they said, but that she
had been spoiled by indulgence. If they had had the charge of her,
they'd have brought her down. She'd got the upperhand of her father now;
but if he'd only taken hold of her in season! There are people who think
that everything may be done, if the doer, be he educator or physician,
be only called “in season.” No doubt,--but in season would often be a
hundred or two years before the child was born; and people never send so
early as that.
The father of Elsie Veneer knew his duties and his difficulties too well
to trouble himself about anything others might think or say. So soon
as he found that he could not govern his child, he gave his life up to
following her and protecting her as far as he could. It was a stern and
terrible trial for a man of acute sensibility, and not without force
of intellect and will, and the manly ambition for himself and his
family-name which belonged to his endowments and his position. Passive
endurance is the hardest trial to persons of such a nature.
What made it still more a long martyrdom was the necessity for bearing
his cross in utter loneliness. He could not tell his griefs. He could
not talk of them even with those who knew their secret spring. His
minister had the unsympathetic nature which is common in the meaner sort
of devotees,--persons who mistake spiritual selfishness for sanctity,
and grab at the infinite prize of the great Future and Elsewhere with
the egotism they excommunicate in its hardly more odious forms of
avarice and self-indulgence. How could he speak with the old physician
and the old black woman about a sorrow and a terror which but to name
was to strike dumb the lips of Consolation?
In the dawn of his manhood he had found that second consciousness for
which young men and young women go about looking into each other's
faces, with their sweet, artless aim playing in every feature, and
making them beautiful to each other, as to all of us. He had found his
other self early, before he had grown weary in the search and wasted his
freshness in vain longings: the lot of many, perhaps we may say of most,
who infringe the patent of our social order by intruding themselves
into a life already upon half allowance of the necessary luxuries of
existence. The life he had led for a brief space was not only beautiful
in outward circumstance, as old Sophy had described it to the Reverend
Doctor. It was that delicious process of the tuning of two souls to each
other, string by string, not without little half-pleasing discords now
and then when some chord in one or the other proves to be overstrained
or over-lax, but always approaching nearer and nearer to harmony, until
they become at last as two instruments with a single voice. Something
more than a year of this blissful doubled consciousness had passed over
him when he found himself once more alone,--alone, save for the little
diamond-eyed child lying in the old black woman's arms, with the coral
necklace round--her throat and the rattle in her hand.
He would not die by his own act. It was not the way in his family. There
may have been other, perhaps better reasons, but this was enough; he did
not come of suicidal stock. He must live for this child's sake, at any
rate; and yet,--oh, yet, who could tell with what thoughts he looked
upon her? Sometimes her little features would look placid, and something
like a smile would steal over them; then all his tender feelings would
rush up, into his eyes, and he would put his arms out to take her from
the old woman,--but all at once her eyes would narrow and she would
throw her head back, and a shudder would seize him as he stooped over
his child,--he could not look upon her,--he could not touch his lips to
her cheek; nay, there would sometimes come into his soul such frightful
suggestions that he would hurry from the room lest the hinted thought
should become a momentary madness and he should lift his hand against
the hapless infant which owed him life.
In those miserable days he used to wander all over The Mountain in his
restless endeavor to seek some relief for inward suffering in outward
action. He had no thought of throwing himself from the summit of any of
the broken cliffs, but he clambered over them recklessly, as having no
particular care for his life. Sometimes he would go into the accursed
district where the venomous reptiles were always to be dreaded, and
court their worst haunts, and kill all he could come near with a kind of
blind fury which was strange in a person of his gentle nature.
One overhanging cliff was a favorite haunt of his. It frowned upon
his home beneath in a very menacing way; he noticed slight seams and
fissures that looked ominous;--what would happen, if it broke off some
time or other and came crashing down on the fields and roofs below? He
thought of such a possible catastrophe with a singular indifference, in
fact with a feeling almost like pleasure. It would be such a swift and
thorough solution of this great problem of life he was working out
in ever-recurring daily anguish! The remote possibility of such a
catastrophe had frightened some timid dwellers beneath The Mountain to
other places of residence; here the danger was most imminent, and yet he
loved to dwell upon the chances of its occurrence. Danger is often the
best counterirritant in cases of mental suffering; he found a solace in
careless exposure of his life, and learned to endure the trials of each
day better by dwelling in imagination on the possibility that it might
be the last for him and the home that was his.
Time, the great consoler, helped these influences, and he gradually fell
into more easy and less dangerous habits of life. He ceased from his
more perilous rambles. He thought less of the danger from the great
overhanging rocks and forests; they had hung there for centuries; it
was not very likely they would crash or slide in his time. He became
accustomed to all Elsie's strange looks and ways. Old Sophy dressed her
with ruffles round her neck, and hunted up the red coral branch with
silver bells which the little toothless Dudleys had bitten upon for
a hundred years. By an infinite effort, her father forced himself to
become the companion of this child, for whom he had such a mingled
feeling, but whose presence was always a trial to him, and often a
terror.
At a cost which no human being could estimate, he had done his duty, and
in some degree reaped his reward. Elsie grew up with a kind of filial
feeling for him, such as her nature was capable of. She never would obey
him; that was not to be looked for. Commands, threats, punishments, were
out of the question with her; the mere physical effects of crossing her
will betrayed themselves in such changes of expression and manner that
it would have been senseless to attempt to govern her in any such way.
Leaving her mainly to herself, she could be to some extent indirectly
influenced,--not otherwise. She called her father “Dudley,” as if he had
been her brother. She ordered everybody and would be ordered by none.
Who could know all these things, except the few people of the household?
What wonder, therefore, that ignorant and shallow persons laid the blame
on her father of those peculiarities which were freely talked about,--of
those darker tendencies which were hinted of in whispers? To all this
talk, so far as it reached him, he was supremely indifferent, not only
with the indifference which all gentlemen feel to the gossip of their
inferiors, but with a charitable calmness which did not wonder or blame.
He knew that his position was not simply a difficult, but an impossible
one, and schooled himself to bear his destiny as well as he might, and
report himself only at Headquarters.
He had grown gentle under this discipline. His hair was just beginning
to be touched with silver, and his expression was that of habitual
sadness and anxiety. He had no counsellor, as we have seen, to turn to,
who did not know either too much or too little. He had no heart to rest
upon and into which he might unburden himself of the secrets and the
sorrows that were aching in his own breast. Yet he had not allowed
himself to run to waste in the long time since he was left alone to
his trials and fears. He had resisted the seductions which always beset
solitary men with restless brains overwrought by depressing agencies.
He disguised no misery to himself with the lying delusion of wine. He
sought no sleep from narcotics, though he lay with throbbing, wide-open
eyes through all the weary hours of the night.
It was understood between Dudley Veneer and old Doctor Kittredge that
Elsie was a subject of occasional medical observation, on account of
certain mental peculiarities which might end in a permanent affection of
her reason. Beyond this nothing was said, whatever may have been in the
mind of either. But Dudley Veneer had studied Elsie's case in the
light of all the books he could find which might do anything towards
explaining it. As in all cases where men meddle with medical science
for a special purpose, having no previous acquaintance with it, his
imagination found what it wanted in the books he read, and adjusted it
to the facts before him. So it was he came to cherish those two fancies
before alluded to that the ominous birthmark she had carried from
infancy might fade and become obliterated, and that the age of complete
maturity might be signalized by an entire change in her physical and
mental state. He held these vague hopes as all of us nurse our only
half-believed illusions. Not for the world would he have questioned his
sagacious old medical friend as to the probability or possibility of
their being true. We are very shy of asking questions of those who know
enough to destroy with one word the hopes we live on.
In this life of comparative seclusion to which the father had doomed
himself for the sake of his child, he had found time for large and
varied reading. The learned Judge Thornton confessed himself surprised
at the extent of Dudley Veneer's information. Doctor Kittredge found
that he was in advance of him in the knowledge of recent physiological
discoveries. He had taken pains to become acquainted with agricultural
chemistry; and the neighboring farmers owed him some useful hints about
the management of their land. He renewed his old acquaintance with the
classic authors. He loved to warm his pulses with Homer and calm them
down with Horace. He received all manner of new books and periodicals,
and gradually gained an interest in the events of the passing time.
Yet he remained almost a hermit, not absolutely refusing to see his
neighbors, nor even churlish towards them, but on the other hand not
cultivating any intimate relations with them.
He had retired from the world a young man, little more than a
youth, indeed, with sentiments and aspirations all of them suddenly
extinguished. The first had bequeathed him a single huge sorrow, the
second a single trying duty. In due time the anguish had lost something
of its poignancy, the light of earlier and happier memories had begun to
struggle with and to soften its thick darkness, and even that duty which
he had confronted with such an effort had become an endurable habit.
At a period of life when many have been living on the capital of their
acquired knowledge and their youthful stock of sensibilities until their
intellects are really shallower and their hearts emptier than they were
at twenty, Dudley Veneer was stronger in thought and tenderer in soul
than in the first freshness of his youth, when he counted but half his
present years. He had entered that period which marks the decline of men
who have ceased growing in knowledge and strength: from forty to fifty
a man must move upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of life
will carry him rapidly downward. At this time his inward: nature was
richer and deeper than in any earlier period of his life. If he could
only be summoned to action, he was capable of noble service. If his
sympathies could only find an outlet, he was never so capable of love as
now; for his natural affections had been gathering in the course of all
these years, and the traces of that ineffaceable calamity of his
life were softened and partially hidden by new growths of thought and
feeling, as the wreck left by a mountainslide is covered over by the
gentle intrusion of the soft-stemmed herbs which will prepare it for the
stronger vegetation that will bring it once more into harmony with the
peaceful slopes around it.
Perhaps Dudley Veneer had not gained so much in worldly wisdom as if
he had been more in society and less in his study. The indulgence with
which he treated his nephew was, no doubt, imprudent. A man more in the
habit of dealing with men would have been more guarded with a person
with Dick's questionable story and unquestionable physiognomy. But he
was singularly unsuspicious, and his natural kindness was an additional
motive to the wish for introducing some variety into the routine of
Elsie's life.
If Dudley Veneer did not know just what he wanted at this period of his
life, there were a great many people in the town of Rockland who thought
they did know. He had been a widower long enough, “--nigh twenty year,
wa'n't it? He'd been aout to Spraowles's party,--there wa'n't anything
to hender him why he shouldn't stir raound l'k other folks. What was the
reason he did n't go abaout to taown-meetin's 'n' Sahbath-meetin's,
'n' lyceums, 'n' school 'xaminations, 'n' s'prise-parties, 'n'
funerals,--and other entertainments where the still-faced two-story
folks were in the habit of looking round to see if any of the
mansion-house gentry were present?--Fac' was, he was livin' too lonesome
daown there at the mansion-haouse. Why shouldn't he make up to the
Jedge's daughter? She was genteel enough for him, and--let's see, haow
old was she? Seven-'n'itwenty,--no, six-'n'-twenty,--born the same year
we buried our little Anny Marl”.
There was no possible objection to this arrangement, if the parties
interested had seen fit to make it or even to think of it. But “Portia,”
as some of the mansion-house people called her, did not happen to awaken
the elective affinities of the lonely widower. He met her once in a
while, and said to himself that she was a good specimen of the grand
style of woman; and then the image came back to him of a woman not quite
so large, not quite so imperial in her port, not quite so incisive in
her speech, not quite so judicial in her opinions, but with two or
three more joints in her frame, and two or three soft inflections in her
voice, which for some absurd reason or other drew him to her side and so
bewitched him that he told her half his secrets and looked into her eyes
all that he could not tell, in less time than it would have takes him
to discuss the champion paper of the last Quarterly with the admirable
“Portia.” Heu, quanto minus! How much more was that lost image to him
than all it left on earth!
The study of love is very much like that of meteorology. We know that
just about so much rain will fall in a season; but on what particular
day it will shower is more than we can tell. We know that just about so
much love will be made every year in a given population; but who will
rain his young affections upon the heart of whom is not known except to
the astrologers and fortune-tellers. And why rain falls as it does and
why love is made just as it is are equally puzzling questions.
The woman a man loves is always his own daughter, far more his daughter
than the female children born to him by the common law of life. It is
not the outside woman, who takes his name, that he loves: before her
image has reached the centre of his consciousness, it has passed through
fifty many-layered nerve-strainers, been churned over by ten thousand
pulse-beats, and reacted upon by millions of lateral impulses which
bandy it about through the mental spaces as a reflection is sent back
and forward in a saloon lined with mirrors. With this altered image of
the woman before him, his preexisting ideal becomes blended. The object
of his love is in part the offspring of her legal parents, but more of
her lover's brain. The difference between the real and the ideal objects
of love must not exceed a fixed maximum. The heart's vision cannot unite
them stereoscopically into a single image, if the divergence passes
certain limits. A formidable analogy, much in the nature of a proof,
with very serious consequences, which moralists and match-makers would
do well to remember! Double vision with the eyes of the heart is a
dangerous physiological state, and may lead to missteps and serious
falls.
Whether Dudley Veneer would ever find a breathing image near enough to
his ideal one, to fill the desolate chamber of his heart, or not, was
very doubtful. Some gracious and gentle woman, whose influence would
steal upon him as the first low words of prayer after that interval of
silent mental supplication known to one of our simpler forms of public
worship, gliding into his consciousness without hurting its old griefs,
herself knowing the chastening of sorrow, and subdued into sweet
acquiescence with the Divine will,--some such woman as this, if Heaven
should send him such, might call him back to the world of happiness,
from which he seemed forever exiled. He could never again be the young
lover who walked through the garden-alleys all red with roses in the old
dead and buried June of long ago. He could never forget the bride of his
youth, whose image, growing phantomlike with the lapse of years, hovered
over him like a dream while waking and like a reality in dreams. But if
it might be in God's good providence that this desolate life should come
under the influence of human affections once more, what an ecstasy of
renewed existence was in store for him! His life had not all been buried
under that narrow ridge of turf with the white stone at its head. It
seemed so for a while; but it was not and could not and ought not to be
so. His first passion had been a true and pure one; there was no spot or
stain upon it. With all his grief there blended no cruel recollection
of any word or look he would have wished to forget. All those little
differences, such as young married people with any individual flavor in
their characters must have, if they are tolerably mated, had only added
to the music of existence, as the lesser discords admitted into some
perfect symphony, fitly resolved, add richness and strength to the whole
harmonious movement. It was a deep wound that Fate had inflicted on him;
nay, it seemed like a mortal one; but the weapon was clean, and its edge
was smooth. Such wounds must heal with time in healthy natures, whatever
a false sentiment may say, by the wise and beneficent law of our
being. The recollection of a deep and true affection is rather a divine
nourishment for a life to grow strong upon than a poison to destroy it.
Dudley Venner's habitual sadness could not be laid wholly to his early
bereavement. It was partly the result of the long struggle between
natural affection and duty, on one side, and the involuntary tendencies
these had to overcome, on the other,--between hope and fear, so long
in conflict that despair itself would have been like an anodyne, and he
would have slept upon some final catastrophe with the heavy sleep of a
bankrupt after his failure is proclaimed. Alas! some new affection might
perhaps rekindle the fires of youth in his heart; but what power could
calm that haggard terror of the parent which rose with every morning's
sun and watched with every evening star,--what power save alone that of
him who comes bearing the inverted torch, and leaving after him only the
ashes printed with his footsteps?