“HOPE!” said Philip Malbone, as they sailed together in a little boat
the next morning, “I have come back to you from months of bewildered
dreaming. I have been wandering,--no matter where. I need you. You
cannot tell how much I need you.”
“I can estimate it,” she answered, gently, “by my need of you.”
“Not at all,” said Philip, gazing in her trustful face. “Any one whom
you loved would adore you, could he be by your side. You need nothing.
It is I who need you.”
“Why?” she asked, simply.
“Because,” he said, “I am capable of behaving very much like a fool.
Hope, I am not worthy of you; why do you love me? why do you trust me?”
“I do not know how I learned to love you,” said Hope. “It is a blessing
that was given to me. But I learned to trust you in your mother’s
sick-room.”
“Ay,” said Philip, sadly, “there, at least, I did my full duty.”
“As few would have done it,” said Hope, firmly,--“very few. Such
prolonged self-sacrifice must strengthen a man for life.”
“Not always,” said Philip, uneasily. “Too much of that sort of thing may
hurt one, I fancy, as well as too little. He may come to imagine that
the balance of virtue is in his favor, and that he may grant himself
a little indulgence to make up for lost time. That sort of recoil is a
little dangerous, as I sometimes feel, do you know?”
“And you show it,” said Hope, ardently, “by fresh sacrifices! How much
trouble you have taken about Emilia! Some time, when you are willing,
you shall tell me all about it. You always seemed to me a magician, but
I did not think that even you could restore her to sense and wisdom so
soon.”
Malbone was just then very busy putting the boat about; but when he had
it on the other tack, he said, “How do you like her?”
“Philip,” said Hope, her eyes filling with tears, “I wonder if you have
the slightest conception how my heart is fixed on that child. She has
always been a sort of dream to me, and the difficulty of getting any
letters from her has only added to the excitement. Now that she is here,
my whole heart yearns toward her. Yet, when I look into her eyes, a sort
of blank hopelessness comes over me. They seem like the eyes of some
untamable creature whose language I shall never learn. Philip, you are
older and wiser than I, and have shown already that you understand her.
Tell me what I can do to make her love me?”
“Tell me how any one could help it?” said Malbone, looking fondly on the
sweet, pleading face before him.
“I am beginning to fear that it can be helped,” she said. Her thoughts
were still with Emilia.
“Perhaps it can,” said Phil, “if you sit so far away from people. Here
we are alone on the bay. Come and sit by me, Hope.”
She had been sitting amidships, but she came aft at once, and nestled
by him as he sat holding the tiller. She put her face against his knee,
like a tired child, and shut her eyes; her hair was lifted by the summer
breeze; a scent of roses came from her; the mere contact of anything
so fresh and pure was a delight. He put his arm around her, and all the
first ardor of passion came back to him again; he remembered how he had
longed to win this Diana, and how thoroughly she was won.
“It is you who do me good,” said she. “O Philip, sail as slowly as you
can.” But he only sailed farther, instead of more slowly, gliding in
and out among the rocky islands in the light north wind, which, for a
wonder, lasted all that day,--dappling the bare hills of the Isle
of Shadows with a shifting beauty. The tide was in and brimming, the
fishing-boats were busy, white gulls soared and clattered round them,
and heavy cormorants flapped away as they neared the rocks. Beneath the
boat the soft multitudinous jellyfishes waved their fringed pendants, or
glittered with tremulous gold along their pink, translucent sides.
Long lines and streaks of paler blue lay smoothly along the enamelled
surface, the low, amethystine hills lay couched beyond them, and little
clouds stretched themselves in lazy length above the beautiful expanse.
They reached the ruined fort at last, and Philip, surrendering Hope to
others, was himself besieged by a joyous group.
As you stand upon the crumbling parapet of old Fort Louis, you feel
yourself poised in middle air; the sea-birds soar and swoop around you,
the white surf lashes the rocks far below, the white vessels come and
go, the water is around you on all sides but one, and spreads its pale
blue beauty up the lovely bay, or, in deeper tints, southward towards
the horizon line. I know of no ruin in America which nature has so
resumed; it seems a part of the living rock; you cannot imagine it away.
It is a single round, low tower, shaped like the tomb of Cacilia
Metella. But its stately position makes it rank with the vast sisterhood
of wave-washed strongholds; it might be King Arthur’s Cornish Tyntagel;
it might be “the teocallis tower” of Tuloom. As you gaze down from its
height, all things that float upon the ocean seem equalized. Look at the
crowded life on yonder frigate, coming in full-sailed before the steady
sea-breeze. To furl that heavy canvas, a hundred men cluster like bees
upon the yards, yet to us upon this height it is all but a plaything for
the eyes, and we turn with equal interest from that thronged floating
citadel to some lonely boy in his skiff.
Yonder there sail to the ocean, beating wearily to windward, a few slow
vessels. Inward come jubilant white schooners, wing-and-wing. There are
fishing-smacks towing their boats behind them like a family of children;
and there are slender yachts that bear only their own light burden. Once
from this height I saw the whole yacht squadron round Point Judith, and
glide in like a flock of land-bound sea-birds; and above them, yet more
snowy and with softer curves, pressed onward the white squadrons of the
sky.
Within, the tower is full of debris, now disintegrated into one solid
mass, and covered with vegetation. You can lie on the blossoming clover,
where the bees hum and the crickets chirp around you, and can look
through the arch which frames its own fair picture. In the foreground
lies the steep slope overgrown with bayberry and gay with thistle
blooms; then the little winding cove with its bordering cliffs; and
the rough pastures with their grazing sheep beyond. Or, ascending the
parapet, you can look across the bay to the men making hay picturesquely
on far-off lawns, or to the cannon on the outer works of Fort Adams,
looking like vast black insects that have crawled forth to die.
Here our young people spent the day; some sketched, some played croquet,
some bathed in rocky inlets where the kingfisher screamed above them,
some rowed to little craggy isles for wild roses, some fished, and then
were taught by the boatmen to cook their fish in novel island ways. The
morning grew more and more cloudless, and then in the afternoon a fog
came and went again, marching by with its white armies, soon met and
annihilated by a rainbow.
The conversation that day was very gay and incoherent,--little fragments
of all manner of things; science, sentiment, everything: “Like a
distracted dictionary,” Kate said. At last this lively maiden got Philip
away from the rest, and began to cross-question him.
“Tell me,” she said, “about Emilia’s Swiss lover. She shuddered when she
spoke of him. Was he so very bad?”
“Not at all,” was the answer. “You had false impressions of him. He was
a handsome, manly fellow, a little over-sentimental. He had travelled,
and had been a merchant’s clerk in Paris and London. Then he came back,
and became a boatman on the lake, some said, for love of her.”
“Did she love him?”
“Passionately, as she thought.”
“Did he love her much?”
“I suppose so.”
“Then why did she stop loving him?”
“She does not hate him?”
“No,” said Kate, “that is what surprises me. Lovers hate, or those who
have been lovers. She is only indifferent. Philip, she had wound silk
upon a torn piece of his carte-de-visite, and did not know it till I
showed it to her. Even then she did not care.”
“Such is woman!” said Philip.
“Nonsense,” said Kate. “She had seen somebody whom she loved better, and
she still loves that somebody. Who was it? She had not been introduced
into society. Were there any superior men among her teachers? She is
just the girl to fall in love with her teacher, at least in Europe,
where they are the only men one sees.”
“There were some very superior men among them,” said Philip. “Professor
Schirmer has a European reputation; he wears blue spectacles and a
maroon wig.”
“Do not talk so,” said Kate. “I tell you, Emilia is not changeable, like
you, sir. She is passionate and constant. She would have married that
man or died for him. You may think that your sage counsels restrained
her, but they did not; it was that she loved some one else. Tell me
honestly. Do you not know that there is somebody in Europe whom she
loves to distraction?”
“I do not know it,” said Philip.
“Of course you do not KNOW it,” returned the questioner. “Do you not
think it?”
“I have no reason to believe it.”
“That has nothing to do with it,” said Kate. “Things that we believe
without any reason have a great deal more weight with us. Do you not
believe it?”
“No,” said Philip, point-blank.
“It is very strange,” mused Kate. “Of course you do not know much about
it. She may have misled you, but I am sure that neither you nor any one
else could have cured her of a passion, especially an unreasonable one,
without putting another in its place. If you did it without that, you
are a magician, as Hope once called you. Philip, I am afraid of you.”
“There we sympathize,” said Phil. “I am sometimes afraid of myself, but
I discover within half an hour what a very commonplace land harmless
person I am.”
Meantime Emilia found herself beside her sister, who was sketching.
After watching Hope for a time in silence, she began to question her.
“Tell me what you have been doing in all these years,” she said.
“O, I have been at school,” said Hope. “First I went through the High
School; then I stayed out of school a year, and studied Greek and German
with my uncle, and music with my aunt, who plays uncommonly well. Then
I persuaded them to let me go to the Normal School for two years, and
learn to be a teacher.”
“A teacher!” said Emilia, with surprise. “Is it necessary that you
should be a teacher?”
“Very necessary,” replied Hope. “I must have something to do, you know,
after I leave school.”
“To do?” said the other. “Cannot you go to parties?”
“Not all the time,” said her sister.
“Well,” said Emilia, “in the mean time you can go to drive, or make
calls, or stay at home and make pretty little things to wear, as other
girls do.”
“I can find time for that too, little sister, when I need them. But I
love children, you know, and I like to teach interesting studies. I have
splendid health, and I enjoy it all. I like it as you love dancing,
my child, only I like dancing too, so I have a greater variety of
enjoyments.”
“But shall you not sometimes find it very hard?” said Emilia.
“That is why I shall like it,” was the answer.
“What a girl you are!” exclaimed the younger sister. “You know
everything and can do everything.”
“A very short everything,” interposed Hope.
“Kate says,” continued Emilia, “that you speak French as well as I do,
and I dare say you dance a great deal better; and those are the only
things I know.”
“If we both had French partners, dear,” replied the elder maiden, “they
would soon find the difference in both respects. My dancing came by
nature, I believe, and I learned French as a child, by talking with my
old uncle, who was half a Parisian. I believe I have a good accent,
but I have so little practice that I have no command of the language
compared to yours. In a week or two we can both try our skill, as there
is to be a ball for the officers of the French corvette yonder,”
and Hope pointed to the heavy spars, the dark canvas, and the high
quarter-deck which made the “Jean Hoche” seem as if she had floated out
of the days of Nelson.
The calm day waned, the sun drooped to his setting amid a few golden
bars and pencilled lines of light. Ere they were ready for departure,
the tide had ebbed, and, in getting the boats to a practicable
landing-place, Malbone was delayed behind the others. As he at length
brought his boat to the rock, Hope sat upon the ruined fort, far above
him, and sang. Her noble contralto voice echoed among the cliffs down
to the smooth water; the sun went down behind her, and still she sat
stately and noble, her white dress looking more and more spirit-like
against the golden sky; and still the song rang on,--
“Never a scornful word should grieve thee, I’d smile on thee, sweet, as
the angels do; Sweet as thy smile on me shone ever, Douglas, Douglas,
tender and true.”
All sacredness and sweetness, all that was pure and brave and truthful,
seemed to rest in her. And when the song ceased at his summons, and she
came down to meet him,--glowing, beautiful, appealing, tender,--then all
meaner spells vanished, if such had ever haunted him, and he was hers
alone.
Later that evening, after the household had separated, Hope went into
the empty drawing-room for a light. Philip, after a moment’s hesitation,
followed her, and paused in the doorway. She stood, a white-robed
figure, holding the lighted candle; behind her rose the arched alcove,
whose quaint cherubs looked down on her; she seemed to have stepped
forth, the awakened image of a saint. Looking up, she saw his eager
glance; then she colored, trembled, and put the candle down. He came to
her, took her hand and kissed it, then put his hand upon her brow and
gazed into her face, then kissed her lips. She quietly yielded, but her
color came and went, and her lips moved as if to speak. For a moment he
saw her only, thought only of her.
Then, even while he gazed into her eyes, a flood of other memories
surged over him, and his own eyes grew dim. His head swam, the lips he
had just kissed appeared to fade away, and something of darker, richer
beauty seemed to burn through those fair features; he looked through
those gentle eyes into orbs more radiant, and it was as if a countenance
of eager passion obliterated that fair head, and spoke with substituted
lips, “Behold your love.” There was a thrill of infinite ecstasy in the
work his imagination did; he gave it rein, then suddenly drew it in and
looked at Hope. Her touch brought pain for an instant, as she laid her
hand upon him, but he bore it. Then some influence of calmness came;
there swept by him a flood of earlier, serener memories; he sat down in
the window-seat beside her, and when she put her face beside his, and
her soft hair touched his cheek, and he inhaled the rose-odor that
always clung round her, every atom of his manhood stood up to drive away
the intruding presence, and he again belonged to her alone.
When he went to his chamber that night, he drew from his pocket a little
note in a girlish hand, which he lighted in the candle, and put upon the
open hearth to burn. With what a cruel, tinkling rustle the pages flamed
and twisted and opened, as if the fire read them, and collapsed again as
if in agonizing effort to hold their secret even in death! The closely
folded paper refused to burn, it went out again and again; while each
time Philip Malbone examined it ere relighting, with a sort of
vague curiosity, to see how much passion had already vanished out of
existence, and how much yet survived. For each of these inspections he
had to brush aside the calcined portion of the letter, once so warm
and beautiful with love, but changed to something that seemed to him a
semblance of his own heart just then,--black, trivial, and empty.
Then he took from a little folded paper a long tress of dark silken
hair, and, without trusting himself to kiss it, held it firmly in the
candle. It crisped and sparkled, and sent out a pungent odor, then
turned and writhed between his fingers, like a living thing in pain.
What part of us has earthly immortality but our hair? It dies not with
death. When all else of human beauty has decayed beyond corruption into
the more agonizing irrecoverableness of dust, the hair is still fresh
and beautiful, defying annihilation, and restoring to the powerless
heart the full association of the living image. These shrinking hairs,
they feared not death, but they seemed to fear Malbone. Nothing but the
hand of man could destroy what he was destroying; but his hand shrank
not, and it was done.