MALBONE stood one morning on the pier behind the house. A two days’
fog was dispersing. The southwest breeze rippled the deep blue water;
sailboats, blue, red, and green, were darting about like white-winged
butterflies; sloops passed and repassed, cutting the air with the white
and slender points of their gaff-topsails. The liberated sunbeams spread
and penetrated everywhere, and even came up to play (reflected from
the water) beneath the shadowy, overhanging counters of dark vessels.
Beyond, the atmosphere was still busy in rolling away its vapors,
brushing the last gray fringes from the low hills, and leaving over them
only the thinnest aerial veil. Farther down the bay, the pale tower
of the crumbling fort was now shrouded, now revealed, then hung with
floating lines of vapor as with banners.
Hope came down on the pier to Malbone, who was looking at the boats.
He saw with surprise that her calm brow was a little clouded, her lips
compressed, and her eyes full of tears.
“Philip,” she said, abruptly, “do you love me?”
“Do you doubt it?” said he, smiling, a little uneasily.
Fixing her eyes upon him, she said, more seriously: “There is a more
important question, Philip. Tell me truly, do you care about Emilia?”
He started at the words, and looked eagerly in her face for an
explanation. Her expression only showed the most anxious solicitude.
For one moment the wild impulse came up in his mind to put an entire
trust in this truthful woman, and tell her all. Then the habit of
concealment came back to him, the dull hopelessness of a divided duty,
and the impossibility of explanations. How could he justify himself to
her when he did not really know himself? So he merely said, “Yes.”
“She is your sister,” he added, in an explanatory tone, after a pause;
and despised himself for the subterfuge. It is amazing how long a man
may be false in action before he ceases to shrink from being false in
words.
“Philip,” said the unsuspecting Hope, “I knew that you cared about her.
I have seen you look at her with so much affection; and then again I
have seen you look cold and almost stern. She notices it, I am sure she
does, this changeableness. But this is not why I ask the question. I
think you must have seen something else that I have been observing, and
if you care about her, even for my sake, it is enough.”
Here Philip started, and felt relieved.
“You must be her friend,” continued Hope, eagerly. “She has changed her
whole manner and habits very fast. Blanche Ingleside and that set seem
to have wholly controlled her, and there is something reckless in all
her ways. You are the only person who can help her.”
“How?”
“I do not know how,” said Hope, almost impatiently. “You know how. You
have wonderful influence. You saved her before, and will do it again. I
put her in your hands.”
“What can I do for her?” asked he, with a strange mingling of terror and
delight.
“Everything,” said she. “If she has your society, she will not care for
those people, so much her inferiors in character. Devote yourself to her
for a time.”
“And leave you?” said Philip, hesitatingly.
“Anything, anything,” said she. “If I do not see you for a month, I can
bear it. Only promise me two things. First, that you will go to her this
very day. She dines with Mrs. Ingleside.”
Philip agreed.
“Then,” said Hope, with saddened tones, “you must not say it was I who
sent you. Indeed you must not. That would spoil all. Let her think
that your own impulse leads you, and then she will yield. I know Emilia
enough for that.”
Malbone paused, half in ecstasy, half in dismay. Were all the events
of life combining to ruin or to save him? This young girl, whom he so
passionately loved, was she to be thrust back into his arms, and was he
to be told to clasp her and be silent? And that by Hope, and in the name
of duty?
It seemed a strange position, even for him who was so eager for fresh
experiences and difficult combinations. At Hope’s appeal he was to risk
Hope’s peace forever; he was to make her sweet sisterly affection its
own executioner. In obedience to her love he must revive Emilia’s. The
tender intercourse which he had been trying to renounce as a crime
must be rebaptized as a duty. Was ever a man placed, he thought, in a
position so inextricable, so disastrous? What could he offer Emilia? How
could he explain to her his position? He could not even tell her that it
was at Hope’s command he sought her.
He who is summoned to rescue a drowning man, knowing that he himself may
go down with that inevitable clutch around his neck, is placed in some
such situation as Philip’s. Yet Hope had appealed to him so simply, had
trusted him so nobly! Suppose that, by any self-control, or wisdom, or
unexpected aid of Heaven, he could serve both her and Emilia, was it not
his duty? What if it should prove that he was right in loving them
both, and had only erred when he cursed himself for tampering with their
destinies? Perhaps, after all, the Divine Love had been guiding him, and
at some appointed signal all these complications were to be cleared, and
he and his various loves were somehow to be ingeniously provided for,
and all be made happy ever after.
He really grew quite tender and devout over these meditations. Phil was
not a conceited fellow, by any means, but he had been so often told by
women that their love for him had been a blessing to their souls, that
he quite acquiesced in being a providential agent in that particular
direction. Considered as a form of self-sacrifice, it was not without
its pleasures.
Malbone drove that afternoon to Mrs. Ingleside’s charming abode, whither
a few ladies were wont to resort, and a great many gentlemen. He timed
his call between the hours of dining and driving, and made sure that
Emilia had not yet emerged. Two or three equipages beside his own were
in waiting at the gate, and gay voices resounded from the house. A
servant received him at the door, and taking him for a tardy guest,
ushered him at once into the dining-room. He was indifferent to this,
for he had been too often sought as a guest by Mrs. Ingleside to stand
on any ceremony beneath her roof.
That fair hostess, in all the beauty of her shoulders, rose to greet
him, from a table where six or eight guests yet lingered over flowers
and wine. The gentlemen were smoking, and some of the ladies were trying
to look at ease with cigarettes. Malbone knew the whole company,
and greeted them with his accustomed ease. He would not have been
embarrassed if they had been the Forty Thieves. Some of them, indeed,
were not so far removed from that fabled band, only it was their
fortunes, instead of themselves, that lay in the jars of oil.
“You find us all here,” said Mrs. Ingleside, sweetly. “We will wait till
the gentlemen finish their cigars, before driving.”
“Count me in, please,” said Blanche, in her usual vein of frankness.
“Unless mamma wishes me to conclude my weed on the Avenue. It would be
fun, though. Fancy the dismay of the Frenchmen and the dowagers!”
“And old Lambert,” said one of the other girls, delightedly.
“Yes,” said Blanche. “The elderly party from the rural districts, who
talks to us about the domestic virtues of the wife of his youth.”
“Thinks women should cruise with a broom at their mast-heads, like
Admiral somebody in England,” said another damsel, who was rolling a
cigarette for a midshipman.
“You see we do not follow the English style,” said the smooth hostess
to Philip. “Ladies retiring after dinner! After all, it is a coarse
practice. You agree with me, Mr. Malbone?”
“Speak your mind,” said Blanche, coolly. “Don’t say yes if you’d rather
not. Because we find a thing a bore, you’ve no call to say so.”
“I always say,” continued the matron, “that the presence of woman is
needed as a refining influence.”
Malbone looked round for the refining influences. Blanche was tilted
back in her chair, with one foot on the rung of the chair before her,
resuming a loud-toned discourse with Count Posen as to his projected
work on American society. She was trying to extort a promise that she
should appear in its pages, which, as we all remember, she did. One
of her attendant nymphs sat leaning her elbows on the table, “talking
horse” with a gentleman who had an undoubted professional claim to a
knowledge of that commodity. Another, having finished her manufactured
cigarette, was making the grinning midshipman open his lips wider and
wider to receive it. Mrs. Ingleside was talking in her mincing way with
a Jew broker, whose English was as imperfect as his morals, and who
needed nothing to make him a millionnaire but a turn of bad luck for
somebody else. Half the men in the room would have felt quite ill at
ease in any circle of refined women, but there was not one who did not
feel perfectly unembarrassed around Mrs. Ingleside’s board.
“Upon my word,” thought Malbone, “I never fancied the English
after-dinner practice, any more than did Napoleon. But if this goes on,
it is the gentlemen who ought to withdraw. Cannot somebody lead the way
to the drawing-room, and leave the ladies to finish their cigars?”
Till now he had hardly dared to look at Emilia. He saw with a thrill of
love that she was the one person in the room who appeared out of place
or ill at ease. She did not glance at him, but held her cigarette in
silence and refused to light it. She had boasted to him once of having
learned to smoke at school.
“What’s the matter, Emmy?” suddenly exclaimed Blanche. “Are you under a
cloud, that you don’t blow one?”
“Blanche, Blanche,” said her mother, in sweet reproof. “Mr. Malbone,
what shall I do with this wild girl? Such a light way of talking! But
I can assure you that she is really very fond of the society of
intellectual, superior men. I often tell her that they are, after all,
her most congenial associates. More so than the young and giddy.”
“You’d better believe it,” said the unabashed damsel. “Take notice that
whenever I go to a dinner-party I look round for a clergyman to drink
wine with.”
“Incorrigible!” said the caressing mother. “Mr. Malbone would hardly
imagine you had been bred in a Christian land.”
“I have, though,” retorted Blanche. “My esteemed parent always
accustomed me to give up something during Lent,--champagne, or the New
York Herald, or something.”
The young men roared, and, had time and cosmetics made it possible, Mrs.
Ingleside would have blushed becomingly. After all, the daughter was
the better of the two. Her bluntness was refreshing beside the mother’s
suavity; she had a certain generosity, too, and in a case of real
destitution would have lent her best ear-rings to a friend.
By this time Malbone had edged himself to Emilia’s side. “Will you drive
with me?” he murmured in an undertone.
She nodded slightly, abruptly, and he withdrew again.
“It seems barbarous,” said he aloud, “to break up the party. But I must
claim my promised drive with Miss Emilia.”
Blanche looked up, for once amazed, having heard a different programme
arranged. Count Posen looked up also. But he thought he must have
misunderstood Emilia’s acceptance of his previous offer to drive her;
and as he prided himself even more on his English than on his gallantry,
he said no more. It was no great matter. Young Jones’s dog-cart was at
the door, and always opened eagerly its arms to anybody with a title.