SO short was the period between Emilia’s betrothal and her marriage,
that Aunt Jane’s sufferings over trousseau and visits did not last long.
Mr. Lambert’s society was the worst thing to bear.
“He makes such long calls!” she said, despairingly. “He should bring an
almanac with him to know when the days go by.”
“But Harry and Philip are here all the time,” said Kate, the accustomed
soother.
“Harry is quiet, and Philip keeps out of the way lately,” she answered.
“But I always thought lovers the most inconvenient thing about a house.
They are more troublesome than the mice, and all those people who live
in the wainscot; for though the lovers make less noise, yet you have to
see them.”
“A necessary evil, dear,” said Kate, with much philosophy.
“I am not sure,” said the complainant. “They might be excluded in the
deed of a house, or by the terms of the lease. The next house I take, I
shall say to the owner, ‘Have you a good well of water on the premises?
Are you troubled with rats or lovers?’ That will settle it.”
It was true, what Aunt Jane said about Malbone. He had changed his
habits a good deal. While the girls were desperately busy about the
dresses, he beguiled Harry to the club, and sat on the piazza, talking
sentiment and sarcasm, regardless of hearers.
“When we are young,” he would say, “we are all idealists in love. Every
imaginative boy has such a passion, while his intellect is crude and his
senses indifferent. It is the height of bliss. All other pleasures are
not worth its pains. With older men this ecstasy of the imagination is
rare; it is the senses that clutch or reason which holds.”
“Is that an improvement?” asked some juvenile listener.
“No!” said Philip, strongly. “Reason is cold and sensuality hateful; a
man of any feeling must feed his imagination; there must be a woman of
whom he can dream.”
“That is,” put in some more critical auditor, “whom he can love as a
woman loves a man.”
“For want of the experience of such a passion,” Malbone went on,
unheeding, “nobody comprehends Petrarch. Philosophers and sensualists
all refuse to believe that his dream of Laura went on, even when he had
a mistress and a child. Why not? Every one must have something to which
his dreams can cling, amid the degradations of actual life, and this tie
is more real than the degradation; and if he holds to the tie, it will
one day save him.”
“What is the need of the degradation?” put in the clear-headed Harry.
“None, except in weakness,” said Philip. “A stronger nature may escape
it. Good God! do I not know how Petrarch must have felt? What sorrow
life brings! Suppose a man hopelessly separated from one whom he
passionately loves. Then, as he looks up at the starry sky, something
says to him: ‘You can bear all these agonies of privation, loss of
life, loss of love,--what are they? If the tie between you is what you
thought, neither life nor death, neither folly nor sin, can keep her
forever from you.’ Would that one could always feel so! But I am weak.
Then comes impulse, it thirsts for some immediate gratification; I
yield, and plunge into any happiness since I cannot obtain her. Then
comes quiet again, with the stars, and I bitterly reproach myself for
needing anything more than that stainless ideal. And so, I fancy, did
Petrarch.”
Philip was getting into a dangerous mood with his sentimentalism. No
lawful passion can ever be so bewildering or ecstatic as an unlawful
one. For that which is right has all the powers of the universe on
its side, and can afford to wait; but the wrong, having all those
vast forces against it, must hurry to its fulfilment, reserve nothing,
concentrate all its ecstasies upon to-day. Malbone, greedy of emotion,
was drinking to the dregs a passion that could have no to-morrow.
Sympathetic persons are apt to assume that every refined emotion must
be ennobling. This is not true of men like Malbone, voluptuaries of the
heart. He ordinarily got up a passion very much as Lord Russell got up
an appetite,--he, of Spence’s Anecdotes, who went out hunting for that
sole purpose, and left the chase when the sensation came. Malbone did
not leave his more spiritual chase so soon,--it made him too happy.
Sometimes, indeed, when he had thus caught his emotion, it caught him
in return, and for a few moments made him almost unhappy. This he liked
best of all; he nursed the delicious pain, knowing that it would die
out soon enough, there was no need of hurrying it to a close. At least,
there had never been need for such solicitude before.
Except for his genius for keeping his own counsel, every acquaintance of
Malbone’s would have divined the meaning of these reveries. As it
was, he was called whimsical and sentimental, but he was a man of
sufficiently assured position to have whims of his own, and could even
treat himself to an emotion or so, if he saw fit. Besides, he talked
well to anybody on anything, and was admitted to exhibit, for a man of
literary tastes, a good deal of sense. If he had engaged himself to
a handsome schoolmistress, it was his fancy, and he could afford it.
Moreover she was well connected, and had an air. And what more natural
than that he should stand at the club-window and watch, when his young
half-sister (that was to be) drove by with John Lambert? So every
afternoon he saw them pass in a vehicle of lofty description, with two
wretched appendages in dark blue broadcloth, who sat with their backs
turned to their masters, kept their arms folded, and nearly rolled off
at every corner. Hope would have dreaded the close neighborhood of those
Irish ears; she would rather have ridden even in an omnibus, could she
and Philip have taken all the seats. But then Hope seldom cared to drive
on the Avenue at all, except as a means of reaching the ocean, whereas
with most people it appears the appointed means to escape from that
spectacle. And as for the footmen, there was nothing in the conversation
worth their hearing or repeating; and their presence was a relief
to Emilia, for who knew but Mr. Lambert himself might end in growing
sentimental?
Yet she did not find him always equally tedious. Their drives had some
variety. For instance, he sometimes gave her some lovely present before
they set forth, and she could feel that, if his lips did not yield
diamonds and rubies, his pockets did. Sometimes he conversed about
money and investments, which she rather liked; this was his strong and
commanding point; he explained things quite clearly, and they found,
with mutual surprise, that she also had a shrewd little brain for
those matters, if she would but take the trouble to think about them.
Sometimes he insisted on being tender, and even this was not so bad as
she expected, at least for a few minutes at a time; she rather enjoyed
having her hand pressed so seriously, and his studied phrases amused
her. It was only when he wished the conversation to be brilliant and
intellectual, that he became intolerable; then she must entertain him,
must get up little repartees, must tell him lively anecdotes, which he
swallowed as a dog bolts a morsel, being at once ready for the next. He
never made a comment, of course, but at the height of his enjoyment he
gave a quick, short, stupid laugh, that so jarred upon her ears, she
would have liked to be struck deaf rather than hear it again.
At these times she thought of Malbone, how gifted he was, how
inexhaustible, how agreeable, with a faculty for happiness that would
have been almost provoking had it not been contagious. Then she looked
from her airy perch and smiled at him at the club-window, where he stood
in the most negligent of attitudes, and with every faculty strained in
observation. A moment and she was gone.
Then all was gone, and a mob of queens might have blocked the way,
without his caring to discuss their genealogies, even with old General
Le Breton, who had spent his best (or his worst) years abroad, and was
supposed to have been confidential adviser to most of the crowned heads
of Europe.
For the first time in his life Malbone found himself in the grasp of a
passion too strong to be delightful. For the first time his own heart
frightened him. He had sometimes feared that it was growing harder, but
now he discovered that it was not hard enough.
He knew it was not merely mercenary motives that had made Emilia accept
John Lambert; but what troubled him was a vague knowledge that it was
not mere pique. He was used to dealing with pique in women, and had
found it the most manageable of weaknesses. It was an element of
spasmodic conscience than he saw here, and it troubled him.
Something told him that she had said to herself: “I will be married,
and thus do my duty to Hope. Other girls marry persons whom they do not
love, and it helps them to forget. Perhaps it will help me. This is a
good man, they say, and I think he loves me.”
“Think?” John Lambert had adored her when she had passed by him without
looking at him; and now when the thought came over him that she would be
his wife, he became stupid with bliss. And as latterly he had thought of
little else, he remained more or less stupid all the time.
To a man like Malbone, self-indulgent rather than selfish, this poor,
blind semblance of a moral purpose in Emilia was a great embarrassment.
It is a terrible thing for a lover when he detects conscience amidst
the armory of weapons used against him, and faces the fact that he
must blunt a woman’s principles to win her heart. Philip was rather
accustomed to evade conscience, but he never liked to look it in the
face and defy it.
Yet if the thought of Hope at this time came over him, it came as
a constraint, and he disliked it as such; and the more generous and
beautiful she was, the greater the constraint. He cursed himself that
he had allowed himself to be swayed back to her, and so had lost Emilia
forever. And thus he drifted on, not knowing what he wished for, but
knowing extremely well what he feared.