HALCYON DAYS.
Having given their consent to Edith’s engagement, the Yorkes
immediately adopted Dick Rowan as their own. They were not people to
be friendly by halves. Even Melicent was propitious, and, when she saw
with what pleased surprise he met her advances, became still more
amiable. Clara, who lived in a rarer atmosphere, effervesced more
readily, and could not enough praise her cousin’s _futur_. Hester
insisted that he should leave the hotel, and stay at her house. She
was completely won by the almost boyish affection and respect with
which he treated her husband, his first and only former friend in
Seaton, and by his fondness to her children.
Mrs. Yorke, beginning by talking with, in order to study him, and know
thoroughly what sort of man she had promised her niece to, found
herself growing affectionate toward him, and not only probing his
mind, but unfolding her own. In after-years she remembered these
confidential interviews as an honor, which, at the time, she had
scarcely appreciated. The young man told her all his hopes and plans,
asked her advice in everything concerning Edith, and listened eagerly
when she explained to him the needs and habits of a delicately bred
lady.
“My poor mother is the only woman I have ever lived in the house
with,” he remarked; “and, of course, she was not able to be dainty.”
He said this rather sadly, but without a taint of humility. Mrs. Yorke
was impressed by the dignity of that character which would not be
ashamed of anything but its own wrong-doing.
One confidence led to another, and Dick was afterward surprised on
recollecting that he had related the story of his whole life to
Edith’s aunt, and spoken more freely to her of his early struggles and
sufferings than even to Edith herself. Not only this; but, seeing
tears in her eyes when he told of his father’s despairing efforts to
reform himself, and hearing the pitying word she spoke for him whom
others had mocked, he told her the end of it all, and where that
father’s desolate grave had been made.
“You poor, dear boy!” she exclaimed, holding out her kind hand to him,
“I don’t wonder that Edith loves you!”
“I do not pretend to understand the designs of God,” Dick said
unsteadily. “When I think of my father, all is a mystery. But for
myself, I think I can see that suffering was good. My nature is to go
straight to any end which I propose to myself, without much regard for
the wishes of others, and no regard for ordinary obstacles. I might
have been cruel, I should have been selfish; but suffering has taught
me to be more tender of other people.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Yorke said; and, recollecting her own early trials,
thought that they had helped her to be more pitiful of his.
Then, led on by her sympathy for him, she told her own past, there on 474
the spot where it had occurred.
These confidences drew the two together, and formed a bond which was
never broken.
A man’s manliness can scarcely bear a severer test than when he
becomes the pet of woman. One is sometimes astonished to see how
characters, apparently fine, deteriorate under that insidious
influence. But Dick Rowan was too grateful and modest, and too little
selfish or vain, to be injured.
“He is not quite like us,” Mrs. Yorke said, “but he is more natural
and original, and is, altogether, a remarkable young man. Edith has
reason to be proud of his homage. He certainly behaves exquisitely
toward her.”
Mr. Yorke, refusing to be influenced by feminine raptures, was fain to
take the young man out of the house, in order to talk with him
uninterruptedly. He displayed the improvements he had made in the
place, his avenues, now as hard as cement, his terraces, smooth and
green with turf of velvet fineness. There were vines here and there,
disposed for effect, like drapery in an artist’s studio, and many a
flower which bloomed now for the first time under Seaton skies. They
stopped at last beside a clover-plot, thick with crowded trefoils and
blossoms. Its surface was unsteady with bees, musical with a low hum,
and all the air was sweet with the breath of it.
“If I were not disgusted with Seaton,” Mr. Yorke said, “I should like
to spend my summers here, and carry out my plans for the place; but
when we go away, probably in October, I shall never wish to see the
town again. There is no security here.”
Dick leaned thoughtfully on the fence, and watched the bees come and
go over the clover, and took off his hat to shake his hair loose in
that fragrant air. “I think, sir, that Seaton may be in future all the
better for this trouble,” he said slowly. “The tone of the place is
low, I know that well, but it is in a fair way of becoming ashamed of
itself, and so, of mending. When people have wrong ideas, and stand by
them stubbornly, I like to have them go on, and find out for
themselves what their principles lead to. Conviction reaches them then
through their own experience, and so you hear no more about the
matter. It is, of course, a slow way, but it is sure.”
Mr. Yorke made a grimace, and quoted President Mann: “God Almighty is
not in a hurry, and I am.”
Carl had gone to Bragon. He went quite unexpectedly, the day Dick
Rowan came, and did not see Edith’s lover till he had been a week in
Seaton. He came home one evening after tea, when the young people were
in the cupola, looking down the bay, for the _Halcyon_. They waved
their handkerchiefs to him, and his mother ran out to meet him.
“My dear son!” she exclaimed, embracing him as joyfully as if he had
been gone a year. “I would not watch for you, lest I should be
disappointed. I pretended I did not expect you. But you may know what
a hypocritical pretence it was when I say that your supper is all
ready, though, to be sure, breakfast, dinner, and supper have been
kept for you every day.”
While speaking, she led him into a little northern parlor, which was
their summer dining-room.
Carl looked at his mother with a smile, but tears rose to his eyes. He
was not one to take even a mother’s devotion as a matter of course,
and just now he found it peculiarly touching.
Mrs. Yorke looked very frail and lovely as she sat opposite her son. 475
Her snowdrop of a face, the pale blue scarf knotted loosely about her
neck, with fringed ends hanging over her white dress, the fall of lace
fastened to her hair by a rosebud--all made a pretty picture. To the
inherent loveliness of the mother, she added the charm of the
exquisite lady.
“If you do not need that apostle behind your chair--” her son
suggested.
She immediately dismissed Paul Patten; and Carl was free to say, “Now
tell me the state of affairs. The engagement I take for granted; but
have I got to endure the spectacle of a pair of cooing lovers? I would
rather leave the country.”
For a moment Mrs. Yorke was too much occupied to give any reply but a
smiling shake of the head. Eating was one of the fine arts with her,
and she made a point of having the circumstances of that odious
operation as artistic as possible. Having placed an accurate square of
currant jelly on a glass plate, where it lay like a ruby block stolen
from Solomon’s hidden treasures, and filled a gorgeous Japanese cup
with coffee, into which she put a tiny cube of loaf-sugar and a
spoonful of cream, she was ready to speak.
“There is no necessity for any such banishment, my dear. Edith is very
friendly to him, but she surrounds herself with a fine reserve which
he could not break through if he would. I could as soon fancy a
gentleman approaching familiarly the Queen of Sheba. They are very
little alone together.”
“What delicious coffee!” Carl exclaimed, and immediately began to tell
some incidents of his journey.
When they heard the others coming down-stairs, they went to meet them.
Melicent came first, with Mr. Rowan, and all saw with pleasure that
the two young men met not only with courtesy, but friendliness. Carl’s
invariable, haughty silence whenever Dick Rowan’s name was mentioned
had given them some uneasiness regarding the meeting. Indeed, could
they have found fault with him for anything, it would have been for
what they considered this excess of pride.
The two passed on, Clara following, and, quite in the rear, came
Edith, alone. She was half-smiling, and came slowly down, step by
step, with a touch of feminine coquetry as innocent and natural as the
tricks of a playful kitten, lingering as he waited. Yet her bright
cheeks and shining eyes told that the approach was a delight.
But for some reason, Carl chose to be displeased all at once, and, by
a slight change of attitude and expression, to be waiting, not to
greet her, but to go up-stairs.
“Pardon me for being so slow,” she said, becoming instantly a
courteous lady. “I think I am getting old and dignified. The wings
have gone from my feet.”
The _Halcyon_ had come, and the Yorkes immediately made the
acquaintance of its master. Dick and Edith went down to the ship to
see him, and persuaded him to go home to tea with them. The big,
bashful sailor was not accustomed to the society of ladies, and had
the impression that there was something cabalistic in good-breeding.
But he found himself quite at ease with the family, after a while, and
was convinced that they were not aware of the few blunders he
committed in the first embarrassment of meeting them. Some diversion
had always taken place at precisely the right moment to screen him,
and soon his self-possession was quite restored. He left the house 476
that night highly pleased with his visit.
“They seem to me perfectly kind and natural people,” he said to Dick,
as they walked through the woods together. “Your Edith, it is true, is
rather grand, but in a sweet, child-like way, and Miss Melicent seems
disposed to be a little on the high horse once in a while, but not
much. I always thought that accomplished ladies were more airy, but I
don’t see that these do any great things.”
“True,” Dick answered; “but mark the things which they do not do.”
They were much together after that, and Mrs. Yorke and her daughters
went on board the _Halcyon_, and were entertained there. Carl had been
afraid to have his mother venture on board the ship, and had charged
himself especially with the care of her, but his solicitude was not
needed. He was both pleased and amused by the simplicity and
tenderness with which their gigantic host smoothed every smallest
obstruction from her path and spared her every exertion. There had
been a momentary flash of angry surprise when he saw his mother lifted
over an obstructing timber in Captain Cary’s arms; but the sailor’s
face was so absolutely anxious and kind, and Mrs. Yorke laughed so
merrily over the _naïf_ gallantry, that he instantly perceived the
folly of resenting it.
“My dear,” Mrs. Yorke whispered to Clara, “he is like one’s
grandfather, grandmother, and all one’s aunts and uncles, in one. It’s
a pity he hasn’t a wife, he would be so good to her.”
Clara blushed slightly. She had been thinking some such thought
herself.
The intercourse gave the Yorkes a fresh and novel sensation. It was so
different from anything they had ever had before, and, at the same time,
so pleasant. It came like a breath of pure sea-air into a warm and
scented drawing-room. They were not so mummified by convention that
they could not appreciate this simple, unconventional nature, in which
they found a noble delicacy.
Captain Cary listened with indignation to the story of their Seaton
experiences. An autocrat on board ship, and completely his own master
everywhere, he could not comprehend how one part of a community could
exercise such tyranny and coercion over the other. “It seems to me
that the Catholics must have done something out of the way,” he said.
“There’s usually fault on both sides, you know, though no fault would
justify such a persecution.”
“There is just the trouble,” Mr. Yorke replied, rather impatiently.
“It is so easy for people, who wish to be fair, and, at the same time,
not put themselves to the inconvenience of investigating, to say that
there is probably fault on both sides, and then fancy that they have
done justice. On the contrary, they may have done great injustice, and
have, certainly, rendered a careless and slipshod judgment. For there
are cases where the fault is all on one side, and other cases where,
though in the end there may be fault on both sides, the responsibility
really rests on the one who was the aggressor, and provoked the other
beyond endurance. I am not blaming you, sir; but I am always anoyed by
that off-hand way of saying, ‘There’s probably fault on both sides.’
If people don’t know, let them say they don’t know, and not give any
judgment at all. I do know, and I say that no provocation was given,
and the Catholics have been only too supine.”
“There have been times, Captain Cary,” Edith said, “when I have wished 477
that you were here. I know you would have been on our side.”
“That I would!” he answered heartily, looking at her with a kind
smile. The two were great friends. “And I would have left my mark
anywhere you told me to strike.”
“It was a shame to waste you on a merchant-ship,” Clara said to him.
“You should have been an admiral.”
The sailor gave one of his great laughs, which always made Mrs. Yorke
jump and flush. “We big fellows are not always fond of fighting,” he
said. “When I was a boy, I had two younger brothers about half my
size, and either of them was a match for me. I was so peaceable that I
was called Mother Cary’s chicken, and I believe it was that nickname
that first put it into my head to go to sea. No, I’d rather fight wind
and wave than men. I could attack a man if he were doing anything
absolutely wrong; but to kill him because he belonged to a foreign
nation, and carried a different flag, that would be too cold-blooded
for me.”
The two sailors, with Edith and Clara, visited the Catholic school,
carrying gifts for the children and encouragement to the teacher.
“You look so worn, dear friend,” Edith said. “I wish you would give
up, and come to Boston with us.”
The teacher shook her head. “I cannot give up,” she said.
Captain Cary complimented Miss Churchill in his own fashion: “We call
that a pretty sharp ship that will sail within four points of the
wind,” he said. “But I hear that you have been making way with the
wind in your teeth.”
“I have not made much headway,” she answered, smiling, “but only held
my own. I am anchored.”
Carl accompanied them up Irish Lane, on Sunday afternoon. They called
at several houses, and talked with and encouraged the inmates. It was
a help to these poor souls to have some one to tell their troubles to.
“But what shall we do when you are all gone?” they asked mournfully.
To them, the expected departure of the Yorke family from Seaton was a
misfortune second only to the banishment of their priest.
Their situation was, indeed, a cruel one. It was not alone the
contumely to which they were subjected, and the being unable to hear
Mass, but their sick and dying were deprived of the sacraments, and
their infants were unbaptized. Yet no harsh word escaped them.
Scarcely one seemed to recollect their persecutors. They were
suffering for the faith, and it was God’s will--that was their view of
the position. The instruments which God used to try them, they thought
but little of. Carl Yorke went home thinking that he had heard better
sermons that afternoon than he had ever before heard in his life.
Father Rasle’s continued absence was not voluntary. He would fain have
returned to his flock, in spite of Mr. Yorke’s and Miss Churchill’s
letters, but his superior added a command to their advice, and he was
forced to restrain his zeal.
“Tell my people that I never forgot them,” he wrote to the teacher.
“Every day at Mass I pray for their deliverance. It cannot be long
before I shall visit them. Meantime, let them give their enemies no
pretext for further injury.”
To Edith he wrote:
“Your desire to _act_ in behalf of these persecuted people is natural,
but I must forbid you. You may safely follow the advice of such good
people as Mr. and Mrs. Yorke. But do not fear that, because you are
inactive, you therefore are useless. I visited once, in Europe, a 478
spot where a temple had stood. Nothing was left of it but a few broken
fragments lying about, and a single beautiful pillar that stood alone.
Was that pillar useless? No; in its way, it was very eloquent. No one
could look upon it without trying to fancy what the whole edifice
might have been; and you may be sure that the traveller’s imagination
did its best in rebuilding that temple. So, now, you shall be the
little caryatid of the church in Seaton. You have the gift of silence:
use it. Be as obedient and quiet as that solitary column, and let the
world guess from you how fair must be that structure of which you are
a part.”
Edith turned from the window, where she had stood to read her letter,
folded her arms up over her head, and said to Dick Rowan, sitting
there, “Can you fancy me supporting an entablature?”
“No,” he answered; “for then there would have to be others like you.”
Edith blushed, and dropped her arms; for they were all looking at her,
and their faces, as well as Dick Rowan’s answer, reminded her that she
was beautiful. She gave him her letter to read, and went to sit on the
window-sill beside Clara, and listen to the talk of the three
gentlemen on the piazza. The two families were dining together that
day, and Mr. Yorke, with his son-in-law, and Captain Cary, were
smoking their cigars outside. Inside the window nearest her husband,
Mrs. Cleaveland sat in a low, broad arm-chair. A nurse in a white cap
had just placed on her knees Hester’s second son, an infant of six
months old. As it lay slowly and deliciously waking up, both nurse and
mother gazed down upon it with adoring eyes. Master Philip, this
baby’s predecessor, was hiding his face in one arm of his mother’s
arm-chair, being in temporary disgrace. Original sin was very strong
and active in this child. He was full of vitality and determination,
and just at that age when will is pretty well developed, and memory
and understanding still dormant--the age for childish atrocities.
There were moments when the child’s life was a burden to him, by
reason of the great number of things which he wished to do, and meant
to do, and could not remember that he must not do. He had a chronic
desire to pull out the baby’s eyelashes, “eye-winkeys,” he called
them, and to make it smile in season and out by violently drawing the
corners of its mouth round toward its ears. Whenever an infantine
shriek was heard, it was always understood that Master Philip was in
some way accountable. Another fancy of his was to poke holes in paper,
or any delicate and easily perforated fabric, with his plump
forefinger. He could have no greater pleasure than to seat himself,
with some precious volume before him, and go gravely and industriously
through it in this way, leaf by leaf, from cover to cover. There was,
indeed, a long list of indictments against this unhappy child. The two
little forefingers tied together behind his back, and a dilapidated
book lying on the carpet, showed plainly enough what his offence was
at this time.
In the background, Carl was telling marvellous stories to the
culprit’s half-brother, Eugene; and Mrs. Yorke and Milicent, in the
centre of the room, were coaxing some account of his adventures from
Dick Rowan. He had to be persuaded before he would speak much of
himself.
“Isn’t he magnificent?” Clara whispered to Edith, meaning Captain Cary.
The sailor had been describing an arrowy little craft, the 479
_Humming-bird_, in which he had once darted in and out of the Chinese
coast, smuggling opium in the very teeth of an English man-of-war.
Seeing the addition to his audience, he threw the end of his cigar
away, and moved his chair nearer the window.
“How I should like to be a sailor!” exclaimed Clara with enthusiasm.
Captain Cary leaned forward, with his arms on his knees, in order to
bring himself more on a level with the young ladies. “And how would
you like to be a sailor’s wife?” he asked.
Although he had the greatest possible admiration for Miss Clara Yorke,
and considered her by far the cleverest young woman he had ever known,
it would be safe to say that the thought of going any further than
that had never entered his mind, till he saw the flash of eyes and
color with which she received his question. The effect was electrical.
He straightened himself up again, and, in the first break of that
possibility, did not hear her saucy but rather tardy reply: “That
depends on who the sailor is.”
The man was confounded between terror, rapture, and astonishment.
Clara’s look had seemed to show that such a consummation was not
impossible to, at least, think of--that it had, perhaps, occurred to
her own mind. True, she was most likely to scorn the thought; but, for
all that, a momentary vision danced before his eyes of what his life
would be if he had a woman of his own to love and serve. That the wife
of his choice should serve him, never occurred to this generous soul.
He could at any time have married a common person, whom most people
would have thought good enough for him; but there was in his nature a
capacity for tender worship which made him shrink from such an
alliance.
Presently, Edith’s cool voice stole through the chaos of his mind.
“You can go to sea with Dick and me, Clara.”
The sailor started, and fell from the clouds. His face became
overcast, and, with a deep sigh, he seemed to renounce a
long-cherished hope.
With a laugh and a toss of the head, Clara rose from her lowly seat,
and, stepping out through the window, began to promenade up and down
the garden-walk. She saw through this great, transparent creature
perfectly, and was amused, and she knew not what else. One could not
be angry with the fellow, she said laughingly to herself. She had been
looking up to him with enthusiasm, as to some antique bronze or marble
Argonaut, or other hero of simpler times. Now that was changed, and
she was on the pedestal, to be worshipped by him. It was preposterous,
but not altogether disagreeable.
Meantime, Captain Cary was confiding his distress to Edith. “I hope
that your cousin didn’t think I was fool enough to dream of her being
my wife,” he said, looking down. “What I said was a slip of the
tongue, and I didn’t know the drift of it myself till I saw how she
took it.”
“Oh! never mind,” Edith answered. “Clara is always jesting, and
twisting people’s meaning. She knew you meant no such thing.”
He sighed, and said no more.
If Clara had expected the sailor to watch her, she was disappointed.
He went into the parlor, and when, later, she entered, brilliant with
exercise and mischief, he was sitting by Carl, and listening with as
sober a face to the stories that young man was telling Eugene
Cleaveland as if he were listening to a sermon. Clara passed near
them, to hear what it might be which produced such solemnity in the 480
man and such a trance of interest in the child.
“Then,” Carl was saying, “Taurus sent to the Great Bear to say that he
should like to have something out of the golden dipper about the
middle of the next month, for all the little stars would grow dim
about that time, and need something to polish up with. And the Bear
said, ‘All right! but the dipper hangs so high on the celestial pole
that you will have to pay me a good deal to climb up to it.’ And
Taurus answered, ‘All right!’ And then the Bears set slyly to work to
grease the pole, so that the dipper should slip down, and they get
their pay without work; and Taurus he set to work to push the dipper
higher up, so as to get more work than he had agreed to pay for; and,
meantime, all the poor little stars languished, and grew dim. And then
Orion got mad, and brought a lot of little dippers, and gave each of
the little stars a full one. And the stars grew bright and glad. But
the Bulls and Bears, finding that they were both beaten, didn’t feel
glad. The Bear began to bite his own paws, and the Bull went for
Orion, and tried to toss him. But Orion laughed, and put up his
shield, and called his dogs, and--”
“Upon my word, Carl,” says Clara, “I think you put the stars to base
uses when you set them to gambling in stocks. Have you told Captain
Cary of our projected sail down the bay?”
“Poor Clara!” Melicent said, joining them. “We are planning some
little pleasure-trip to distract her mind. You do not know, perhaps,
that the Philistines are upon her?”
The sailor did not understand, but looked so inquiring and solicitous
that Clara explained to him.
“I published a story ages ago,” she said, “and the editor of the
_Cosmic_ has just become aware of it. He found it lately among the
_débris_ of his writing-table. The authoress, he says, has shaken
up a few fancies in a kaleidoscope, and calls them life. They are
about as much like life, he adds, as Watteau’s shepherdesses are like
real shepherdesses, or as Marie Antoinette’s housekeeping at the Petit
Trianon, with ribbons tied round the handles of silver saucepans, was
like real kitchen-work. Still, he concludes, the story is amusing, in
spite of its pinchbeck ideal, and, when the writer is older, she will,
doubtless, do better. The musty old metaphysician!” exclaimed Miss
Clara, warming with the subject. “I once read a paragraph in one of
his articles, and found it comical. I had never seen any of the words
before, except the articles and prepositions. My first impression was
that he had made them up, for fun. I found them all out in the
unabridged dictionary, though. They were real words, but I have
forgotten what they mean.”
“So much the better!” said Melicent. And then followed a controversy
on the subject of learned women. Melicent denounced them as unwomanly;
but Melicent was neither a student nor well read, and there might be a
difference of opinion as to cause and effect in her case. Mr. Yorke
mocked _les savantes_; but Mr. Yorke adored a wife whose literary
acquirements were of the most modest kind, and he had once, in a
never-forgotten argument, been worsted by a clever woman. Captain Cary
was of opinion that clever and learned women were not fit wives for
common men. At that, Clara took up the gauntlet with great spirit.
Clever women did not wish to marry common men, she said. And there
were plenty of uncommon men who were not jealous of them. She disliked 481
all this hypocritical talk about the beauty of simplicity and humility
and submission in women. The real meaning of it was not Christian, but
Mohammedan.
“For me,” Mrs. Yorke interposed, “I think that some women should be
learned, in order to appreciate learned men. If the wife of a scholar
could not understand and sympathize in her husband’s love of books and
what they teach, she would soon grow jealous of them, and he would
miss what should be his sweetest homage.”
“Now, is not there an orthodox woman?” Mr. Yorke exclaimed with
delight. “The sole use she can conceive of a woman’s having for
learning is that she may be better able to appreciate her husband.”
Edith glanced past Carl, and looked with arch inquiry at Dick Rowan.
He was perfectly self-possessed, and spoke even with a slight air of
authority. “I believe the true superiority of woman to be in
religion,” he said; “and, if she has that, it is no matter whether she
is learned or not.”
“But is not your view somewhat ascetical?” asked Carl Yorke. “We are
supposing that this life is something. Looking at the question in that
light, I would say that no one has the right to dogmatize one way or
the other. Let each woman follow the bent of her own mind, and be as
learned as she will. I only stipulate that she shall not be
loud-voiced nor disputatious, but wear her learning with a grace, as
an ornament, not a weapon, though she may use it as a weapon when
there is need. I would have woman wear erudition, as Mrs. Browning
says men wear grief who have worn it long:
‘As a hat aside,
With a flower stuck in it.’”
“And while your erudite wife is gracefully adjusting her ologies, who
is to see to the bread and the buttons?” Melicent asked, rather
sneeringly.
“Oh! those everlasting buttons!” Clara cried out, and put her hands
over her ears.
“The servant, probably,” Carl replied to Melicent. “If a woman could
give some thought to those things also, well and good, but I should
not choose a wife for such a service. I would rather have her help me
to polish a sentence or pose a figure than cook my dinner or mend my
stockings, unless we were so poor that labor was absolutely necessary.
I should be ashamed to see my wife performing menial services for me.
I would as willingly see her at work in the field as bringing me my
slippers.”
Carl had scarcely time to see the look of beaming approval in Edith’s
eyes, before his sight and hearing were both temporarily lost in
Clara’s rapturous embrace. “You are perfect!” she cried, kissing him.
“You are of the progeny of Apollo! I am so glad to have that slipper
theory upset; for I never saw a woman bringing her husband’s slippers
for him without feeling a contempt for her. I don’t believe that any
one ever admired such a piece of mean servility, except the lazy Turk
who allowed it to be done for him.”
While they laughed at Clara’s enthusiasm, Dick Rowan said to Edith, “I
quite agree with your cousin. I mean all that he means, and more.”
“By the way,” Carl said carelessly, as he went toward the door, “I am
not Edith’s cousin, nor in any way related to her.”