In time long past, when the Huguenots were better known, if less
esteemed, an impecunious gentleman of France left his native land for
the sake of faith and fortune.
Lured by that blatant boast of liberty which swelled the throats of the
Western colonies, even while their hands were employed in meting out the
reward of witchcraft and in forging the chains of slavery, he directed
his way towards American soil.
His mission failed, and, in search of theological freedom, he only
succeeded in weaving matrimonial fetters. Amid an unassorted medley of
creeds and customs he came upon the red-cheeked daughter of a Swiss
adventurer--an ambitious pioneer who lived upon the theory that the New
World having been created for the service of its foreign invaders, the
might of the sword was the right of possession.
The gentleman of France, deciding to found a farm and family in the land
of his adoption, awoke suddenly to the knowledge that, to insure the
success of such an enterprise, feminine intervention is a necessary
evil.
Accordingly, he set about his preparations with an economic industry.
Casting his eye upon a tract of land upon a Southern river, he acquired
it for certain services rendered in an unguarded moment to the Swiss
adventurer, who had acquired it in a manner that concerned himself
alone.
The next step of the French gentleman was to build beside the Southern
river a family mansion, whose door he promptly closed upon the Swiss
adventurer, since virtue consists not so much in refusing to benefit by
vice as in refusing to acknowledge the benefit. Not without a sense of
nervous perturbation, he then proceeded to cast his gaze upon the most
promising feminine pledges of progeny. From among a dozen or so of his
fair neighbors he selected, with the experienced eye of a woman-fancier,
the blooming specimen of Swiss buxomness, and, the adventurer coming to
terms, the marriage had been celebrated without the retarding
curtain-raiser of a romantic prelude.
The gentleman's name was Marcel Musin de Biencourt; the lady's has no
place in the following history.
For a period matters progressed in natural sequence. The land was
tilled, the cotton picked, and the lady installed in the best bedroom of
the newly erected mansion. Had she played the part for which nature and
her lord intended her, there is reason to suppose that she would have
become a serviceable instrument in the preservation of the species.
But the gentleman had reckoned without Providence. With the ending of
the year of her bridehood the roses in the lady's cheeks grew waxen, and
she turned with a sigh of relief from the labor of travail to the rest
of the little church-yard upon the hill.
The aspens shivered above her, the river purled between level fields far
down below, and from the uprooted furrows around the dutiful corn put
forth tender sprouts; but the lady had shirked her mission in its first
fulfilment, and with the birth-time of the year she neither rose nor
stirred.
In the best bedroom the dust thickened upon the chintz curtains, and a
weak and sickly hostage to fortune yelled his new throat hoarse with
premonition of the inhospitality of the planet upon which he had been
precipitated.
Disappointed in his estimate of woman's nature, the gentleman of France
decided to economize in material, and to rear a race from the
unpromising specimen in his possession. Faithfully he strove to fulfil
his part, and when the boy reached manhood, he laid himself down beside
his wife upon the hill.
From this time on the family record is biblically concise. Marcel begot
Marcel, and again Marcel begot Marcel, and yet again.
While the root Musin languished, De Biencourt, the lofty family tree,
withered and died, to be forgotten. Neither in history nor in tradition,
nor in the paths of private virtue, was a Musin known to have
distinguished himself. If he took up arms in the American Revolution, he
took them up in a manner unworthy of record; if he favored the
Declaration of Independence, he did not commit his preference to paper;
if he excelled in any way, it was in the way of mediocrity--which is
perhaps the safest way of all.
But extinction was not to be the end of the venturesome blood of the
French gentleman. His spirit animated one of his name to confide to the
care of his ex-slaves the mansion crumbling above his head, and to
become a wanderer in the States which had been so nearly disunited. Like
the minstrels of old, he strung his harp from his shoulder, and
journeyed from South to North and from East to West. His Norman blood
still ran blue in his veins, and his faith was the faith of his fathers.
In his travels he played his passage into the vivacious affections of an
Irish maiden, who wore a rosary about her neck and a cross upon her
sleeve. But these conspicuous badges of Popery failed to chill the
passion of Marcel. And, in truth, if the maiden's heart was as black as
the arch-fiend, her eyes (which is more to the point) were not less blue
than heaven. With an improvidence sufficient to bleach the ghost of his
colonial progenitor, he tossed forebodings into the capacious lap of the
future, and stormed the yielding heart of young Ireland.
Love was lord, and their marriage-bonds were double-locked and barred by
Protestant and Catholic clergy. But there is a power which laughs at
religious locksmiths. Within six months the illusions with which each
had draped the other melted before the fire and brimstone of
ecclesiastical dispute. Between the kisses of their lips each offered
petitions to a patient Omnipotence for the salvation of the other's
soul. As the kisses grew colder the prayers grew warmer. There is a
tendency in man, when he has fallen out with the human brother whom he
has seen, to wax more zealous in his attentions to the Divine Father
whom he has not. To be courteous to one's neighbor is so much more
difficult than to be cringing to one's God.
And then a child was given. In the large family Bible upon the father's
desk the event is recorded in two different hands, and the child was
christened with two different names.
The first reads:
"MARIE MUSIN, _born April_ 24, 1868."
And the second:
"MARY ANN MUSIN, _born April_ 24, 1868."
After fifteen years the matter was settled, as were most family matters,
by the child herself.
"I will be both," she said, decisively. "I will be Mariana."
And Mariana she became.
In the same high-handed fashion the theological disputes of the parents
were reduced to trifles as light as air.
"I will be a Presbyterian one Sunday and a Catholic the next," she
concluded, with amiable acquiescence; "only on fast-days and
lecture-nights I'll be a heathen."
For a time these regulations were observed with uncompromising
impartiality, but, upon moving to a smaller town, she foresaw a
diplomatic stroke.
"I think it better," she announced, sweetly, "for one of us to become an
Episcopalian. I have noticed that most of the society people here are
Episcopalians--and in that way the family will be so evenly distributed.
I see that it will be easier for me to make the sacrifice than for
either of you. Of course, I should love to go with you, mamma, but
incense makes me sneeze; and you know, papa, I can't stand
congregational singing. It grates upon my nerves. And I must be
something, for I have so much religious feeling. I will be an
Episcopalian."
She cast herself into the arms of the Church with all the zeal of a
convert. From an artistic stand-point she repudiated insincerity, and,
though cultivated, her professions were as fertile as the most natural
product. Even to herself she scorned to admit that her alliance with a
particular creed was the result of aught but a moral tendency in that
direction. And the burden of the truth was with her. She was as
changeable as wind and as impressionable as wax, and the swelling tide
of sentiment had taken an ecclesiastical turn.
She dressed in sober grays, and attended service with the regularity of
the sexton; she decorated her walls with Madonnas; and she undertook, by
way of the Sunday-school room, to lead a class of eight small boys into
the path of righteousness. She read Christina Rossetti and George
Herbert, and she placed tiny silver crosses, suspended from purple
ribbons, in her school-books.
At the age of sixteen she attached herself to a society whose mission it
was to cultivate, by frequent calls, the religious poor, and she
neglected social observances to retard by her presence the domestic
duties of the indigent members of the community. She descended in a
special detachment upon a series of beer saloons, enforcing the pledge
upon a number of helpless gentlemen, and thereby multiplying the sin of
intemperance by that of perjury. While her mother mended the rents in
her garments, Mariana promoted a circle of stocking-darners for the
inhabitants of the almshouse.
At that period her expression was in perfect harmony with the tenor of
her mind. The dramatic effect was always good.
In the daily school, which she attended when the fancy seized her, she
ruled as a popular fetish. Between the younger children, whom she
terrorized, and the elder, whom she mesmerized, there was an
intermediate class with whom she was in high favor. As a tiny child she
had caught the street songs quicker than any other, and had sung them
better; and to the accompaniment of a hand-organ she could render a
marvellous ballet.
During her tenth year she fell into a passionate friendship for one of
the scholars--a stately girl with phlegmatic eyes of gray. For six
months she paid her lover-like attentions in surreptitious ways, and
expended her pocket-money in nosegays, with which to adorn the desk of
her divinity. She wore a photograph of the gray-eyed girl above her
heart, and lingered for an hour to walk home with her upon Fridays.
The friendship was sundered at last by visits exchanged between them,
and Mariana's emotions became theological.
But this passed also. Vague amatory impulses of old racial meaning were
born. At sixteen she was precipitated into a sentiment for the
photograph, printed by the daily press, of a young fellow who was at
that time in the custody of the State, preparatory to responding to a
charge of highway-robbery. The photograph was romantic, the crime was
also. It was a nineteenth-century attempt at a revival of the part of
Claude Duval.
Mariana attended missions less and meditated more. She divided her time
between her journal and the piano, showing a preference for songs of
riotous sentiment. Without apparent trouble to herself, she grew wan and
mysteriously poetic. She wore picturesque gowns with romantic draperies.
Her hair possessed a charming disorder, the expression of her face
passed from the placid into the intense. The dramatic effect was as good
as ever. Her journal of that year contains a declaration of undying
constancy. The object of this avowal is nominally the young
highwayman--in reality the creation of an over-fertile brain craving the
intoxicant of a great passion. The highwayman was but a picturesque
nucleus round which her dreams clustered and from which they gathered
color. She existed in a maze of the imagination, feasting upon the
unsubstantial food of idealism. Her longings for fame and for love were
so closely interwoven that even in her own mind it was impossible to
disassociate them. If she bedewed her pillow with tears of anguish for
the sake of a man whom she had never seen, and whom, seeing, she would
have passed with averted eyes, the tears were often dried by ecstatic
visions of artistic aspirations. And yet this romance of straw was not
the less intense because it was the creation of overwrought
susceptibilities; perhaps the more so. If real troubles were the only
troubles, how many tortured hearts would be uplifted to the hills. And
Mariana's mystical romance was a _daemon_ that lured her in a dozen
different disguises towards the quicksands of life.
But this passed also and was done with.
Her mother died, and her father married an early love. Mariana, who had
been first, declined to become last. Dissensions followed swiftly, and
the domestic atmosphere only cleared when Mariana departed from the
paternal dwelling-place.
From the small Southern village, under the protection of an elderly
female relation, she had flown to New York in search of theatrical
employment. Failing in her object, she turned desperately to the culture
of her voice, living meanwhile upon a meagre allowance donated by her
father. The elderly female relation had remained with her for a time,
but finding Mariana intractable in minor ways, and foreseeing a future
in which she would serve as cat's-paw for the girl's vagaries, she had
blessed her young relative and departed.
"One must either worship or detest you, my dear," she remarked as a
parting shaft. "And to worship you means to wait upon you, which is
wearing. Your personality is as absorbent as cotton. It absorbs the
individual comfort of those around you. It is very pleasant to be
absorbed, and you do it charmingly; but there is so much to see in the
world, and I'm getting old fast enough."
So she went, leaving Mariana alone in a fourth-story front room of The
Gotham apartment-house.