Ten hours of heavy sleep had had a wonderfully revigorating effect upon
him, and despite some stiffness he awoke with a sense of renewed power.
His repose had, too, a far more remarkable effect than this. Before his
eyes were open he said aloud, as if he were solemnly summoning some
culprit before the bar of an awful tribunal:--
"Thomas Wainwright!"
The sound of his own words acted upon him like an electric shock. He
started up in bed, wide awake, his eyes shining, his whole manner alert,
joyous, and confident. He was nameless no longer. Treacherous memory had
yielded up its tenaciously kept secret, and at last he emerged from the
shadowy company of the nameless to be again a man among men.
He sprang from his couch and made his toilet with impatient eagerness.
As he dressed he remembered everything in an instant. That baffling
mystery of his family name seemed the key to all the secrets of his
past, and, having yielded up this prime fact, his memory made no further
resistance. His whole life lay before him, no longer laboriously traced
out, bit by bit, but unrolled as a map, visible at a single _coup
d'oeil_.
Little that he recalled was of a nature to change the conclusions he
had formed of his circumstances, except the single fact that his wife
had not outlived her honeymoon. The shock of her father's death, and,
perhaps, some seeds of malaria contracted in India, had proved too much
for her delicate constitution, and Tom, eagerly reviewing his newly
recovered past, felt a pang of unselfish sorrow for the unloved bride
who had for so short a time borne his name, that name which he now kept
saying over to himself, as if he feared he might again forget it.
He hurried downstairs, and in the old-fashioned hall, stately with
its wainscoting and antique carved furniture, he met Columbine coming
towards him. Like his, her eyes shone with a new light, her lips were
parted with excitement, and her step was eager.
"Good-morning, Mr. Wainwright," she fluted in a voice high with
excitement and joyousness. "I heard your step, and could not wait for
you to get to the parlor."
"Good heavens!" cried he, stopping short in amazement. "How did you
know? Are you a witch?"
"No," she laughed, pleasure and excitement mingling rather dangerously
in her mood. "Nothing of the sort, I assure you; though one of my
ancestors was tried for witchcraft at Salem. Cousin Tom sent me this
advertisement, and I knew at once that it must be you."
The advertisement she showed him was cut from a New York paper, and
called, with a detailed description of the personal appearance of
the missing man, for tidings of one Thomas Wainwright, of Baltimore,
supposed to have perished in the wreck of the Sound steamer, and whose
large estate was unsettled. Tom read it over with mingled feelings.
"Bah!" he said. "When I get home I shall only have to look over a file
of the daily papers to read my obituary. Fortunately I have been back
from India so few years that they cannot say a great deal about me."
"_De mortuis_," returned Columbine, smiling. "They will only say good of
you. I congratulate you on having found your name."
"I had it before you told me," he said.
He took her hands in his and looked at her tenderly.
"I have all my past, too," he went on. "I am free; I have nothing to
hide; nothing stands between us. Will you be my wife, Columbine?"
She grew pale as ashes; then flushed celestial red; but her eyes did not
flinch.
"I trust you utterly," she answered him. "And I love you no less."
Interlude First
AN EPISODE IN MASK.
AN EPISODE IN MASK.
[_Scene:--A balcony opening by a wide, curtained window from a ball-room
in which a masquerade is in progress. Two maskers, the lady dressed as a
peasant girl of Britany and her companion as a brigand, come out. The
curtains fall behind them so that they are hidden from those within._]
_He._ You waltz divinely, mademoiselle.
_She._ Thank you. So I have been told before, but I find that it depends
entirely upon my partner.
_He._ You flatter me. Will you sit down?
_She._ Thank you. How glad one is when a ball is over. It is almost
worth enduring it all, just to experience the relief of getting through
with it.
_He._ What a world-weary sentiment for one so young and doubtless so
fair.
_She._ Oh, everybody is young in a mask, and by benefit of the same
doubt, I suppose, everybody is fair as well.
_He._ It were easy in the present case to settle all doubts by dropping
the mask.
_She._ No, thank you. The doubt does not trouble me, so why should I
take pains to dispel it? Say I am five hundred; I feel it.
_He._ What indifference; and in one who waltzes so well, too. Will you
not give me another turn?
_She._ Pardon me. I am tired.
_He._ And you can resist music with such a sound of the sea in it?
_She._ It is not melancholy enough for the sea.
_He._ Is the sea so solemn to you, then?
_She._ Inexpressibly. It is just that--solemn. It is too sad for anger,
and too great and grave for repining; it is as awful as fate.
_He._ I confess it never struck me so.
_She._ It did not me always. It was while I was in Britany--where I got
this peasant dress; isn't it quaint?--that I learned to know the sea.
It judged me; it reiterated one burden over and over until it seemed
to me that I should go mad; yet at the same time its calmness gave
me self-control. If there had been the slightest trace of anger or
relenting in its accusations, I could have turned away easily enough,
and shaken its influence all off. But it was like an awful tribunal
before which I had to stand silent, and review my past as interpreted by
inexorable justice,--with no palliations, no shams, nothing but honest
truth. But why should I say all this rigmarole to you? You must be
amused,--if you are not too much bored, that is.
_He._ On the contrary, I thank you very much.
_She._ For what?
_He._ First, for your confidence in me; and second, for telling me an
experience so like my own. It was not the sea, but circumstances that
delivered me over to myself,--a long, slow convalescence, in which I,
too, had an interview with the Nemesis of truth, and found a carefully
built structure of shams and self-deception go down as mist before
the sun. The most frightful being in the world to encounter is one's
estranged better self.
_She._ That is true. No one but myself could have persuaded me that it
was I who was to blame. The more I was argued with, the more I believed
myself a martyr, and my husband--
_He._ Your husband?
_She._ I have betrayed myself. I am not mademoiselle, but madame.
_He._ But I see no--
_She._ No ring? True; I returned that to my husband before I went to
Britany.
_He._ And in Britany?
_She._ In Britany I would have given the world to have it back again.
_He._ But your husband? Did he accept it so easily?
_She._ What else can a man do when his wife casts him off?
_He._ Do? Oh, it is considered proper in such cases, I believe, for him
to make a violent pretence of not accepting his freedom.
_She._ You seem to be sure he considered it freedom!
_He._ Pardon me. I forgot for the moment that you were his wife.
_She._ Compliments do not please me.
_He._ Then you are not a woman.
_She._ Will you be serious?
_He._ Why should I be--at a ball?
_She._ Because I choose.
_He._ Oh, good and sufficient reason!
_She._ But tell me soberly,--you are a man,--what could my husband have
done?
_He._ Do you mean to make my ideas standards by which to try him?
_She._ Perhaps yes; perhaps no. At least tell me what you think.
_He._ A man need not accept a dismissal too easily.
_She._ But what then?
_He._ He might have followed; he might have argued. It is scarcely
possible that you alone were to blame. Was there nothing in which he
might have acknowledged himself wrong,--nothing with which he should
reproach himself?
_She._ How can I tell what took place in his heart? I only know my own.
He may have repented somewhat, or he may not. As for following-- You do
not know my husband. He is just, just, just. It was his one fault, I
thought then. It took time for me to appreciate the worth of such a
virtue.
_He._ But what has that to do with following you?
_She._ 'She has chosen,' he would reason. 'Let the event punish her; it
is only right that she should suffer for her own act.'
_He._ But is his justice never tempered by mercy?
_She._ The highest mercy is to be just. To palliate is merely to
postpone sentence.
_He._ You are the first woman I ever met who would acknowledge that.
_She._ Few women, I hope, have been taught by an experience so hard as
mine. But how dolefully we are talking. Do say something amusing; we are
at a ball.
_He._ I might give you an epigram for the one with which you served me
a moment ago, and retort that to be amusing is to be insincere.
_She._ Then--for we came to be amused--why are we here?
_He._ Manifestly because we prize insincerity.
_She._ You are right. I came to get away from myself. One must do
something, and even the dissipations of charity pall after a time.
_He._ We seem to be in much the same frame of mind, and perhaps cannot
do better than to stay where we are, consorting darkly, while the others
take pains to amuse themselves. So we get through the evening, that is
the main thing.
_She._ You have forgotten to be as complimentary as you were half an
hour since.
_He._ Have I? And yet the greatest compliment a man can pay a woman is
sincerity.
_She._ If he does not love her, yes.
_He._ Ah, then you agree with Tom Moore:
"While he lies, his heart is yours;
But oh! you've wholly lost the youth,
The instant that he tells you truth!"
_She._ Perhaps; but it is no matter, since we were not talking of love.
_He._ But if we were?
_She._ If we were we should undoubtedly say a great many foolish things
and quite as many false ones.
_He._ You are cynical.
_She._ Oh, no. Cynicism is like a cravat, very becoming to a man if
properly worn, but always setting ill upon a lady.
_He._ Did you learn that, also, in Britany? It is a country of
enlightenment. Would that my wife had gone there.
_She._ Or her husband!
_He._ You are keen. Her husband learned bitter truths enough by staying
at home. I am evidently your complement; for I had a wedding-ring sent
back to me.
_She._ And why?
_He._ Why? Why? Who ever knows a woman's reason! Because I refused,
perhaps, to call black white, to say I was pleased by what made me
angry; because-- No; on the whole, since I am not making love to her,
it is hardly worth while to lie to a peasant from Britany, though it is
of course necessary to sustain the social fictions with people nearer
home. It was because the wedding-ring was a fetter that constrained my
wife, body and soul; because I was as inflexible as steel. My purposes,
my views, my beliefs were the Procrustean bed upon which every act of
hers was measured. _Voila tout!_
_She._ I understand, I think.
_He._ Oh, I have learned well enough where the blame lay in the three
years since she left me.
_She._ Three years!
_He._ Why do you start?
_She._ It is three years, too, since I--
_He._ Who are you?
_She._ It is no matter; my husband is far from here.
_He._ That is more than I can say of my wife.
_She._ Where is she, then?
_He._ Heaven knows; not I. But let that go. Why may we not be useful to
each other? Our cases are similar; we are both lonely.
_She._ And strangers.
_He._ Acquaintance is not a matter of time, but of temperament. Should
we have found it possible to be so frank with one another had we been
merely strangers?
_She._ You are specious.
_He._ No; only honest.
_She._ But what--
_He._ What? Why, friendship. We have found it possible to be frank in
masks; why not out of them?
_She._ Then you propose a platonic friendship?
_He._ I want a woman who will be my friend, to whom I can talk freely.
There are words a man has no power or wish to say to a man, yet which
must be spoken or they fester in his mind.
_She._ I am, then, to be a safety-valve.
_He._ Every man must have a woman as a lodestar; you are to be that to
me.
_She._ And your wife?
_He._ My wife? She voluntarily abandoned me. I haven't seen her for
three years; and surely she ought to cease to count by this time.
_She._ You are heartless.
_He._ Heartless?
_She._ You should be faithful to your lost--
_He._ Lost fiddlestick!
_She._ You are very rude!
_He._ I don't see--
_She._ And very disagreeable.
_He._ But--
_She._ If you had really loved your wife, you'd always mourn for her,
whatever she did.
_He._ Good Heavens! That is like a woman. A man is expected to bear
anything, everything, and if at last he does not come weeping to kiss
the hand that smites him, he is heartless, forsooth! Bah! I am not a
whipped puppy, thank you.
_She._ Your love was, perhaps, never distinguished by meekness?
_He._ I'm afraid not.
_She._ It might be none the worst for that. The ideal man for whom I am
looking will not be too lamblike, even in love.
_He._ You look for an ideal man, then?
_She._ As closely as did Diogenes.
_He._ And your husband?
_She._ Oh, like your wife, he should, perhaps, begin not to count.
_He._ Good. We are sworn friends, then, until you find your ideal man.
_She._ If you will.
_He._ Then unmask.
_She._ Is that in the bargain?
_He._ Of course. Else how should we know each other again?
_She._ But--
_He._ Unmask!
_She._ Very well,--when you do.
_He._ Now, then. [_They unmask._]
_She._ Philip!
_He._ Agnes!
_She._ You knew all the time!
_He._ Who told you I was here?
_She._ I didn't know it.
_He._ I thought you went to Russia.
_She._ Well, I didn't. I hope you feel better! Good night.
_He._ Wait, Agnes. I--
[_There is a moment's silence, in which they look at each other
intently. He takes her hand in both his._]
_He._ Agnes, I am not your ideal man, but--
_She._ Nor I your ideal woman, apparently. Your wife does not count, you
say.
_He._ No more than your husband; so we are quits there.
_She._ It's very horrid of you to remind me of that.
_He._ I acknowledge that I was always very horrid in everything.
_She._ Oh, if you acknowledge that, Phil, it is hardly worth while to
spend any more time in explanations while this divine waltz is running
to waste.
_He._ But you were tired and out of sorts.
_She._ You old goose, don't you see that I'm neither!
_He._ And you do waltz divinely.
[_They attempt to adjust their masks, but somehow get into each other's
arms. In a few moments more, however, they are seen among the dancers
within._]
Tale the Second.
THE TUBEROSE.
THE TUBEROSE.
I.
"I shall feel honored, Mistress Henshaw, if you will accept this posie
as a token which may perchance serve to keep me in remembrance while I
am over the sea."
"I am extremely beholden to you," replied the old dame addressed, her
wrinkled face illuminated with a smile of pleasure. "But for keeping you
in remembrance it needs not this posie or other token. I do not hold my
friends so lightly."
"I thank you for counting me one of your friends," John Friendleton said
frankly. "I have no kindlier memories of Boston than of the home under
your roof."
He had placed upon the many-legged table a flower-pot containing a
thrifty tuberose, and with a kindly smile upon his handsome and winning
face, he stood regarding the old dame into whose custody he had just
given the plant. The dress of the period,--the days of the end of the
seventeenth century,--plain though it was, accorded well with the
sturdy honesty and kindness of his face and the compact and strong build
of his figure. The wrinkled crone returned his smile with one of frosty
but genuine warmth.
"This plant is none the less pleasing to me," she said, "though I by no
means need it as a reminder. I shall be very careful in its nourishing."
"It is by no means an ordinary herb," Friendleton returned lightly.
"There may be magic in it for aught I can tell. My uncle, who sent me
the bulbs from even so far away as Spain, hath a shrewd name as a wise
man; and to say sooth he belike doth know far more than altogether
becometh a good Christian. I give you fair warning that there may be
mischief in the herb; though to be sure," he added laughing, "the earth
in which it grows is consecrated, for I filled the pot from Copp's Hill
graveyard hard by here."
A momentary gleam shot with a sinister light its fiery sparkle across
the black eyes of Mistress Henshaw.
"To one who feareth no harm," she answered, "it seldom haps. I trust
the wind may hold fair for your sailing," she added, glancing from the
small-paned window, "and that you may safely return to Boston as you are
minded."
"Thank you, I have hitherto been much favored by Providence in my
journeyings. Farewell, Mistress Henshaw."
The old dame received his adieu, and a moment later she watched from the
window his active young figure as he walked briskly away. She regarded
it intently until a corner hid him from sight. Then she turned back to
her room and her occupations.
"Providence, indeed!" she muttered half aloud, with a world of contempt
in her tone.
Then she turned to the thrifty, healthy tuberose and caressed its leaves
with her thin old fingers as if it were alive and could understand her
attentions.
The house in which this conversation took place was still standing a few
years since, the oldest in Boston, at the corner of Moon and Sun Court
streets. It was erected in 1669; its timber, tradition says, being cut
in the neighborhood. The upper story projected over the lower like a
frowning brow, from beneath which the windows shone at night like
the glowing eye-balls of a wild beast. It was a stout and almost
warlike-looking edifice, which preserved even up to the day when, in
1878, it was at length pulled down by the hand of progress, a certain
strongly individual appearance, which if less marked at the time when
John Friendleton bade Mistress Henshaw good-by, and the building was
thirty years old, must always have distinguished the dwelling from those
about it.
Dwellings, however, take much of their air from dwellers, and Mistress
Henshaw was likely to impart to any house she inhabited a bearing unlike
that of its neighbors. She was a dame to all appearances of some three
score winters, each frosty season having left its snow upon her hair.
Her figure was still erect, while her eyes were piercing and black and
capable of a glance of such strength and directness as almost to seem
supernatural.
It may have been from the power and fervor of this glance that Mistress
Henshaw acquired the uncanny reputation which she enjoyed in Boston.
As she moved with surprising energy about the house, overseeing and
directing her dumb negro servant Dinah, the eyes of passers-by who saw
her erect figure flit by the windows were half averted as if from some
deadly thing which yet held them with a weird fascination; and at
nightfall the children whom chance belated in the neighborhood went
skurrying past Dame Henshaw's house like frightened hares.
It is not perhaps to be told why Satan should have been able to
establish his kingdom among a people so devout and pious as the godly
inhabitants of the Massachusetts colony; yet we have it upon the
testimony of no less a man than the sage and reverend Cotton Mather,
whose sepulchre is with us unto this day, and upon the word of many
another scarcely less wise and devout, that the Father of Evil did
establish a peculiar and covenant people of his own in the midst of the
very elect of New England. It may be that it is always as it was in the
days of Job, and that the sons of God never assemble without finding in
their midst the dark form of Lucifer; for certain it is that the devil,
to quote the Rev. Cotton Mather's own words, "broke in upon the country
after as astonishing a manner as was ever heard of."
"Flashy people," quaintly and solemnly remarks the learned divine, "may
burlesque these things, but when hundreds of the most sober people in a
country where they have as much _mother-wit_ certainly as the rest of
mankind, know them to be _true_, nothing but the absurd and forward
spirit of _Sadducism_ can question them." From all of which, and from
much more which might be cited, it is evident that there was plenty of
witchcraft abroad in those days, whether Mistress Henshaw was concerned
therein or not.
It is sufficient to note that certain gossips scrupled not to declare
that Dame Henshaw was one of the accursed who bore the mark of the beast
and kept tryst at the orgies of the witches' sabbath, and the report
once started the facts in the case made little difference. Some of her
neighbors went so far as to declare that if the dame's residence were
forcibly changed from Sun Court street to Prison lane, the community
would be the better off.
Governor Belamont, however, in this last year of the century, was far
more exercised about pirates than concerning witches; and better pleased
at the capture of Captain Kidd, who had just fallen into his hands, than
if he had discovered all the wise women in the colonies. Public feeling,
moreover, was still in a reactionary state from the horrors of the Salem
delusion of 1692; and thus it came about that Mistress Henshaw was left
unmolested.
The second person in the dialogue given above, John Friendleton, was
an Englishman, and, if tradition be true, the son of an old lover of
Mistress Henshaw. He had taken up his abode with that lady upon his
arrival in the New World, whither he had been led, like many another
stout young blade of his day, by the hope of finding fair fortunes in
the growing colonies, and from the first he had been a favorite with
the old lady. It was whispered over certain of those tea-cups which
we now tenderly cherish from a respect for the memory of very great
grandmothers and an æsthetic enjoyment of the beauties of old china,
that it was by the aid of unhallowed power exercised in his behalf that
the young man was always so fortunate in his undertakings. There were
sinister tales of singular coincidences which had worked for his good,
and behind which the gossips believed to lie the instigating will of his
powerful landlady. Whether he himself was aware of this supernatural
aid, opinion was divided, but he was so frank and handsome withal that
the weight of opinion leaned toward acquitting him. The habit of New
England thought, moreover, was so opposed to imagining a witch as
exercising her power for anything but evil, that these rumors after all
gained no great or general credence.
The friendship between the dame and her lodger was perhaps based upon
mutual need. The young man gave her that full confidence which a
pure-minded youth enjoys bestowing upon an elderly female friend; while
in turn the childless old lady, alone and otherwise friendless, regarded
him with tender affection. She cherished any chance token from him, and
especially did she seem touched by this gift of a tuberose which he had
given her at parting. She knew how carefully he had tended and cherished
the plant, more rare then than now, and long after the sails of the
ship which conveyed him to England, whither he had been summoned by the
serious illness of a relative, had dipped under the horizon, the old
witch--if witch she were--sat regarding the flower with eyes in which
the tears glistened.
II.
It was early springtime when John Friendleton once more caught sight of
the beacon upon Trimountain, and the walls of the fort standing upon a
hill which has itself been removed by the enterprise of Boston. The few
months of the young man's absence, and the progress of time from one
century to another--for it was now 1700--had brought no great changes
to the town; but to him it seemed far from being the same he had left.
The first tidings he had received from Boston, after landing in England,
had been a letter telling of the death of Mistress Henshaw. She had set
out from Boston, so the letter informed him, to visit a sister living
somewhere in the wilds toward far Pemaquid, and had never returned. The
letter was written by one Rose Dalton, who claimed to be a niece of the
deceased, and who had come into possession of the small property of
Mistress Henshaw by virtue of a will made before the adventurous and
fatal journey. The writer added to her letter the information that she
should live on with dumb Dinah, holding as nearly as possible to the
fashion of her aunt's housekeeping.
When John stood once more upon the well-remembered threshold, he felt
half disposed to turn away and enter no more a place in which every
familiar sight could but call up sad memories. Then, endeavoring to
shake off his melancholy, he knocked.
A light, brisk step approached from within, and the door opened quickly.