AFTER DARKNESS.
When Miss Barhyte was one year younger she had gone with her mother to
pass the summer at Mt. Desert; and there, the morning of her arrival,
on the monster angle of Rodick’s porch, Lenox Leigh had caused himself
to be presented.
A week later Miss Barhyte and her new acquaintance were as much
gossiped about as was possible in that once unconventional resort.
Lenox Leigh was by birth a Baltimorean, and by profession a gentleman
of leisure, yet as the exercise of that profession is considered less
profitable in Baltimore than in New York, he had, for some time past,
been domiciled in the latter city. From the onset he was well received;
one of the Amsterdams had married a Leigh, his only sister had charmed
the heart of Nicholas Manhattan, and being in this wise connected with
two of the reigning families, he found the doors open as a matter
of course. But even in the absence of potent relatives, there was no
reason why he should not have been cordially welcomed. He was, it is
true, better read than nineteen men out of twenty; when he went to the
opera he preferred listening to the music to wandering from box to box;
he declined to figure in cotillons and at no dinner, at no supper had
he been known to drink anything stronger than claret and water.
But as an offset to these defects he was one of the most admirably
disorganized young men that ever trod Fifth avenue. He was without
beliefs and without prejudices; added to this he was indulgent to the
failings of others, or perhaps it would be better to say that he was
indifferent. It may be that the worst thing about him was that he was
not bad enough; his wickedness, such as there was of it, was purely
negative. A poet of the decadence of that period in fact when Rome had
begun to weary of debauchery without yet acquiring a taste for virtue,
a pre-mediæval Epicurean, let us say, could not have pushed a creedless
refinement to a greater height than he. There were men who thought him
a prig, and who said so when his back was turned.
It was in the company of this patrician of a later day that Miss
Barhyte participated in the enjoyments of Mt. Desert. Leigh was then in
his twenty-fifth year, and Miss Barhyte was just grazing the twenties.
He was attractive in appearance, possessed of those features which now
and then permit a man to do without beard or moustache, and his hair,
which was black, clung so closely to his head that at a distance it
might have been taken for the casque of a Saracen. To Miss Barhyte,
as already noted, a full share of beauty had been allotted. Together
they formed one of the most charming couples that it has ever been
the historian’s privilege to admire. And being a charming couple, and
constantly together, they excited much interest in the minds of certain
ladies who hailed from recondite Massachusettsian regions.
To this interest they were indifferent. At first, during the early
evenings when the stars were put out by the Northern Lights, they rowed
to the outermost shore of a neighboring island and lingered there for
hours in an enchanted silence. Later, in the midsummer nights, when
the harvest-moon was round and mellow, they wandered through the open
fields back into the Dantesque forests and strayed in the clinging
shadows and inviting solitudes of the pines.
From one such excursion they returned to the hotel at an hour which
startled the night porter, who, in that capricious resort, should have
lost his ability to be startled at anything.
That afternoon Mrs. Bunker Hill--one of the ladies to whom allusion
has been made--approached Miss Barhyte on the porch. “And are you to
be here much longer?” she asked, after a moment or two of desultory
conversation.
“The holidays are almost over,” the girl answered, with her radiant
smile.
“_Holidays_ do you call them? _Holidays_ did I understand you to say?
_I_ should have called them _fast_ days.” And, with that elaborate
witticism, Mrs. Bunker Hill shook out her skirts and sailed away.
Meanwhile an enveloping intimacy had sprung up between the two young
people. Their conversation need not be chronicled. There was in it
nothing unusual and nothing particularly brilliant; it was but a strain
from that archaic duo in which we have all taken part and which at each
repetition seems an original theme.
For the first time Miss Barhyte learned the intoxication of love. She
gave her heart ungrudgingly, without calculation, without forethought,
wholly, as a heart should be given and freely as had the gift been
consecrated in the nave of a cathedral. If she were generous why should
she be blamed? In the giving she found that mite of happiness, that one
unclouded day that is fair as June roses and dawns but once.
In September Miss Barhyte went with her mother on a visit in the
Berkshire Hills. Leigh journeyed South. A matter of business claimed
his attention in Baltimore, and when, early in November, he reached New
York the girl had already returned.
Since the death of Barhyte _père_ she had lived with her mother in a
small house in Irving Place, which they rented, furnished, by the year.
But on this particular autumn affairs had gone so badly, some stock had
depreciated, some railroad had been mismanaged, or some trustee had
speculated--something, in fact, had happened of which no one save those
personally interested ever know or ever care, and, as a result, the
house in Irving Place was given up, and the mother and daughter moved
into a boarding-house.
Of all this Lenox Leigh was made duly aware. Had he been able, and
could such a thing have been proper and conventional, he would have
been glad indeed to offer assistance; he was not selfish, but then
he was not rich, a condition which always makes unselfishness easy.
Matrimony was out of the question; his income was large enough to
permit him to live without running into debt, but beyond that its
flexibility did not extend, and in money matters, and in money matters
alone, Lenox Leigh was the most scrupulous of men. Beside, as the
phrase goes, he was not a marrying man--marriage, he was accustomed
to assert, means one woman more and one man less, and beyond that
definition he steadfastly declined to look, except to announce that,
like some other institutions, matrimony was going out of fashion.
That winter Miss Barhyte was more circumspect. It was not that her
affection had faltered, but in the monochromes of a great city the
primal glamour that was born of the fields and of the sea lost its
lustre. Then, too, Lenox in the correctness of evening dress was not
the same adorer who had lounged in flannels at her side, and the change
from the open country to the boarding-house parlor affected their
spirits unconsciously.
And so the months wore away. There were dinners and routs which the
young people attended in common, there were long walks on avenues
unfrequented by fashion, and there were evenings prearranged which they
passed together and during which the girl’s mother sat up stairs and
thought her own thoughts.
Mrs. Barhyte had been a pretty woman and inconsequential, as pretty
woman are apt to be. Her girlhood had been of the happiest, without a
noteworthy grief. She married one whose perfection had seemed to her
impeccable, and then suddenly without a monition the tide of disaster
set in. After the birth of a second child, Maida, her husband began to
drink, and drank, after each debauch with a face paler than before,
until disgrace came and with it a plunge into the North River. Her
elder child, a son, on whom she placed her remaining hopes, had barely
skirted manhood before he was taken from her to die of small-pox in a
hospital. Then came a depreciation in the securities which she held
and in its train the small miseries of the shabby genteel. Finally,
the few annual thousands that were left to her seemed to evaporate,
and as she sat in her room alone her thoughts were bitter. The
pretty inconsequential girl had developed into a woman, hardened yet
unresigned. At forty-five her hair was white, her face was colorless
as her widow’s cap, her heart was dead.
On the night when her daughter, under the chaperonage of Mrs. Hildred,
one of her few surviving relatives--returned from the reception, she
was still sitting up. At Mrs. Hildred’s suggestion a position, to which
allusion has been made, had been offered to her daughter, and that
position--the bringing up or rather the bringing out of a child of the
West--she determined that her daughter should accept. Afterwards--well,
perhaps for Maida there were other things in store, as for herself she
expected little. She would betake herself to some Connecticut village
and there wait for death.
When her daughter entered the room she was sitting in the erect
impassibility of a statue. Her eyes indeed were restless, but her face
was dumb, and in the presence of that silent desolation, the girl’s
tender heart was touched.
“Mother!” she exclaimed, “why did you wait up for me?” And she found a
seat on the sofa near her mother and took her hand caressingly in her
own. “Why are you up so late,” she continued, “are you not tired? Oh,
mother,” the girl cried, impetuously, “if you only knew what happened
to-night--what do you suppose?”
But Mrs. Barhyte shook her head, she had no thoughts left for
suppositions. And quickly, for the mere sake of telling something
that would arouse her mother if ever so little from her apathy, Maida
related Mr. Incoul’s offer. Her success was greater, if other, than she
anticipated. It was as though she had poured into a parching throat the
very waters of life. It was the post tenebras, lux. And what a light!
The incandescence of unexpected hope. A cataract of gold pieces could
not have been more dazzling; it was blinding after the shadows in which
she had groped. The color came to her cheeks, her hand grew moist.
“Yes, yes,” she cried, urging the girl’s narrative with a motion of the
head like to that of a jockey speeding to the post; “yes, yes,” she
repeated, and her restless eyes flamed with the heat of fever.
“Wasn’t it odd?” Maida concluded abruptly.
“But you accepted him?” the mother asked hoarsely, almost fiercely.
“Accepted him? No, of course not--he--why, mother, what is the matter?”
Engrossed in the telling of her story, the girl had not noticed her
mother’s agitation, but at her last words, at the answer to the
question, her wrist had been caught as in a vise, and eyes that
she no longer recognized--eyes dilated with anger, desperation and
revulsion of feeling--were staring into her own. Instinctively she drew
back--“Oh, mother, what is it?” And the mother bending forward, even as
the daughter retreated, hissed, “You shall accept him--I say you shall!”
“Mother, mother,” the girl moaned, helplessly.
“You shall accept him, do you hear me?”
“But, mother, how can I?” The tears were rolling down her cheeks, she
was frightened--the acute, agonizing fright of a child pursued. She
tried to free herself, but the hands on her wrist only tightened, and
her mother’s face, livid now, was close to her own.
“You shall accept him,” she repeated with the insistence of a
monomaniac. And the girl, with bended head, through the paroxysms of
her sobs, could only murmur in piteous, beseeching tones, “Mother!
mother!”
But to the plaint the woman was as deaf as her heart was dumb. She
indeed loosened her hold and the girl fell back on the lounge from
which they had both arisen, but it was only to summon from the
reservoirs of her being some new strength wherewith to vanquish. For a
moment she stood motionless, watching the girl quiver in her emotion,
and as the sobbing subsided, she stretched forth her hand again, and
caught her by the shoulder.
“Look up at me,” she said, and the girl, obedient, rose from her seat
and gazed imploringly in her mother’s face. No Neapolitan fish-wife
was ever more eager to barter her daughter than was this lady of
acknowledged piety and refinement, and the face into which her daughter
looked and shrank from bore no trace of pity or compassion. “Tell me if
you dare,” she continued, “tell me why it is that you refuse? What more
do you want? Are you a princess of the blood? Perhaps you will say you
don’t love him! And what if you don’t? I loved your father and look at
me now! Beside, you have had enough of that--there, don’t stare at me
in that way. I know, and so do you. Now take your choice--accept this
offer or get to your lover--and this very night. As for me, I disown
you, I--”
But the flood of words was interrupted--the girl had fainted. The
simulachre of death had extended its kindly arms, and into them she
had fallen as into a grateful release.
By the morrow her spirit was broken. Two days later Mr. Incoul called
with what success the reader has been already informed, and on that
same evening in obedience to the note, came Lenox Leigh.