FATAL LOVE.
Childhood’s lip and cheek
Mantling beneath its earnest brow of thought;
And in the flute-like voice murmuring low,
Is woman’s tenderness, how soon her woe!
Her lot is on thee, silent tears to weep,
And patient smiles to wear through painful hours,
And sumless riches from affection’s deep,
To pour on broken reeds—a wasted shower!
And to raise idols and to find them clay,
And to bewail that worship—therefore pray.—HEMANS.
He came, even before be was expected. By some happy chance the train was
in half an hour earlier than usual.
Old Mrs. Lyon had gone into the “study,” to have a chat with the judge.
Drusilla was alone in the drawing-room, when a cab dashed swiftly up to
the street-door, the bell rang sharply, and was answered quickly; and
there was a pleasant bustle of arrival in the hall, and Mr. Alexander
burst into the drawing-room.
He looked not fatigued or travel-stained, but flushed and excited with
exercise and anticipation.
With an irrepressible cry of joy, Drusilla sprung to meet him, and then
suddenly recoiled, blushed and trembled between delight, timidity and
embarrassment.
Alexander caught her hand, gazed in her face, and exclaimed:
“Why—Who are you? I ought to know. Your face seems familiar, and
yet—DRUSILLA!” he suddenly cried, as he recognized and caught her up in
his arms, and covered her face with kisses.
“Welcome! Oh, welcome!—I am so glad you have come at last!—I never was
so happy in my life!” she tried to say, as she dropped her head upon his
shoulder and wept with delight.
“And my child is the first one to welcome me!” said Alexander, sitting
down on a sofa and drawing her upon his knee, where she sat, painfully
embarrassed yet unwilling to move, lest she should wound his affection
on this, the first day of his return.
“All are well?” he inquired.
“Quite well,” she answered.
“Ay, so the servant told me at the door. Where is my mother?”
“Just stepped from the room. I expect her back every instant.”
“Why, what a beautiful girl you are growing to be!” he said, looking
down with earnest admiration at the long, black eye-lashes that, being
cast down, shaded and softened the crimson cheeks.
“Come! look up at me; I wish to see if your eyes are changed. I never
could decide whether they were gray or hazel. Let me see!” he said,
putting his hand under her chin to lift her face.
She looked up with a quick and quickly withdrawn glance, and her cheeks
deepened in their hue. She hated to sit on his knee, where years ago she
had sat a hundred times, and she hated to hurt his feelings by leaving
him; and she doubted whether she loved him now as well as she did then,
and whether her love was not turning into something very much like
distrust and dread; and she wondered why this should be so, and secretly
blamed and disbelieved in herself.
“Am I so altered by travel that you don’t like to look at me?” he asked,
smilingly.
“Oh no, sir, you are not altered, except to be—improved,” she forced
herself to say, with courtesy.
They were interrupted.
“She is too great a girl for that sort of thing now, Mr. Alexander, if
you please. Be so good as to put her down, sir.”
It was the voice of the housekeeper that spoke, as she entered the room.
“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Sterling,” said Alexander, laughing, and
releasing his favorite; “but it is hard to realize that my little pet is
growing up.”
“She is thirteen, sir,” curtly answered the housekeeper.
“Dear me! Is she so? Why I dandled her when she was a baby! What an old
man I am growing to be, to be sure!”
“Not quite old enough to be her father, Mr. Alexander, and therefore too
young to make a pet of her.”
“Come, now, this is a pretty way to welcome me home with a rebuke the
first thing.”
“I am very glad to see you home, sir, however; and—Here is Mrs. Lyon!”
The housekeeper cut her speech short, as the old lady entered the room.
“Oh, my son! my son!” she cried, and fell sobbing for joy in his arms.
The housekeeper withdrew, taking her daughter with her, and leaving the
mother and son alone together.
Arrived in her own room, Mrs. Sterling sat her daughter down before her,
and began to lecture her.
Drusilla—she preached—must not allow Mr. Alexander to pet her and caress
her _now_, as he had done before he went away. Drusilla was too great a
girl now, for that sort of thing. Truly, she was not a woman yet; but
she was growing into one, and so the familiarities that were quite
innocent when she was a child, would be extremely improper now that she
was almost a young woman. Such was the purport of the sermon.
Drusilla trembled excessively, and wept a little over this exordium. In
her heart she agreed with it, but grieved over it.
It was just such a lecture as any prudent mother might have given her
growing daughter under the circumstances. But Drusilla, while
acquiescing in its propriety, was shocked by its plainness.
Their interview was interrupted by the voice of Mrs. Lyon, who came
herself in search of her favorite.
“Where are you, Drusilla, my dear? Come and thank your benefactor for
all that he has done for you, and show him how much you have profited by
his kindness,” said the old lady, as she came in.
Blushing and embarrassed, the girl followed the lady to the
drawing-room.
Mr. Alexander had changed his travelling suit for an evening dress, and
was sitting talking to Judge Lyon about the voyage home.
Drusilla, at a sign from Mrs. Lyon, seated herself near the talkers.
“I want you to see how much your protegée has improved, Alick,” said
Alick’s mother.
“Oh, I _have_ seen, Madam,” answered Alexander with a smile.
“After supper I want her to sing and play for you. She has a wonderful
proficiency in music,” said Mrs. Lyon.
“I shall be glad to have a specimen of her skill, mother,” said the
young man, turning to his father, and taking up the thread of the broken
conversation, in order to relieve Drusilla, who was embarrassed by all
this notice.
What between her own half-consciousness and her mother’s severe lecture,
Drusilla was perplexed and distressed. The great pleasure she had
anticipated from the arrival of Alexander was mixed with strange pain—a
pain not the less poignant because she could not understand it. To
become the cold and formal stranger to him that her mother wished her to
be, seemed impossible; while to continue the familiar child-pet that she
had hitherto been to him was not to be thought of. If he had only been
her brother, so that she might have had a right to his caresses, how
happy she could have been, she dared to think.
But as it was, she could scarcely venture to glance at him, because each
glance thrilled her soul with such strange, wild emotion, half delight,
half dread. Ah, friends, she was a child of the sun, fervent, earnest,
devoted in all her ardent soul. She was already, all unknown to herself,
deeply and passionately attached to Alexander Lyon. The budding love of
years had this evening burst into full bloom. And yet it was even more
religion than love, and more worship than passion.
Supper was announced and every one arose.
“Come, Drusilla, you are the only young lady present,” said Alexander,
taking her hand to lead her in to supper.
He felt that small hand flutter and throb within his own like the heart
of a captured bird. He turned suddenly and looked at her. Her eyes were
cast down, and her cheeks were crimson. He gazed on her for a moment in
grave silence, and then slightly frowning, led her on into the dining
room, and placed her in a chair at the table. He paid her all due
attention at the supper, but with a certain reserve that he had never
used with her before.
The evening meal was, notwithstanding this, a very happy one.
The judge chatted gaily with his restored son, encouraging him to talk
of his wanderings in the old world.
The old lady listened with pleased attention, and only once in a while
broke her silence to ask whether he had been presented to all the queens
in Europe, and which was the most beautiful woman among them, or some
such question as that.
Her son answered that he saw no woman in Europe prettier than some he
found at home; and he glanced at Drusilla with a smile.
The girl beaming in the light of his countenance, and drinking in the
music of his voice was intensely happy and—vaguely wretched.
When supper was over they went back into the drawing-room, and Mrs. Lyon
made Drusilla sit down to the pianoforte and play and sing for
Alexander.
He shrugged his shoulders at the proposition, but politely acquiesced
and prepared to be bored. Alexander was a connoisseur in music, and he
had heard the very best singers of the day. Consequently he had little
patience with the crude efforts of young misses.
She, Drusilla, began with a very simple song—chosen in compliment to the
newly-arrived son:
“Home again! home again! from a foreign shore,
And oh, it fills my soul with joy to meet my friends once more.”
At first her voice trembled slightly; but the tremor only added to its
pathos; and as she went on it gained strength and volume. She sang with
much feeling and expression. And Alexander was surprised, and pleased
and profoundly affected.
“My child, you sing well; I tell you so, who have heard the best singers
in the world. Your voice has reached the depths of my heart, Drusilla,
and awakened it to a deeper consciousness of its joy in home-coming,” he
whispered as she finished her song.
She bowed her head, partly in meek acknowledgment of this praise, and
partly to conceal the blush that overspread her cheeks.
“Oh, that little song is very pretty and very appropriate, but it is
nothing to what she can do. Sing Casta Diva, my dear,” said Mrs. Lyon.
Drusilla raised an imploring glance to the old lady’s face, but met with
no reprieve there.
“Come, my dear! the Casta Diva!” she repeated.
With a deprecating look at Alexander the girl took down another volume
of music, and turned to the selections from Norma. The piece chosen by
Mrs. Lyon was a great trial to any immature and half-cultivated voice
like Drusilla’s, however excellent the quality of that voice might
naturally be; and Drusilla knew this, and thence her imploring and
deprecating glances.
“You are too exacting, mother. She cannot sing that; I do not think any
woman under thirty years old could, unless she had had a very remarkable
and precocious experience,” said Alexander, laughing.
“Ay, you say that because you know nothing of the intuitions of genius.
You must hear your protégée sing, and you will understand better,” said
Mrs. Lyon.
Thus urged on, Drusilla began to sing. Her voice arose tremulously, as
at first, like a young bird fluttering out of its nest, but then it
soared and swelled, gaining power and volume, until it filled all the
air with the music of that wild, impassioned, agonized, terrible
invocation and appeal.
Certainly Drusilla had never known remorse, anguish or despair, yet all
these wailed forth in her soul-thrilling tones.
She ceased, and dropped her head, exhausted, on her book.
Alexander made no comment, but took her hand and led her from the
instrument, and then went and resolutely shut it down.
“There! what do you think of that?” demanded the old lady, triumphantly.
“I will tell you some other time,” said Alexander, and he took and
lighted a bedroom candle, and put it into Drusilla’s hand, and said:
“Good night! go to bed, my child.”
Drusilla took the light and turned to the old lady, and held up her face
for a kiss.
And Mrs. Lyon stooped and touched her lips, saying, with a smile:
“I suppose I may kiss you _now_.”
Alexander held the door open until the girl had passed out, and then he
shut it after her and returned to his seat.
“Do you know, Alick, why I said to Drusilla just now, ‘I suppose I may
kiss you _now_?’”
“No, mother.”
“Then I’ll tell you. You remember how you kissed her when you went
away?”
“I do.”
“Ah, Alick! your departure nearly killed your poor little pet. If you
had been her own father, she could not have grieved after you more than
she did. She had a low fever, and after she got well she would not let
any one kiss her. She said that you had kissed her last, and that no one
else should touch her lips until you should return and kiss her again.”
“Did she now, really,” exclaimed Alexander, with emotion.
“She did indeed, and she kept her word.”
Alexander reflected a moment, and then spoke:
“Mother!”
“Eh!”
“Tell her teachers that I do not wish and will not permit, Drusilla to
learn opera music or love songs. Let her confine herself to sacred music
only.”
“But Alick, my son, how absurd! I am particular enough, the dear knows,
but I don’t see any harm in good opera music. All young ladies learn it,
and you desired that she should learn all that young ladies do.”
“I was hasty; and now I say that she must give up opera music and such
like. Let her learn and practice sacred music to her heart’s content and
her soul’s salvation. Let music be the means, not of drawing her
affections down to earthly follies, but of fixing them more steadfastly
upon heavenly things.”
“Alick, you do astonish me.”
“I astonish myself, sometimes.”
“Pray have you got religion, as the phrase goes?”
“No; I wish to the Lord I had. But I want her to have it. Mother!” he
said, with sudden energy, going towards the old lady, “you don’t know
_how_ I love that child; you can’t feel how I love her—how near and dear
she seems to me—how near and dear she has always seemed since I first
looked into her soft, sweet, patient eyes.”
“I believe you love her as much as if you were her father.”
“Her father! well, I suppose my affection for her has something paternal
in it, but fathers seldom love their daughters as I love her. Instance:
Fathers are willing to give their daughters away in marriage, but I am
very sure that I would rather see Drusilla dead than married.”
The old lady stared at the young man, utterly unable to comprehend him.
He continued:
“Mother, I tremble for that child. I trembled when I heard her sing that
Casta Diva as I never heard a good or happy woman sing it. There could
not have been _memory_—there must have been _prophecy_ in those wild,
despairing wails.”
“There was intuition, and nothing more. But you have been to Germany,
and I suppose you have grown mystical,” said Mrs. Lyon.
“By which you mean mad. Very likely. Perhaps my previsions are
illusions: but mother, I nevertheless must _insist_ that Drusilla shall
drop opera and take up church music. Let her teachers know.”
“Certainly, Alick. And now light my candle and wake up your father; it
is bed time.”
Alexander lighted and handed the wax taper to his mother, and then
gently roused his father, who had been comfortably napping in his easy
chair.
And the trio separated and went to rest.