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An Ambitious Man, a novel by Ella Wheeler Wilcox |
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Chapter 18 |
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_ CHAPTER XVIII Joy Irving had come to Beryngford at the time when the discoveries of the quarries caused that village to spring into sudden prominence as a growing city. Newspaper accounts of the building of the new church, and the purchase of a large pipe organ, chanced to fall under her eye just as she was planning to leave the scene of her unhappiness. "I can at least only fail if I try for the position of organist there," she said, "and if I succeed in this interior town, I can hide myself from all the world without incurring heavy expense." So all unconsciously Joy fled from the metropolis to the very place from which her mother had vanished twenty-two years before. She had been the organist in the grand new Episcopalian Church now for three years; and she had made many cordial acquaintances who would have become near friends, if she had encouraged them. But Joy's sweet and trustful nature had received a great shock in the knowledge of the shadow which hung about her birth. Where formerly she had expected love and appreciation from everyone she met, she now shrank from forming new ties, lest new hurts should await her. She was like a flower in whose perfect heart a worm had coiled. Her entire feeling about life had undergone a change. For many weeks after her self-imposed exile, she had been unable to think of her mother without a mingled sense of shame and resentment; the adoring love she had borne this being seemed to die with her respect. After a time the bitterness of this sentiment wore away, and a pitying tenderness and sorrow took its place; but from her heart the twin angels, Love and Forgiveness, were absent. She read her mother's manuscript over, and tried to argue herself into the philosophy which had sustained the author of her being through all these years. But her mind was shaped far more after the conventional pattern of her paternal ancestors, who had been New England Puritans, and she could not view the subject as Berene had viewed it. In spite of the ideality which her mother had woven about him, Joy entertained the most bitter contempt for the unknown man who was her father, and the whole tide of her affections turned lavishly upon the memory of Mr Irving, whom she felt now more than ever so worthy of her regard. Reason as she would on the supremacy of love over law, yet the bold, unpleasant fact remained that she was the child of an unwedded mother. She shrank in sensitive pain from having this story follow her, and the very consciousness that her mother's experience had been an exceptional one, caused her the greater dread of having it known and talked of as a common vulgar liaison. There are two things regarding which the world at large never asks any questions--namely, How a rich man made his money, and how an erring woman came to fall. It is enough for the world to know that he is rich--that fact alone opens all doors to him, as the fact that the woman has erred closes them to her. There was a common vulgar creature in Beryngford, whose many amours and bold defiance of law and order rendered her name a synonym for indecency. This woman had begun her career in early girlhood as a mercenary intriguer; and yet Joy Irving knew that the majority of people would make small distinctions between the conduct of this creature and that of her mother, were the facts of Berene's life and her own birth to be made public. The fear that the story would follow her wherever she went became an absolute dread with her, and caused her to live alone and without companions, in the midst of people who would gladly have become her warm friends, had she permitted. Her book of "Impressions" reflected the changes which had taken place in the complexion of her mind during these years. Among its entries were the following:-
No love is sanctioned by God, which shatters human hearts. Fathers are only distantly related to their children; love for the male parent is a matter of education. The devil macadamises all his pavements. A natural child has no place in an unnatural world. When we cannot respect our parents, it is difficult to keep our ideal of God. Love is a mushroom, and lust is its poisonous counterpart. It is a pity that people who despise civilisation should be so uncivil as to stay in it. There is always darkest Africa. The extent of a man's gallantry depends on the goal. He follows the good woman to the borders of Paradise and leaves her with a polite bow; but he follows the bad woman to the depths of hell. It is easy to trust in God until he permits us to suffer. The dentist seems a skilled benefactor to mankind when we look at his sign from the street. When we sit in his chair he seems a brute, armed with devil's implements. An anonymous letter is the bastard of a diseased mind. An envious woman is a spark from Purgatory. The consciousness that we have anything to hide from the world stretches a veil between our souls and heaven. We cannot reach up to meet the gaze of God, when we are afraid to meet the eyes of men. It may be all very well for two people to make their own laws, but they have no right to force a third to live by them. Virtue is very secretive about her payments, but the whole world hears of it when vice settles up. We have a sublime contempt for public opinion theoretically so long as it favours us. When it turns against us we suffer intensely from the loss of what we claimed to despise. When the fruit must apologise for the tree, we do not care to save the seed. It is only when God and man have formed a syndicate and agreed upon their laws, that marriage is a safe investment. The love that does not protect its object would better change its name. When we say OF people what we would not say TO them, we are either liars or cowards. The enmity of some people is the greatest compliment they can pay us.
As our fears, like our wishes, when strong and unremitting, prove to be magnets, the result of Joy's despondent fears came in the scandal which the Baroness had planted and left to flourish and grow in Beryngford after her departure. An hour before the services began, on the day of Preston Cheney's burial, Joy learned at whose rites she was to officiate as organist. A pang of mingled emotions shot through her heart at the sound of his name. She had seen this man but a few times, and spoken with him but once; yet he had left a strong impression upon her memory. She had felt drawn to him by his sympathetic face and atmosphere, the sorrow of his kind eyes, and the keen appreciation he had shown in her art; and just in the measure that she had been attracted by him, she had been repelled by the three women to whom she was presented at the same time. She saw them all again mentally, as she had seen them on that and many other days. Mrs Cheney and Alice, with their fretful, plain, dissatisfied faces, and their over-burdened costumes, and the Baroness, with her cruel heart gazing through her worn mask of defaced beauty. She had been conscious of a feeling of overwhelming pity for the kind, attractive man who made the fourth of that quartette. She knew that he had obtained honours and riches from life, but she pitied him for his home environment. She had felt so thankful for her own happy home life at the time; and she remembered, too, the sweet hope that lay like a closed-up bud in the bottom of her heart that day, as the quartette moved away and left her standing alone with Arthur Stuart. It was only a few weeks later that the end came to all her dreams, through that terrible anonymous letter. It was the Baroness who had sent it, she knew--the Baroness whose early hatred for her mother had descended to the child. "And now I must sit in the same house with her again," she said, "and perhaps meet her face to face; and she may tell the story here of my mother's shame, even as I have felt and feared it must yet be told. How strange that a 'love child' should inspire so much hatred!" Joy had carefully refrained from reading New York papers ever since she left the city; and she had no correspondents. It was her wish and desire to utterly sink and forget the past life there. Therefore she knew nothing of Arthur Stuart's marriage to the daughter of Preston Cheney. She thought of the rector as dead to her. She believed he had given her up because of the stain upon her birth, and, bitter as the pain had been, she never blamed him. She had fought with her love for him and believed that it was buried in the grave of all other happy memories. But as the earth is wrenched open by volcanic eruptions and long buried corpses are revealed again to the light of day, so the unexpected sight of Arthur Stuart, as he took his place beside Mabel and the Baroness during the funeral services, revealed all the pent- up passion of her heart to her own frightened soul. To strong natures, the greater the inward excitement the more quiet the exterior; and Jay passed through the services, and performed her duties, without betraying to those about her the violent emotions under which she laboured. The rector of Beryngford Church requested her to remain for a few moments, and consult with him on a matter concerning the next week's musical services. It was from him Joy learned the relation which Arthur Stuart bore to the dead man, and that Beryngford was the former home of the Baroness. Her mother's manuscript had carefully avoided all mention of names of people or places. Yet Joy realised now that she must be living in the very scene of her mother's early life; she longed to make inquiries, but was prevented by the fear that she might hear her mother's name mentioned disrespectfully. The days that followed were full of sharp agony for her. It was not until long afterward that she was able to write her "impressions" of that experience. In the extreme hour of joy or agony we formulate no impressions; we only feel. We neither analyse nor describe our friends or enemies when face to face with them, but after we leave their presence. When the day came that she could write, some of her reflections were thus epitomised:
Suppressed steam and suppressed emotion are dangerous things to deal with. The infant who wants its mother's breast, and the woman who wants her lover's arms, are poor subjects to reason with. Though you tell the former that fever has poisoned the mother's milk, or the latter that destruction lies in the lover's embrace, one heeds you no more than the other. The accumulated knowledge of ages is sometimes revealed by a kiss. Where wisdom is bliss, it is folly to be ignorant. Some of us have to crucify our hearts before we find our souls. A woman cannot fully know charity until she has met passion; but too intimate an acquaintance with the latter destroys her appreciation of all the virtues. To feel temptation and resist it, renders us liberal in our judgment of all our kind. To yield to it, fills us with suspicion of all. There is an ecstatic note in pain which is never reached in happiness. The death of a great passion is a terrible thing, unless the dawn of a greater truth shines on the grave. Love ought to have no past tense. Love partakes of the feline nature. It has nine lives. It seems to be difficult for some of us to distinguish between looseness of views, and charitable judgments. To be sorry for people's sins and follies and to refuse harsh criticism is right; to accept them as a matter of course is wrong. Love and sorrow are twins, and knowledge is their nurse. The pathway of the soul is not a steady ascent, but hilly and broken. We must sometimes go lower, in order to get higher. That which is to-day, and will be to-morrow, must have been yesterday. I know that I live, I believe that I shall live again, and have lived before. Earth life is the middle rung of a long ladder which we climb in the dark. Though we cannot see the steps below, or above, they exist all the same. The materialist denying spirit is like the burr of the chestnut denying the meat within. The inevitable is always right. Prayer is a skeleton key that opens unexpected doors. We may not find the things we came to seek, but we find other treasures. The pessimist belongs to God's misfit counter. Art, when divorced from Religion, always becomes a wanton. To forget benefits we have received is a crime. To remember benefits we have bestowed is a greater one. To some men a woman is a valuable book, carefully studied and choicely guarded behind glass doors. To others, she is a daily paper, idly scanned and tossed aside. _ |
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