Chapter 6. Reckless Words And Deeds

________________________________________________
_ Chapter VI. Reckless Words and Deeds

Light carriages now began to wheel rapidly up to the entrance, and were followed soon by the lumbering and heavily-laden stages. Joyous greetings and merry repartee made the scene pleasant to witness even by one who, like Van Berg, had no part in it. Stanton, who at this moment joined him, drew his special attention to a thin and under-sized gentleman somewhat past middle age, who mounted the steps with a tread that was as inelastic as his face was devoid of animation.

"There is poor Uncle Mayhew," remarked the young man indifferently. "I suppose I must go and speak to him."

"Mr. Mayhew?" said Van Berg, in some surprise. "You have not spoken of him before. I was not aware that there was any such person in existence."

"You are not to blame for that," replied Stanton with a shrug. "You might have been one of the friends of the family and scarcely have learned the fact. Indeed, poor man, he only about half exists, for he has been so long overshadowed by his fashionable wife and daughter, that he is but a sickly plant of a man."

Van Berg saw that the greeting received by Mr. Mayhew from his wife and daughter was very undemonstrative to say the least, and that then the gentleman quickly disappeared, as if fearing that he might be in the way.

"From my very limited means of judging," Van Berg remarked, "I cannot see anything more objectionable in the head of the family than in the other members."

"Your phrase, 'head of the family,' as applied to Mr. Mayhew, makes me smile. His name figures at the head of the large family bills, but scarcely elsewhere with much prominence. You will soon learn, if you remain here, that Mr. Mayhew imbibes rather more than is good for him, so I may as well mention the disagreeable fact at once. But to do the poor man justice, I suppose he drinks to keep his spirits up to the ordinary level, rather than from any hope of becoming a little jolly occasionally. Why my aunt married him I scarcely know; and yet I have often thought that he might be a very different did she not so quench him by a manner all her own. As it is, his life seems to consist of toiling and moiling all the week, and of stolidly and joylessly soaking himself into semi-stupidity on Sunday. It this wretched state of affairs could be kept secret I would not mention it even to you, my intimate friend; but, since it continues no secret wherever they happen to remain for any length of time, I would rather tell you the exact truth at once, than permit you to guess at it through distorted rumors. As you artists occasionally express yourselves concerning pictures, so I suppose you will think that this family, with all its wealth is quite lacking in tone."

"Well, Stanton, I must admit that I find myself chiefly inclined towards the subdued and neutral-tinted Mr. Mayhew. If you have a chance I wish you would introduce me to him."

"Are you in earnest?"

"Certainly."

"Then I'll ask him to smoke with us after supper. Well, Van, I congratulate you again that your correct and cultivated taste enabled you to see the fatal flaw in my cousin's beauty. If you had been bewitched by her, and had insisted on imagining (as so many others have done) that her faultless features were the reflex of what she is or could become in mind and character, I might have had a good deal of trouble with you; for you are a mulish fellow when you get a purpose in your head. I don't care how badly singed the average run of moths become. You may see two or three fluttering around to-night, if you care to look on, but I wish no friend of mine to make sport, at serious cost to himself, for yonder incorrigible coquette, if she is my cousin. But after what you have seen and now know, you would be safe enough, even if predisposed to folly. The little minx! but I punished her well for her spite this afternoon."

"O most prudent Ulysses! you have indeed filled my ears with wax. I thank you all the same as if my danger were greater."

"Well, view them all with such charity as you can. I hope you were not very much annoyed by the loss of your ride. The young lady will not be in a hurry to play such a trick again. I'll join you after supper in this your favorite and out-of-the-way corner."

"Was beauty ever environed within and without by such desperately prosaic and inartistic surroundings?" mused Van Berg. "It glistens like a lost jewel in an ash-barrel; or, more correctly, it is like an exquisite flower that nature has perversely made the outcome of a rank and poisonous vine. Of course the flower is poisonous also, and as soon as its first delicate bloom is over, will grow as rank and repulsive as the vine that bears it. Like produces like; and with such parentage, what hope is there for her? I am glad no one suspects my absurd project; for every hour convinces me of its impracticability. The ancient Undine was a myth, and my modern Undine might be called a white lie, but one that will grow darker every day. At a distance she presents the semblance of a very fair woman, but I have been unable to detect a single element yet that will prevent her from developing into an old and ugly hag, in spite of all that art and costume can do for her."

After supper Stanton brought Mr. Mayhew to Van Berg's retired nook, and the artist gave the hand of the weary, listless man such a cordial pressure as to cause him a slight surprise, but after satisfying his faint interest by a brief glance, he turned the back of his chair towards all the gay company, although it contained his wife and daughter, puffed mechanically at his cigar, and looked vacantly into space. Before the evening was over, however, Van berg had drawn from him several quite animated remarks, and secured the promise that he would join him and Stanton in a ramble immediately after breakfast the following morning.

Nor had the young man been oblivious of the daughter who now seemed in her native element. From his dusky point of observation he caught frequent glimpses of her, now whirling through a waltz in the parlor, now talking and laughing in a rather pronounced way from the midst of a group of gentlemen, and again coquettishly stealing off with one of them through the moonlit walks. Her manner, whether assumed or real, was that of extravagant gaiety. Occasionally she seemed to glance towards their obscure corner, but neither she nor her mother came to seek the man who had been toiling all the week to maintain their idle luxury.

As Mrs. Mayhew and her daughter were preparing for dinner on the following day, Mr. Mayhew entered with a brisker step than usual.

"Why, father, where have you been?" Ida asked, surprised by the fact that he had not been drinking and dozing in his room all the morning.

"I have been shown a glimpse of something that I have not seen for many years."

"Indeed, and what is that?"

"Beauty that seemed beautiful."

"That's a compliment to us," remarked Mrs. Mayhew, acidly.

"I mean the kind of beauty which does one good and makes a man wish that he were a man."

"Do you mean an unmarried man?" said his wife with a discordant laugh.

"Probably your own wishes suggested that speech, madam," replied the husband, bitterly.

"And pray, where did you find so much beauty?" said Mrs. Mayhew, ignoring his last remark.

"On a breezy hill-side. It's a kind of beauty, too, that one can enjoy without paying numberless bills for its enhancement. I refer to that of the scenery."

"Oh," remarked Mrs. Mayhew, indifferently; "it would have been more to your credit if you had gone to church instead of tramping around the fields."

"I think the fields have done more for me than church for you."

"Why so?" was the sharp response.

"They have at least kept me from indulging in one bad habit. I am sober."

"They do not keep you from making ill-natured remarks," said Mrs. Mayhew, sailing out of the room fully bedizened for the solemnity of dinner.

"You say you were 'shown' all this beauty," remarked Ida, who was giving the finishing touches to her toilet before a large mirror, and by whom the frequent bickerings of her parents were scarcely noted. "Who officiated as showman?"

"A man who understands the beauties of a landscape so well that he could make them visible even to my dim eyes, and attractive to my deadened and besotted nature. I'd give all the world if I could be young, strong, and hopeful like him, again. It was good of him--yes, good of him, to try to cheer a stranger with pleasant thoughts and sights. I suppose you are acquainted with Mr. Van Berg, since he is a friend of Ik's?"

"No, I'm not," was the sharp reply; "nor do I wish to be."

"Why not?" asked Mr. Mayhew in some surprise.

"It's sufficient that I don't like him."

"He's not your style, I suppose you mean to say?"

"Indeed he is not."

"So much worse for your style, Ida."

She was sweeping petulantly from the room when her father added with a depth of feeling very unlike his wonted apathy: "O, Ida, it were better that all three of us had never been born than to live as we do! Your life and your mother's is froth, and mine is mud. How I hated it all this bright June morning, as Mr. Van Berg gave me a glimpse into another and better world!"

"Do you mean to say that Mr. Van Berg presumed to criticise my mode of life?" Ida asked with a darkening face.

"Oh, no, no! How small and egotistical all your ideas are! He never mentioned you, and probably never thought of you. He only took a little pains that a tired and dispirited man might see and feel the eternal beauty and freshness of nature, as one might give, in passing, a cup of water to a traveller."

"I don't see what reason you have for feeling and appearing so forlornly, thus asking for sympathy from strangers, as it were, and causing it to seem as if we were making a martyr of you. As for this artist, with his superior airs, I detest him. He never loses a chance to annoy and mortify me. I've no doubt he hoped you would come home and tell us, as you have, how much better he was than---"

"There, there, quit that kind of talk or I'll be drunk in half an hour." said her father, harshly. "If you had the heart of a woman, let alone that of a daughter, you would thank the man who had unwittingly kept me from making a beast of myself for one day at least. Go down to your dinner, I'm in no mood for eating."

She went without a word, but with a more severe compunction of conscience than she had ever felt before in her life. Her father's face and words smote her with a keen reproach, piercing the thick armor of her vanity and selfishness. She saw, for a moment, how unnatural and unlovely she must appear to him, in spite of her beauty, and the thought crossed her mind:

"Mr. Van Berg despises me because he sees me in the same light. How I hate his cold, critical eyes!"

Even at his far remove Van Berg could see that she was ill at ease during the dinner hour. There would be times of forced and unnatural gayety, followed by a sudden cloud upon the brow and an abstracted air, as if her thoughts had naught to do with the chattering group around her. It would also appear that her appetite was flagging unusually, and once or twice he thought she darted an angry look towards him.

As if something were burdening her mind, she at last left the table hastily, before the others were through with their dessert.

As may be surmised, she sought her father's room. Receiving no response to her knock, she entered and saw at a glance the confirmation of her fears. Her father sat in an arm-chair with his head upon his breast. A brandy bottle stood on the table beside him. At the sound of her step he looked up for a moment with heavy eyes, and mumbled:

"He ain't of your style, is he? Nor of mine, either. Froth and mud!"

Ida gave a sudden stamp of rage and disgust, and whirled from the room.

Van Berg happened to see her as she descended to the main hall-way, and her face was so repulsive as to suggest to him the lines from Shakespeare:

"In nature there's no blemish, but the mind;
None can be called deformed, but the unkind;
Virtue is beauty; but the beauteous--evil
Are empty trunks, o'er flourished by the devil."

That afternoon and evening her reckless levity and open coquetry secured unfavorable comment not only from the artist, but from others far more indifferent, whose attention she half compelled by a manner that did not suggest spring violets.

Van Berg was disgusted. He was less versed in human nature than art, and did not recognize in the forced and obtrusive gayety the effort to stifle the voice of an aroused conscience. Even to her blunted sense of right it seemed a hateful and disgraceful truth that a stranger had helped her father towards manhood, an that she had destroyed the transient and salutary influence. Her complacency had been disturbed from the time her cousin had repeated Van Berg's remark, "I could not speak civilly to a lady that I had just seen giggling and flirting through one of Beethoven's finest symphonies;" and now, through an unexpected chain of circumstances, she had, for the first time in her life, reached a point of self-disgust and self-loathing. Such a moral condition is evil's opportunity when a disposition towards penitence or reform is either absent or resisted. The thought, therefore, of her father's drunkenness that day, and of herself as the immediate cause, made her so wretched and reckless that she tried to forget her miserable self in excitement, as he had in lethargy. Even her mother chided her, asking if she did not "remember the day."

"Indeed, I shall have occasion to remember it," was her ambiguous answer; "but Mondays in the country are always blue, and I'll do my repenting then. If I were a good Catholic I'd hunt up a priest to-morrow."

"I'll be your father-confessor to-day," said a black-eyed young man, twirling his mustache.

"You, Mr. Sibely? You would lead me into more naughtiness than you would help me out of, twice over. For my confessor I would choose an ancient man who had had his dinner. What a comfortable belief it is, to be sure! All one has to do is to buzz one's sins through a grating (that is like an indefinite number of key-holes) to a dozing old gentleman inside, and then away with a heart like a feather, to load up again. I'd bless the man who could convert me to a Papist."

But she hated the man who had made her feel the need of absolution, and who seemed an inseparable part of all her disagreeable experiences. Although he appeared to avoid any locality in which she remained, she observed his eyes turned towards her more than once before the day closed, and it exasperated her almost beyond all endurance to believe that their expression was only that of contempt.

She might have been a little better pleased, perhaps, if she had known that she made the artist almost as uncomfortable as herself. Never before had there seemed to him so great a contrast between her beauty and herself, her features and her face. The latter could not fail to excite his increased disgust, while the former was so great that he found himself becoming resolutely bent on redeeming them from what seemed a horrid profanation. In accordance with one of his characteristics, the more difficult the project seemed, the more obstinately fixed became his purpose to discover whether she had a mind of sufficient calibre to transform her into what she might be, in contrast with what she was. The more he saw of her the more his interest as an artist, and, indirectly, as a student of character, was deepened. If she had no mind worth naming he would give the problem up to the solution of time, which, however, promised nothing but a gradual fading away of all beauty, and the intensifying of inward deformity until fully reproduced in outward ugliness. _

Read next: Chapter 7. Another Feminine Problem

Read previous: Chapter 5. Spite

Table of content of Face Illumined


GO TO TOP OF SCREEN

Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book