CHAPTER XXVI.
“I hope nothing has gone wrong, Robert? You look unusually forlorn and doleful.”
Dr. Grey stepped out of his buggy, and accosted the gardener, who was leaning idly on the gate, holding a trowel in his hand, and lazily puffing the smoke from his pipe.
“I thank you, sir; with us the world wags on pretty much the same, but when a man has been planting violets on his mother’s grave he does not feel like whistling and making merry. Besides, to tell the truth,—which I do not like to shirk,—I am getting very tired of this dismal, unlucky place. If I had known as much before I bought it as I do now, all the locomotives in America could not have dragged me here. I was a stranger, and of course nobody thought it their special duty to warn me; so I was bitten badly enough by the agent who sold me this den of misfortune. Now, when it is too late, there is no lack of busy tongues to tell me the place is haunted, and has been for, lo! these many years.”
“Nonsense, Robert! I gave you credit for too much good sense to listen to the gossip of silly old wives. Put all these ridiculous tales of ghosts and hobgoblins out of your mind, man, and do not make me laugh at you, as if you were a child who had been so frightened by stories of ‘raw-head and bloody-bones,’ that you were afraid to blow out your candle and creep into bed.”
“I am neither a fool nor a coward, and I will fight anything that I can feel has bone and muscle; but I am satisfied that if all the water in Siloam were poured over this place, it would not wash out the curse that people tell me has always rested on it since the time the pirates first located here. I can’t admit I believe in witches, but undoubtedly I do believe in Satan, who seems to have a fee-simple to the place. It is not enough that my poor mother is buried yonder, but 343 my wheat and oats took the rust; the mildew spoiled my grape crop; the rains ruined my melons; the worms ate up every blade of my grass; the cows have got the black-tongue; the gale blew down my pigeon-house and mashed all my squabs; and my splendid carnations and fuchsias are devoured by red spider. Nothing thrives, and I am sick at heart.”
The dogged discontent written so legibly on his countenance, did not encourage the visitor to enter into a discussion of the abstract causes of blight, gales, and black-tongue, and he merely answered,—
“The evils you have enumerated are not peculiar to any locality; and all the farmers in this neighborhood are echoing your complaints. How is Mrs. Gerome?”
“Neither better nor worse. You know what miserable weather we have had for a week. This morning she ordered the small carriage and horses brought to the door, and when I took the reins, she dismissed me and said she preferred driving herself. I told her the grays had not been used, and were badly pampered standing so long in their stalls, and that I was really afraid they would break her neck, as she was not strong enough to manage them; but she laughed, and answered that if they did, it would be the best day’s work they had ever accomplished, and she would give them a chance. Down the beach they went like a flash, and when she came home their flanks smoked like a lime-kiln. What is ever to be done with my mistress, I am sure I don’t know. She makes the house so doleful, that nobody wants to stay here, and only yesterday Katie and Phœbe, the cook, gave notice that they wished to leave when the month was out. She has no idea what she will do, or where she will go. We have wanted a hot-house, and she ordered me to get the builder’s estimate of the cost of two plans which she drew; but when I carried them to her, she pushed them aside, and said she would think of the matter, but thought she might leave this place, and therefore would not need the building. She is as notionate as a child; and no one but my poor mother could ever manage her. Hist! sir! Don’t you hear her? You may be sure there is mischief brewing when she sings like that.”
Dr. Grey walked towards the house, and paused on the portico to listen,—
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“Quis est homo, qui non fleret Christi matrem si videret, In tanto supplicio.” |
The voice was not so strong as when he had heard it in Addio del Passata, but the solemn mournfulness of its cadences was better suited to the Stabat Mater, and indexed much that no other method of expression would have reached. After some moments she forsook Rossini, and began the Agnus Dei from Haydn’s Third Mass,—
| “Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere.” |
Surely she could not render this grand strain if her soul was in fierce rebellion; and, with strained ears and hushed breath, Dr. Grey listened to the closing
| “Dona nobis pacem,—pacem,—pacem.” |
It was a passionate, wailing prayer, and the only one that ever crossed her lips, yet his heart throbbed with pleasure, as he noted the tremor that seemed to shiver her voice into silvery fragments; and as she ended, he knew that tears were not far from her eyes.
When he entered the room, she had left the piano, and wheeled a sofa in front of the grate, where she sat gazing, vacantly into the fiery fretwork of glowing coals.
A copy of Turner’s “Liber Studiorum,” superbly bound in purple velvet, lay on her knee, and into a corner of the sofa she had tossed a square of canvas almost filled with silken Parmese violets.
“Good-evening, Mrs. Gerome; I hope I do not interrupt you.”
Dr. Grey removed the embroidery to the table, and seated himself in the sofa corner.
“Good evening. Interruption argues occupation and absorbed attention, and the term is not applicable to me. I 345 who live as vainly, as uselessly, as fruitlessly, as some fakir twirling his thumbs and staring at his beard, have little right to call anything an interruption. My existence here is as still, as stagnant, as some pool down yonder in the sedge which last week’s waves left among the sand hillocks, and your visits are like pebbles thrown into it, creating transient ripples and circles.”
“You have gone back to the God of your æsthetic idolatry,” said he, touching the “Liber Studiorum.”
“Yes, because ‘Beauty pitches her tents before him,’ and his pencil is more potent in conjuring visions that enchant my wearied mind, than Jemschid’s goblet or Iskander’s mirror.”
“But why stand afar off, trusting to human and fallible interpreters, when it is your privilege to draw near and dwell in the essence of the only real and divine beauty?”
“Better reverence it behind a veil, than suffer like Semele. I know my needs, and satisfy them fully. Once my heart was as bare of adoration as Egypt’s tawny sands of crystal rain-pools; but looking into the realm of nature and of art, I chose the religion of the beautiful, and said to my famished soul,
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‘From every channel thro’ which Beauty runs, To fertilize the world with lovely things, I will draw freely, and be satisfied.’” |
“This morbid sentimentality, this sickly gasping system of æsthetics, soi-disant ‘Religion of the Beautiful,’ is the curse of the age,—is a vast, universal vampire sucking the life from humanity. Like other idolatries it may arrogate the name of ‘Religion,’ but it is simply downright pagan materialism, and its votaries of the nineteenth century should look back two thousand years, and renew the Panathenœa. The ancient Greek worship of æsthetics was a proud and pardonable system, replete with sublime images; but the idols of your emasculated creed are yellow-haired women with straight noses,—are purple clouds and moon-silvered seas,—and physical beauty constitutes their sole excellence. Lovely 346 landscapes and perfect faces are certainly entitled to a liberal quota of earnest admiration; but a religion that contents itself with merely material beauty, differs in nothing but nomenclature from the pagan worship of Cybele, Venus, and Astarte.”
A chill smile momentarily brightened Mrs. Gerome’s features, and turning towards her visitor, she answered slowly,—
“Be thankful, sir, that even the worship of beauty lingers in this world of sin and hate; and instead of defiling and demolishing its altars, go to work zealously and erect new ones at every cross-roads. Lessing spoke for me when he said, ‘Only a misapprehended religion can remove us from the beautiful, and it is proof that a religion is true and rightly understood when it everywhere brings us back to the Beautiful.’”
“Pardon me. I accept Lessing’s words, but cavil at your interpretation of them. His reverence for Beauty embraced not merely physical and material types, but that nobler, grander beauty which centres in pure ethics and ontology; and a religion that seeks no higher forms than those of clay,—whether Himalayas or ‘Greek Slave,’—whether emerald icebergs, flashing under polar auroras, or the myosotis that nods there on the mantelpiece,—a religion that substitutes beauty for duty, and Nature for Nature’s God, is a shameful sham, and a curse to its devotees. There is a beauty worthy of all adoration, a beauty far above Antinous, or Gula or Greek æsthetics,—a beauty that is not the disjecta membra that modern maudlin sentimentality has left it,—but that perfect and immortal ‘Beauty of Holiness,’ that outlives marble and silver, pigment, stylus, and pagan poems that deify dust.”
He leaned towards her, watching eagerly for some symptom of interest in the face before him, and bent his head until he inhaled the fragrance of the violets which clustered on one side of the coil of hair.
“‘Beauty of Holiness.’ Show it to me, Dr. Grey. Is it at La Trappe, or the Hospice of St. Bernard? Where are its 347 temples? Where are its worshippers? Who is its Hierophant?”
“Jesus Christ.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, as if to shut out some painful vision evoked by his words.
“Sir, do you recollect the reply of Laplace, when Napoleon asked him why there was no mention of God in his ‘Mécanique Celeste?’ ‘Sire, je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse.’ I was not sufficiently insane to base my religion of beauty upon a holiness that was buried in the tomb supplied by Joseph of Arimathea,—that was long ago hunted out of the world it might have purified. Once I believed in, and revered what I supposed was its existence, but I was speedily disenchanted of my faith, for,—
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‘I have seen those that wore Heaven’s armor, worsted: I have heard Truth lie: Seen Life, beside the founts for which it thirsted, Curse God and die.’ |
Dr. Grey, I do not desire to sneer at your Christian trust, and God knows I would give all my earthly possessions and hopes for a religion that would insure me your calm resignation and contentment; but the resurrection of my faith would only resemble that beautiful floral Palingenesis (asserted by Gaffarel and Kircher), which was but ‘the pale spectre of a flower coming slowly forth from its own ashes,’ and speedily dropping back into dust. Leave me in the enjoyment of the only pleasure earth can afford me, the contemplation of the beautiful.”
“Unless you blend with it the true and good, your love of beauty will degenerate into the merely sensuous æsthetics, which, at the present day, renders its votaries fastidious, etiolated voluptuaries. The deification of humanity, so successfully inaugurated by Feuerbach and Strauss, is now no longer confined to realms of abstract speculation; but cultivated sensualism has sunk so low that popular poets chant the praises of Phryne and Cleopatra, and painters and sculptors seek to immortalize types that degrade the taste of all 348 lovers of Art. The true mission of Art, whether through the medium of books, statues, or pictures, is to purify and exalt; but the curse of our age is, that the fashionable pantheistic raving about Nature, and the apotheosizing of physical loveliness,—is rapidly sinking into a worship of the vilest elements of humanity and materialism. Pagan æsthetics were purer and nobler than the system, which, under that name, finds favor with our generation.”
She listened, not assentingly, but without any manifestation of impatience, and while he talked, her eyes rested dreamily upon the yellow beach, where,—
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“Trampling up the sloping sand, In lines outreaching far and wide, The white-maned billows swept to land.” |
Whether she pondered his words, or was too entirely absorbed by her own thoughts to heed their import, he had no means of ascertaining.
“Mrs. Gerome, what have you painted recently?”
“Nothing, since my illness; and perhaps I shall never touch my brush again. Sometimes I have thought I would paint a picture of Handel standing up to listen to that sad song from his own ‘Samson,’—‘Total eclipse, no sun, no moon!’ But I doubt whether I could put on canvas that grand, mournful, blind face, turned eagerly towards the stage, while tears ran swiftly from his sightless eyes. Again, I have vague visions of a dead Schopenhauer, seated in the corner of the sofa, with his pet poodle, Putz, howling at his master’s ghastly white features,—with his Indian Oupnekhat lying on his rigid knee, and his gilded statuette of Gotama Buddha grinning at him from the mantelpiece, welcoming him to Nirwána. There stands my easel, empty and shrouded; and here, from day to day, I sit idle, not lacking ideas, but the will to clothe them. Unlike poor Maurice de Guérin, who said that his ‘head was parching; that, like a tree which had lived its life, he felt as though every passing wind were blowing through dead branches in his top,’ I feel that my 349 brain is as vigorous and restless as ever, while my will alone is paralyzed, and my heart withered and cold within me.”
“Your brush and palette will never yield you any permanent happiness, nor promote a spirit of contentment, until you select a different class of subjects. Your themes are all too sombre, too dismal, and the sole motif that runs through your music and painting seems to be in memoriam. Open the windows of your gloomy soul, and let God’s sunshine stream into its cold recesses, and warm and gild and gladden it. Throw aside your morbid proclivities for the melancholy and abnormal, and paint peaceful genre pictures,—a group of sunburnt, laughing harvesters, or merry children, or tulip-beds with butterflies swinging over them. You need more warmth in your heart, and more light in your pictures.”
“Eminently correct,—most incontestably true; but how do you propose to remedy the imperfect chiaro-oscuro of my character? Show me the market where that light of peace and joy is bartered, and I will constitute you my broker, with unlimited orders. No, no. I see the fact as plainly as you do, but I know better than you how irremediable it is. My soul is a doleful morgue, and my pictures are dim photographs of its corpse-tenants. Shut in forever from the sunshine, I dip my brush in the shadows that surround me, for, like Empedocles,—
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... ‘I alone
Am dead to life and joy; therefore I read In all things my own deadness.’” |
“If you would free yourself from the coils of an intense and selfish egoism that fetter you to the petty cares and trials of your individual existence,—if you would endeavor to forget for a season the woes of Mrs. Gerome, and expend a little more sympathy on the sorrows of others,—if you would resolve to lose sight of the caprices that render you so unpopular, and make some human being happy by your aid and kind words,—in fine, if, instead of selecting as your model some cynical, half-insane woman like Lady Hester Stanhope, you chose for imitation the example of noble Christian usefulness 350 and self-abnegation, analogous to that of Florence Nightingale, or Mrs. Fry, you would soon find that your conscience—”
“Enough! You weary me. Dr. Grey, I thoroughly understand your motives, and honor their purity, but I beg that you will give yourself no further anxiety on my account. You cannot, from your religious standpoint, avoid regarding me as worse than a heathen, and have constituted yourself a missionary to reclaim and consecrate me. I am not quite a cannibal, ready to devour you, by way of recompense for your charitable efforts in my behalf, but I must assure you your interest and sympathy are sadly wasted. Do you remember that celebrated ‘vase of Soissons,’ which was plundered by rude soldiery in Rheims, and which Clovis so eagerly coveted at the distribution of the spoils? A soldier broke it before the king’s hungry eyes, and forced him to take the worthless mocking fragments. Even so flint-faced fate shattered my happiness, and tauntingly offers me the ruins; but I will none of it!”
“Trust God’s overruling mercy, and those fragments, fused in the furnace of affliction, may be remoulded and restored to you in pristine perfection.”
“Impossible! Moreover, I trust nothing but the brevity of human life, which one day cannot fail to release me from an existence that has proved an almost intolerable burden. You know Vogt says, ‘The natural laws are rude, unbending powers,’ and I comfort myself by hoping that they can neither be bribed nor browbeaten out of the discharge of their duty, which points to death as ‘the surest calculation that can be made,—as the unavoidable keystone of every individual life.’ A grim consolation, you think? True; but all I shall ever receive. Dr. Grey, in your estimation I am sinfully inert and self-indulgent; and you conscientiously commend my idle hands to the benevolent work of knitting socks for indigent ditchers, and making jackets for pauper children. Now, although it is considered neither orthodox nor modest to furnish left-hand with a trumpet for sounding the praises of almsgiving right-hand, still I must be allowed to assert 351 that I appropriate an ample share of my fortune for charitable purposes. Perhaps you will tell me that I do not give in a proper spirit of loving sympathy,—that I hurl my donations at my conscience, as ‘a sop to Cerberus.’ I have never injured any one, and if I have no tender love in my heart to expend on others, it is the fault of that world which taught me how hollow and deceitful it is. God knows I have never intentionally wounded any living thing; and if negatively good, at least my career has no stain of positive evil upon it. I am one of those concerning whom Richter said, ‘There are souls for whom life has no summer. These should enjoy the advantages of the inhabitants of Spitzbergen, where, through the winter’s day, the stars shine clear as through the winter’s night.’ I have neither summer nor polar stars, but I wait for that long night wherein I shall sleep peacefully.”
“Mrs. Gerome, defiant pride bars your heart from the white-handed peace that even now seeks entrance. Some great sorrow or sin has darkened your past, and, instead of ejecting its memory, you hug it to your soul; you make it a mental Juggernaut, crushing the hopes and aims that might otherwise brighten the path along which you drag this murderous idol. Cast it away forever, and let Peace and Hope clasp hands over its empty throne.”
From that peculiar far-off expression of the human eye that generally indicates abstraction of mind, he feared that she had not heard his earnest appeal; but after some seconds, she smiled drearily, and repeated with singular and touching pathos, lines which proved that his words were not lost upon her,—
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“‘Ah, could the memory cast her spots, as do The snake’s brood theirs in spring! and be once more Wholly renewed, to dwell in the time that’s new,— With no reiterance of those pangs of yore. Peace, peace! Ah, forgotten things Stumble back strangely! and the ghost of June Stands by December’s fire, cold, cold! and puts The last spark out.’” |
The mournful sweetness and calmness of her low voice made Dr. Grey’s heart throb fiercely, and he leaned a little farther forward to study her countenance. She had rested her elbow on the carved side of the sofa, and now her cheek nestled for support in one hand, while the other toyed unconsciously with the velvet edges of the Liber Studiorum. Her dress was of some soft, shining fabric, neither satin nor silk, and its pale blue lustre shed a chill, pure light over the wan, delicate face, that was white as a bending lily.
The faint yet almost mesmeric fragrance of orange flowers and violets floated in the folds of her garments, and seemed lurking in the waves of gray hair that glistened in the bright steady glow of the red grate; and moved by one of those unaccountable impulses that sometimes decide a man’s destiny, Dr. Grey took the exquisitely beautiful hand from the book and enclosed it in both of his.
“Mrs. Gerome, you seem strangely unsuspicious of the real nature of the interest with which you have inspired me; and I owe it to you, as well as to myself, to avow the feelings that prompt me to seek your society so frequently. For some months after I met you, my professional visits afforded me only rare and tantalizing glimpses of you, but from the day of Elsie’s death, I have been conscious that my happiness is indissolubly linked with yours,—that my heart, which never before acknowledged allegiance to any woman, is—”
“For God’s sake, stop! I cannot listen to you.”
She had wrung her hand violently from his clinging fingers, and, springing to her feet, stood waving him from her, while an expression of horror came swiftly into her eyes and over her whole countenance.
Dr. Grey rose also, and though a sudden pallor spread from his lips to his temples, his calm voice did not falter.
“Is it because you can never return my love, that you so vehemently refuse to hear its avowal? Is it because your own heart—”
“It is because your love is an insult, and must not be uttered!”
She shivered as if rudely buffeted by some freezing blast, 353 and the steely glitter leaped up, like the flash of a poniard, in her large, dilating eyes.
Shocked and perplexed, he looked for a moment at her writhing features, and put out his hand.
“Can it be possible that you so utterly misapprehend me? You surely can not doubt the earnestness of an affection which impels me to offer my hand and heart to you,—the first woman I have ever loved. Will you refuse—”
“Stand back! Do not touch me! Ah,—God help me! Take your hand from mine. Are you blind? If you were an archangel I could not listen to you, for—for—oh, Dr. Grey!”
She covered her face with her hands, and staggered towards a chair.
A horrible, sickening suspicion made his brain whirl and his heart stand still. He followed her, and said, pleadingly,—
“Do not keep me in painful suspense. Why is my declaration of devoted affection so revolting to you? Why can you not at least permit me to express the love—”
“Because that love dishonors me! Dr. Grey, I—am—a—wife!”
The words fell slowly from her white lips, as if her heart’s blood were dripping with them, and a deep, purplish spot burned on each cheek, to attest her utter humiliation.
Dr. Grey gazed at her, with a bewildered, incredulous expression.
“You mean that your heart is buried in your husband’s grave?”
“Oh, if that were true, you and I might be spared this shame and agony.”
A low wail escaped her, and she hid her face in her arms.
“Mrs. Gerome, is not your husband dead?”
“Dead to me,—but not yet in his grave. The man I married is still alive.”
She heard a half-stifled groan, and buried her face deeper in her arms to avoid the sight of the suffering she had caused.
For some time the stillness of death reigned around them, 354 and when at last the wretched woman raised her eyes, she saw Dr. Grey standing beside her, with one hand on the back of her chair, the other clasped over his eyes. Reverently she turned and pressed her lips to his cold fingers, and he felt her hot tears falling upon them, as she said, falteringly,—
“Forgive me the pain that I have innocently inflicted on you. God is my witness, I did not imagine you cared for me. I supposed you pitied me, and were only interested in saving my miserable soul. The servants told me you were very soon to be married to a young girl who lived with your sister; and I never dreamed that your noble, generous heart felt any interest in me, save that of genuine Christian compassion for my loneliness and desolation. If I had suspected your feelings, I would have gone away immediately, or told you all. Oh, that I had never come here!—that I had never left my safe retreat, near Funchal! Then I would not have stabbed the heart of the only man whom I respect, revere, and trust.”
Some moments elapsed ere he could fully command himself, and when he spoke he had entirely regained composure.
“Do not reproach yourself. The fault has been mine, rather than yours. Knowing that some mystery enveloped your early life, I should not have allowed my affections to centre so completely in one concerning whose antecedents I knew absolutely nothing. I have been almost culpably rash and blind,—but I could not look into your beautiful, sad eyes, and doubt that you were worthy of the love that sprang up unbidden in my heart. I knew that you were irreligious, but I believed I could win you back to Christ; and when I tell you that, after living thirty-eight years, you are the only woman I ever met whom I wished to call my wife, you can in some degree realize my confidence in the innate purity of your character. God only knows how severely I am punished by my rashness, how profoundly I deplore the strange infatuation that so utterly blinded me. At least, I am grateful that my brief madness has not involved you in sin and additional suffering.”
The burning spots faded from her cheeks as she listened 355 to his low, solemn words, and when he ended, she clasped her hands passionately, and exclaimed,—
“Do not judge me, until you know all. I am not as unworthy as you fear. Do not withdraw your confidence from me.”
He shook his head, and answered, sadly,—
“A wife, yet bereft of your husband’s protection! A wife, wandering among strangers, and a deserter from the home you vowed to cheer! Your own admission cries out in judgment against you.”
He walked to the table and picked up his gloves, and Mrs. Gerome rose and advanced a few steps.
“Dr. Grey, you will come now and then to see me?”
“No; for the present I do not wish to see you.”
“Ah! how brittle are men’s promises! Did you not assure Elsie that you would never forsake her wretched child?”
“Our painful relations invalidate that promise,—cancel that pledge. I can not visit you as formerly; still, I shall at all times be glad to serve you; and you have only to acquaint me with your wishes to insure their execution.”
“Remember how solitary, how desolate, I am.”
“A wife should be neither, while her husband lives.”
The cold severity of his tone wounded her inexpressibly, and she haughtily drew herself up.
“Dr. Grey will at least allow me an opportunity of explaining the circumstances that he seems to regard as so heinous?”
He looked at the proud but quivering mouth,—into the great, shadowy, gray eyes, and a heavy sigh escaped him.
“Perhaps it is better that I should know your history, for it will diminish my own unhappiness to feel assured that you are worthy of the estimate I placed upon you one hour ago. Shall I come to-morrow, or will you tell me now what you desire me to know?”
“I can not sleep until I have exonerated myself in your clear, truthful, holy eyes: I can not endure that you should think harshly of me, even for a day. This room is suffocating! 356 I will meet you on the portico; and yonder, by the sea, I will show you my life.”
She went to the escritoire, opened one of the drawers, and took out a package. Wrapping a cloak around her, she quitted the parlor, and found Dr. Grey leaning against one of the columns.
He did not offer her his arm as formerly, but slowly and silently they walked down towards the beach, where the surf was rolling heavily in with a steady roar, and tossing sheets of foam around the stone piers.
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... “While far across the hill,
A dark and brazen sunset ribbed with black, Glared, like the sullen eyeballs of the plague.” |