CHAPTER IX.
My mother, on her return, had gone at once to her sister, Mrs. Woolsey of New York, and remained with her until she joined me for a Christmas visit at Mr. Raymond's. Three years had passed since I was there, and the three years had changed Helen from a mere child into a slim maiden of almost fourteen, tall and stately for her years. Mr. Raymond seemed no older and no feebler: his eyes held the old restless fire, the only reminiscence of youthful power about him; he was still anxiously served and tended, and in this cold season huddled before the fires covered with furs, a tiger-skin over his knees, his pale hands clasping his wrappings together at the throat. He was considerate for my mother's comfort, as a host should be, and he betrayed an eager curiosity and interest concerning my infirmity; which showed his care for me, but which I resented as an intrusion. For I had reached the point when it was easy for me to endure the fact that I was unlike other men in my physical strength, but was not yet sufficiently resigned to it to bear questioning or sympathy. Helen never alluded to it, and although at first she tried to save me footsteps, she had tact enough to give up even that evidence of any knowledge of my weakness. Indeed, she was shy of me now: she had a governess in these days, and had perhaps been taught one of the first lessons that young girls learn—to shrink from every man who is neither her father nor her brother nor her grandfather. Accordingly, during all that Christmas week I rarely heard the sound of her voice.
Mr. Floyd had joined us a few hours after we reached The Headlands. The three years had made more change in him than in any of the rest of us, if I except myself. He had grown older—was more quiet and languid, and more tender in his manner. I had often wondered of late, now that I was strong again and in a measure launched into life, whether he and my mother would marry. I saw many meanings in my mother's beautiful face of which she never spoke to me; the two had long talks together every day, and their manner to each other held all the sweetness of steadfast affection and true sympathy; yet there was a nameless something which was never in his tones now.
It was a lovely, quiet Christmas-time. Outside, the winter seas roared and great masses of ice covered the rocks and bound the shore: heavy snows fell and the winds whistled cold. But inside, everything went on in a still, blessed fashion that only comes when people love one another, and in a stately, comfortable fashion that is only at command in rich houses where all stores of state and comfort are opened with a golden key. The greenhouses were in their perfection now: there were many of them of various temperatures, but all opening from one into the other. Mr. Floyd and I were walking one day where the oranges, lemons and cedrats were ripening in different degrees of maturity: they seemed to blossom and yield as freely as if in their native climates, and our favorite walk was there these chilly winter afternoons; for Mr. Floyd, always a shiverer, of late found every place except the tropical atmosphere of a greenhouse too cold for him. My mother had been with us picking a few orange-blossoms. My guardian had taken one little spray and put it against her hair, sighing meanwhile, although he was smiling.
"No orange-blossoms for my white hair," said she, laughing and flushing. "They are for the dark curls of a young girl."
"Oh, youth! youth! youth!" he exclaimed half bitterly.
"Dear friend," said she very calmly and sweetly, "youth is only so beautiful when we have lost it. Middle life is stronger, pleasanter, nobler."
"I might cry for middle life too," Mr. Floyd said lightly, "for I have lost that as well as youth. I am an old man: I have no to-morrows. Carry your orange-blossoms away, Mary: their perfume is too strong for me."
I had listened dreamily, without taking much meaning from their words. My mother went on into the next conservatory and picked roses and camellias, and Mr. Floyd watched her, shivered, and, passing his arm within mine, walked back into the first greenhouse, among the bristling cactuses and broad, silky-leaved bananas.
"As soon as you are free from college, Floyd," said he, "you and I will go to Europe; that is, if I am alive. The doctors say travel is good for me—occupation without fever, interest without personal emotion. Yes, a year from July we will set out, and if Helen can go with us, she and your mother shall be our companions."
"And how about your position at Washington?"
"After the fourth of March I shall never hold office again. I suppose that is what is killing me: I have worked too hard and abused my strength a little."
I looked into his face. I was almost as tall as he now, and Mr. Floyd had always been a head above other men. I put my hand on his shoulder and looked steadily into his face.
"I wish you would tell me, sir," said I, "what you mean when you say these things. Are you really ill? Your allusions to your state of health are so painful to me, and to my mother too."
"Oh," he returned kindly, "your mother knows all about it." He mused a little, then cheered up, laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. "If I were a man in decent health," he affirmed with an air of jollity, "I should be your father-in-law. No, that is not it: I should be your stepfather. Thank your stars that I have the modesty not to believe myself irresistible under present circumstances."
"But why not?" said I, quite in earnest. "If you are less strong than formerly, all the more need of your having a wife. I should suppose."
"As to my need, that is nothing, nothing. But think: if she cared for me I should be preparing tortures for her. She would feel nothing but dread. I may die at any time, Floyd, if I am shocked or startled. Raptures would not do for me, either: I should be afraid to kiss my wife, lest my heart should increase its beating by a throb a minute. No: I shall marry no one now: I have put by the hope, as an old man puts by all the dreams of his prime."
"It might all have come to pass," I exclaimed bitterly, "had it not been for me."
"Oh, my boy! my dear boy!" said Mr. Floyd. "When your accident came I forgot my own wishes at once, thinking only of your need of your mother. I would have given up more for you than that: I would have given up my life. Come, come! we have fallen into too serious a vein. Let us talk about our trip to Europe and the East. I never had the right sort of a travelling-companion yet: wise men stay at home, but bores and noodles go abroad."
"But when we start the wise men will no longer be at home."
"You have hit it precisely. There are a few things I want to show you—some cathedrals, landscapes and pictures. I will save you a world of trouble, and will instruct you at once to find certain objects frightful and unworthy of notice or esteem. The zest of travel is taken out of one by the necessity of muttering vague formulas of meaningless praise before pictures and statues it is traditional to admire. There's too much of everything in this world. When a man has reached my age and my state of health he feels the necessity of getting at the real substance of things."
"But can one get at it?"
"Oh, don't utter any precocious wisdom. Certainly, one can get at the substance of things. True, there is enough mystery and perplexity about the system of the world, and at times all life looms up a terrible enigma, so increasing in difficulty of solution that Death's key to knowledge seems the one thing to be desired. But it is well for a man not to lose himself in labyrinths of conjecture, but to resolutely put aside his spirit of philosophical inquiry, and do something useful for himself and his fellow-men. For my own part, I don't think Hamlet a fine fellow. Don't ask conundrums. Your duty now is to finish your collegiate course respectably. Take honors or not as it happens, but be a man, and win yourself the place you ought to take, and keep it like a gentleman. Then we will travel, and I will remember you are young and let you do the foolish things youth loves to do. We will have famous times together. Not that I altogether approve of vagabondizing. Still, what is there for us to do? I am worn out: you are too young to have duties to society, and ought to try life, and examine, criticise and become enlightened. I suppose I shall catch the mania for bric-à-brac and curiosities, and make them the object of my life, since I have no other. If I do, I shall be obliged to will them to you, Floyd, for, Goodness knows, Helen will have enough to set up a museum of art without any help from me."
"I think so," I rejoined: "this house is so filled with wonderful things. But Helen—"
"Don't talk about me, please," cried a voice from behind the acacias, "for I am here;" and the little girl came through the drooping branches covered with their plumy canary-colored blossoms, and advanced toward us with that wonderful princess-like gait of hers. She was smiling demurely. "Listeners hear no good of themselves, they say," she observed, throwing a laughing glance at me.
"I was only about to remark that you seemed tolerably indifferent to your possessions."
"The fact is," said Mr. Floyd teasingly, "since Helen found that the moon and the sea did not belong to her, she gave up, and has not believed she is so very rich, after all;" and while he laughed and Helen blushed, and half hid herself, I heard how the child, when she was six years old, had taken her new nursery-governess around the place, saying, "This is my pony," "These are my dogs," "This is my conservatory," and "These are my greenhouses:" then, when she had exhausted the inventory of her wealth, she had affirmed, "That is my moon" and "That is my water;" and when it was explained to her that the crescent over the pine trees in the west belonged alike to all the children on the wide earth, and that the fickle sea too paid its homage at a thousand shores, she was quite inconsolable, and nothing could make up to her for her loss.
A very quiet, demure little woman was Helen now-a-days. I deplored the necessity for the graceful French governess who was polishing her into a conventional manner and preparing her for the dull routine which other girls must follow. I never analyzed my impressions of Helen then, but I am sure I considered her far above any commonplace educational needs, for I knew that she was so wise, so disciplined, so true to all her duties, that she was altogether a woman, and not a little girl at all. It gave me a positive shock to discover that she was ciphering in vulgar fractions and that her spelling was, to say the least, crude. Not but that she was childish enough in many things, and so exquisitely docile with her father that he often scolded her for her over-careful obedience. I could understand well enough myself how she liked to be led by the strong man who loved her, and whom she so dearly loved, because when she was alone with her grandfather she needed to govern, holding a dreary sway over her little kingdom.
As I have said before, we were not intimate this winter. I was not of an age to be interested in a little girl in the schoolroom, and Mademoiselle Blois took care not to allow the little girl in the schoolroom to take an interest in me. Occasionally, however, when she was with her father and I joined them, the memories we shared between us broke through the gossamer web of diffidence which shackled us both, and for a little while we would be as free as in the old childish confidential days on the seashore or back among the brown stubble of the stripped harvest-fields of the uplands. At these times she would ask me many questions about Georgy Lenox, and when I told her that Georgy was quite a grown woman now, and engaged to my friend Jack Holt, she thought it wonderful and strange.
"But why?" I asked. "Georgy is a trifle older than I am, and I am now almost nineteen."
"Everybody is so old!" she said with a droll little gesture of despair. "It seems to me I shall never grow up."
"Oh yes, you will soon be fourteen: I have heard you say your mother was married when she was seventeen: that is only three years off; and Georgy Lenox is much older, and only just engaged, and will not be married until Jack is out of college and a partner in his father's business."
"Does he like her very much?" asked Helen solemnly.
"Well, yes: he has loved her ever since she was a very little girl. He has spent all his money upon her: he knows all her little needs, her tastes. I have been out shopping with him frequently when he would devote hours to the matching of a shade of ribbon or the selection of a peculiar color of gloves. Harry Dart is never tired of making fun of Jack, for the dear old fellow is a little absurd in his painstaking for a capricious girl who does not even know her own mind, and is certain to find fault with even his most fastidious choice."
"I should not like that," said Helen, so decidedly that I looked with some surprise at the expression of her imperious face. "I should want to have everything, and give it all to him."
"To whom? to Jack?"
"Oh, dear me, no! You know what I mean."
I understood her, and I made an involuntary grimace in thinking of mademoiselle's chaste teachings in the schoolroom. Here was a little girl of fourteen with her mind made up about what she would do for the lover who was to come out of Shadowland some day.
"Don't you think that would be nicer, Floyd?" she asked.
"For the girl to be rich, that she might make her husband rich? Some men would like that."
"But what do you think?"
A boy of nineteen is not so glib in speaking of marriage as a girl of fourteen, but I finally told her that I should not fancy the destiny of marrying a rich girl: then my imagination warmed, and I let her hear what my dream would be. She, the girl I loved, should be poor: very likely life would have been cruel to her, and she would have known cold and privation. What joy I should have in wrapping her in costly things, in setting off her beauty with ornaments appropriate and rare! What a light would shine in her eyes when I led her to the lovely house where we two were to dwell in Fairyland! Every duty in life should be taken from her: all she would have to do would be to grow more and more beautiful. I myself would be chief servant to this dainty little new-made queen, and not even the winds should be allowed to play too freely with her hair.
Helen looked at me pensively, and Mr. Floyd, who was writing in the corner, laughed a low amused laugh which reminded me for a moment of Mephistopheles.
"So you would like that?" mused Helen. "Do you know, I should not like it at all."
"Well, you will never be poor," I retorted, "and you will give your golden key to some man who wants to marry a princess. But, to tell the truth, Helen, I don't expect to marry anybody: I think it is great nonsense. Both Harry and I have made up our minds to be bachelors."