CHAPTER LIX.
It was not many minutes after this before Mrs. Rolfe found herself across the street and closeted with Alice. “I am too tired and nervous to talk now,” Mary had said; “wait till to-morrow; or, if you are very impatient, ask Alice to tell you. She knows all.”
“My dear Alice,” asked Mrs. Rolfe, for the twentieth time, at the close of a two-hours’ investigation, “who is this Mr. Don or Smith? Who is his father? Who is his mother? How am I to know that my daughter is not interested in an adventurer or an escaped lunatic?”
Alice did her best to reassure Mrs. Rolfe on this point; adding, with a becoming little blush, that she did not rely upon her own judgment, solely,—that e-v-e-r-y-b-o-d-y was sure that the Don was all that he should be.
“E-v-e-r-y-b-o-d-y! Then why don’t you take him yourself? I suppose this same e-v-e-r-y-b-o-d-y objected!”
“Oh!”
That was all that this whilom merry babbler could say. Her chin (just as though it thought itself the most highly improper little chin in the world) tried to hide between her shoulder and her throat, nestling down somewhere. In those days we thought it was becoming,—that sudden rush of roses to a young girl’s cheek. Now she will look you straight in the face, and tell you without blinking that next spring she is to marry a man weighing (just as likely as not) two hundred pounds. It is straightforward, and manly, and “good form,”—but some of us can’t forget the old way, and like it still.
“I must confess, Alice, that I can make nothing of the whole business. You tell me that Mary’s suitor is entirely devoted to her, and that every one has the highest respect for him. His incognito need not trouble me, you say, since its removal is only delayed,—and delayed, too, through some romantic whim or other of Mary herself. But there is one thing which nothing you say explains; that everything you say darkens; why is the poor child so wretched?”
Alice was silent.
“Alice,” continued Mrs. Rolfe, placing her hand affectionately on the young girl’s shoulder, “have you told me all? It is Mary’s express injunction that you do so, you know.”
Alice seemed to have something to say, but hesitated.
“Ah, I see,” cried Mrs. Rolfe, jumping to a conclusion. “He has thrown off his incognito, and there was something dreadful,—a living wife in a lunatic asylum—or—”
Alice smiled. “No, it is nothing of that kind. To tell you the truth, it is all nonsense. Mary is making a mountain of a mole-hill.”
“A mountain of a mole-hill?”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“It is all perfectly absurd—”
“What disturbs the poor child,—tell me?”
“Some nonsensical fears as to his religious tendencies.”
“His religious tendencies?” echoed Mrs. Rolfe, puzzled. Suddenly light seemed to break upon her. “For heaven’s sake, Alice,” she cried, pale with anxiety, “you do not mean to say that he is a Catholic! Don’t tell me that. Tell me that he is a—a—an Atheist,—anything but a Catholic!”
“An Atheist rather than a Catholic?” said Alice, raising her eyes to those of Mrs. Rolfe for the first time for several minutes.
“Most assuredly; a thousand times rather. Why, when I was a girl, several of my acquaintances married young men who were pleased to consider themselves sceptics,—it was rather the fashion in those days,—but, bless you, the last one of them was a vestryman before five years of married life had passed. But a Catholic! Heaven forbid! One of two things, Alice, invariably happens to a Protestant girl who marries a Catholic. Either, halting between opposing claims, she loses all interest in religion itself, or else she goes over to the enemy. Oh, Alice, Alice,” cried she, with sudden vehemence, “do not tell me that my poor Mary loves a Catholic! Lost to me in this world—and—”
I will tell you, my Ah Yung Whack, what Mrs. Rolfe was going to say when Alice interrupted her with a merry laugh. She was going to add, “lost in the next.”
It was, indeed, as I have hinted in earlier chapters of this work, the settled conviction of the Protestants of Virginia, at that day, that all Catholics were as surely destined to the bottomless pit as the very heathen who had never so much as heard a whisper of the Glad Tidings. (My Catholic friends often complained to me of this bigotry. For my part, I hardly knew whether to laugh or to weep when I remembered that they had made precisely the same arrangements for my Protestant acquaintance.)
“Why, who told you he was a Catholic?”
“Heaven be praised! Then what is he, pray?”
“I am afraid he is a little sceptical,—or—or—something.”
“And is that all? Sceptical or something! Capital, Alice!” cried she, with a bright laugh. “You have hit them off to a nicety. Sceptical or something,—that’s just it. You see, my dear, when the beard begins to sprout on a youth’s chin, he fancies that it is time he had opinions of his own. At this period he begins to sneer at the ‘fiery furnace’ story, and discovers that whales, though their mouths be large, have small throats, and could never have swallowed Jonah. His throat, at any rate, is too small to swallow such musty tales,—leave that to the old women! Sceptical or something! Excellent, excellent, Alice! Ah, that merry tongue of yours!”
“I am delighted that you take so philosophical a view of the case,” said Alice, much taken aback at this unexpected praise of her wit. She might have added that she was amazed. How often do those we know best utterly confound us in this way! Mrs. Rolfe was what some lukewarm people called fanatically pious; and Alice had been looking forward with dread to the scene that poor Mary must have with her when she learned that her daughter had given her heart to a sceptic (or something). Strange! it was the very energy of this fanaticism which wrought the result which so surprised Alice. It is possible for convictions to be so strong as to inspire a merry incredulity touching the honesty of opposing beliefs.
“Why, of course,” rejoined Mrs. Rolfe, smiling complacently. (It was the word philosophical that did the business.) “The fact is, my dear, there are no infidels. It is all the merest affectation. Most young men pass through an attack of scepticism, just as, earlier in life, teething must be gone through with. It is a cheap mode of earning a reputation for brains. With girls, this striving to be brilliant takes a different shape. Many young women cultivate sarcasm for a year or so after leaving school, not having seen enough of mankind to know that a satirical turn infallibly indicates the combination of a bad heart with an empty head. But people of experience learn to pardon these foibles of youth. The fact is, Alice,” added Mrs. Rolfe, smiling, “I know nothing in life more deliciously comic than a young graduate posing as a ‘thinker.’ Of course, if they are loud-mouthed—”
“That, at least, he is not.”
“Of course not, of course not; since I hear he is a gentleman. But how, pray, does he show that he is a sceptic, or something? (Capital phrase, upon my word, Alice!) How do you know it?”
“During the whole time that he has been at Elmington he has never once—I am afraid it is more serious than you imagine—”
“Go on!”
“Never once put his foot inside the church.”
“Impossible!” cried Mrs. Rolfe. “Why, ’tisn’t genteel!”
“Never once!”
“And his apology?”
“The Don apologizing!” broke in Alice, with a little laugh. “You don’t know him!”
“What! paying court to my daughter, and allowing her to go to church, Sunday after Sunday, without ever offering to attend her? I should just have liked Mr. Rolfe to have tried that game with me! Even now,—and we have been married thirty years! just fancy me marching off to church alone!”
To do Mr. Rolfe justice, those who knew him and the partner of his bosom best would never have suspected him of trying to play any such game on Mrs. Rolfe in their courting days, still less now. He discovered during the first month of the first year of the thirty alluded to, that his Araminta was a woman of views; and he had spent the twenty-nine years and eleven months immediately preceding these observations of Mrs. Rolfe in learning just what those views were, that he might the better conform to the same.
“The i-d-e-a!” chirped Alice.
“Yes, indeed. And if Mary will be guided by me— Upon my word, Alice, aren’t we both too absurd! Has the wedding-day been fixed? If so, I have not heard of it. Before that happens, your Mr. Don, or whatever he is, will have to have a talk with me—I mean Mr. Rolfe.” (Which, as she went on to explain, was, as in all harmonious households, one and the same thing. She could not remember, in fact, when she had expressed an opinion different from Mr. Rolfe’s.)
Sly was Mr. Rolfe, they say; who always let his wife have the first say,—and then he had her just where he wanted her.
“He won’t find me,—or, rather, Mr. Rolfe,—so sentimental as to refuse to hear who he is!”
In the end our spirited matron was much mollified at learning that the Don had not been “paying court” to her daughter, and yet, at the same time, publicly slighting her. The affair had been so sudden, etc., etc. But Alice’s master-stroke was delivered when she told how the Don had fought against the avowal of his love.
Ah! they never, as we men do, get so old as quite to forget all their romance, these women!
“Honor is a good thing to begin with,” said she. “As to the church business, I think we shall be able to manage that,” she added, with a slightly influential expression about those lips which had so often carried conviction to the peace-loving bosom of the harmonious Mr. Rolfe.
“Provided, of course—” continued she.
“Oh, of course,” chimed in Alice.