“My poor old bones!” cried Lizzette, sinking into a chair. “Antoine’s a necromancer! I almost grow young again.” The fiddle stopped, but only for a moment, for by a sudden transition it swept away into an old-time melody:
“Sleep on thy pillow,
Happy and light,
As the moon on the billow
Reposes at night.”
The old fiddle seemed to have awakened to new life under the touch of the new Antoine, and Herbert could scarcely repress a glow of satisfaction as he looked at the lad. “Specific kindness does vastly more for the world than general good-will. If I might be permitted to spend the better part of my income on this little circle, I should feel that I had done enough for humanity; but the worst part of it is, this little circle has such exalted ideas of independence, and Elsie—bless her and bother her!—shuts the door in my face continually. I don’t more than half like the muddle, anyway!”
The winter wore away with but few radical changes. Mrs. Mason’s opposition to Herbert’s marriage to Elsie showed no diminution, and after numberless and fruitless intercessions on his part he finally took up his quarters at a hotel, and Mrs. Mason closed her house and went to Europe. His sister’s opposition and Elsie’s persistent refusal to marry him as long as the present bitterness remained between them, kept Herbert in a constant state of dissatisfaction. The world was quite too much upside down with the conflict of ideas, and men no longer seemed to be permitted to work out their own lines of happiness without treading on somebody’s toes. Helen’s sole objection to Elsie had been the capacity in which she had served them, and the consequent fear of society’s verdict. He didn’t care a bit more for Helen’s narrow world, than he did for Elsie’s quixotic schemes for a regenerated humanity. He wanted simply to be happy in his own way and according to his highest light. Helen and Elsie had both called him selfish, and both from opposite standpoints. As to the truth of their judgments, he didn’t care. He only knew that an overmastering love for Elsie as the sweetest-natured, most piquant, and original woman he had ever met held him fast in an irrevocable bondage, and but for an obstinacy on Elsie’s part, as settled as it was difficult to understand, he would have cut the Gordian knot by an immediate marriage and absolute defiance of Helen. Lizzette had been right when she told Herbert he did not know Elsie’s nature. It was developing a faculty for self-abnegation that alarmed him. There were times when the sweetest and most sacred love shone in her eyes, and the barriers of restraint were broken down by the utmost sympathy of thought and feeling; at others the spirit of a martyr looked out from their translucent depths and an invisible yet conscious wall seemed to separate them. Herbert trembled in vague alarm whenever he encountered this look, lying but thinly veiled beneath the mobile face. But with a man’s blindness he could not see that the love which he arrogated to himself and which shut out the world as of little moment, was only broadening her sympathies and making divine revelations of its beauty and value. Love with all its sacredness and possibilities, holding close to the one dear image enshrined in the holy of holies of her heart, had opened wide its door to suffering mankind. So vividly burned the fire on the altar of her love that she turned as if with outstretched arms, crying: “O ye who are cold and hungry! Here ye will find warmth and shelter.”
It is rarely that a man understands either the motive or development of a love like this, and he is quite apt through ignorance or jealousy to quarrel with any of its various manifestations. To Herbert many of Elsie’s ideas on the great and vexed social questions of the day seemed the acme of absurdity, and he cherished the fond hope that when she was once transplanted to regions of luxurious ease, they would die from inanition. He looked upon them as the natural outgrowth of a circumscribed horizon and constant association with the seamy side of life. “When she sees what art, science, culture, and wealth can do for those she loves, her sympathies will not wander so far, but will narrow down to an area wherein we can walk hand in hand.”
Thus Herbert often assured himself as he became daily more conscious of the undercurrent of feeling and belief that was gradually widening in her nature.
The winter had been an unusually long and severe one, and the resources of the little family had often been severely taxed to keep the wolf from the door. Herbert’s alert eyes had discovered this fact, and he had taken to leaving sundry packages of groceries and provisions of various kinds in the most unheard-of places, trusting to time to discover them and good sense to appropriate and say nothing. Margaret had found them stuffed under the cushions of the chairs, behind pictures, tucked under the book-rack, and impelled by a need sharper than even Elsie had guessed, since into Margaret’s hands had been transferred the domestic machinery, had, as Herbert hoped, used them without inquiry. “It is one of God’s balances,” she said to herself, “that may one day even up. It is a delicate and generous act for which I can only be thankful and keep silent.”