"Yah! yah! He! he! he!"
It is not strange that Charlton did not sleep that night, that he was a prey to conflicting emotions, blessing the cool, intellectual, self-possessed face of Miss Minorkey, who knew botany, and inwardly cursing the fate that had handed little Katy over to be the prey of such a man as Smith Westcott.
CHAPTER VIII.
ISABEL MARLAY.
Isabel Marlay was not the niece of our friend Squire Plausaby, but of his first wife. Plausaby, Esq., had been the guardian of her small inheritance in her childhood, and the property had quite mysteriously suffered from a series of curious misfortunes: the investments were unlucky; those who borrowed of the guardian proved worthless, and so did their securities. Of course the guardian was not to blame, and of course he handled the money honestly. But people will be suspicious even of the kindest and most smoothly-speaking men; and the bland manner and innocent, open countenance of Plausaby, Esq., could not save him from the reproaches of uncharitable people. As he could not prove his innocence, he had no consolation but that which is ever to be derived from a conscience void of offense.
Isabel Marlay found herself at an early age without means. But she had never seen a day of dependence. Deft hands, infallible taste in matters of dress, invincible cheerfulness, and swift industry made her always valuable. She had not been content to live in the house of her aunt, the first Mrs. Plausaby, as a dependent, and she even refused to remain in the undefined relation of a member of the family whose general utility, in some sort, roughly squares the account of board and clothes at the year's end. Whether or not she had any suspicions in regard to the transactions of Plausaby, Esq., in the matter of her patrimony, I do not know. She may have been actuated by nothing but a desire to have her independence apparent. Or, she may have enjoyed—as who would not?—having her own money to spend. At any rate, she made a definite bargain with her uncle-in-law, by which she took charge of the sewing in his house, and received each year a hundred dollars in cash and her board. It was not large pay for such service as she rendered, but then she preferred the house of a relative to that of a stranger. When the second Mrs. Plausaby had come into the house, Mr. Plausaby had been glad to continue the arrangement, in the hope, perhaps, that Isa's good taste might modify that lady's love for discordant gauds.
To Albert Charlton, Isa's life seemed not to be on a very high key. She had only a common-school education, and the leisure she had been able to command for general reading was not very great, nor had the library in the house of Plausaby been very extensive. She had read a good deal of Matthew Henry, the "Life and Labors of Mary Lyon" and the "Life of Isabella Graham," the "Works of Josephus," "Hume's History of England," and Milton's "Paradise Lost." She had tried to read Mrs. Sigourney's "Poems" and Pollok's "Course of Time," but had not enjoyed them much. She was not imaginative. She had plenty of feeling, but no sentiment, for sentiment is feeling that has been thought over; and her life was too entirely objective to allow her to think of her own feelings. Her highest qualities, as Albert inventoried them, were good sense, good taste, and absolute truthfulness and simplicity of character. These were the qualities that he saw in her after a brief acquaintance. They were not striking, and yet they were qualities that commanded respect. But he looked in vain for those high ideals of a vocation and a goal that so filled his own soul. If she read of Mary Lyon, she had no aspiration to imitate her. Her whole mind seemed full of the ordinary cares of life. Albert could not abide that anybody should expend even such abilities as Isa possessed on affairs of raiment and domestic economy. The very tokens of good taste and refined feeling in her dress were to him evidences of over-careful vanity.
But when his mother and Katy had gone out on the morning after he had overheard Smith Westcott expound his views on the matter of marriage, Charlton sought Isa Marlay. She sat sewing in the parlor, as it was called—the common sitting-room of the house—by the west window. The whole arrangement of the room was hers; and though Albert was neither an artist nor a critic in matters of taste, he was, as I have already indicated, a man of fine susceptibility. He rejoiced in this susceptibility when it enabled him to appreciate nature. He repressed it when he found himself vibrating in sympathy with those arts that had, as he thought, relations with human weakness and vanity; as, for instance, the arts of music and dress. But, resist as one may, a man can not fight against his susceptibilities. And those who can feel the effect of any art are very many more than those who can practice it or criticise it. It does not matter that my Bohemian friend's musical abilities are slender. No man in the great Boston Jubilee got more out of Johann Strauss, in his "Kunstleben," that inimitable expression of inspired vagabondage, than he did. And so, though Albert Charlton could not have told you what colors would "go together," as the ladies say, he could, none the less, always feel the discord of his mother's dress, as now he felt the beauty of the room and appreciated the genius of Isa, that had made so much out of resources so slender. For there were only a few touch-me-nots in the two vases on the mantel-piece; there were wild-flowers and prairie-grasses over the picture-frames; there were asparagus-stalks in the fireplace; there was—well, there was a tout-ensemble of coolness and delightfulness, of freshness and repose. There was the graceful figure of Isabel by the window, with the yet dewy grass and the distant rolling, boundless meadow for a background. And there was in Isabel's brown calico dress a faultlessness of fit, and a suitableness of color—a perfect harmony, like that of music. There was real art, pure and refined, in her dress, as in the arrangement of the room. Albert was angry with it, while he felt its effect; it was as though she had set herself there to be admired. But nothing was further from her thought. The artist works not for the eyes of others, but for his own, and Isabel Marlay would have taken not one whit less of pains if she could have been assured that no eye in the universe would look in upon that frontier-village parlor.
I said that Charlton was vexed. He was vexed because he felt a weakness in himself that admired such "gewgaws," as he called everything relating to dress or artistic housekeeping. He rejoiced mentally in the superiority of Helen Minorkey, who gave her talents to higher themes. And yet he felt a sense of restfulness in this cool room, where every color was tuned to harmony with every other. He was struck, too, with the gracefulness of Isa's figure. Her face was not handsome, but the good genius that gave her the feeling of an artist must have molded her own form, and every lithe motion was full of poetry. You have seen some people who made upon you the impression that they were beautiful, and yet the beauty was all in a statuesque figure and a graceful carriage. For it makes every difference how a face is carried.
The conversation between Charlton and Miss Marlay had not gone far in the matter of Katy and Smith Westcott until Albert found that her instincts had set more against the man than even his convictions. A woman like Isabel Marlay is never so fine as in her indignation, and there never was any indignation finer than Isa Marlay's when she spoke of the sacrifice of such a girl as Katy to such a man as Westcott. In his admiration of her thorough-going earnestness, Albert forgave her devotion to domestic pursuits and the arts of dress and ornamentation. He found sailing with her earnestness much pleasanter than he had found rowing against it on the occasion of his battle about the clergy.