CHAPTER LII.
| On me laisse tout croire; on fait gloire de tout; Et cependant mon coeur est encore assez lâche Pour ne pouvoir briser la chaîne qui l'attache.—Le Misanthrope. |
"I had an old friend," Buckland began, with some glimmering of his former vivacity,—"De Ruyter,—I don't think you ever knew him. He was the representative of a family great in its day and generation, but broken in fortune, and without means to support its pretensions. This did not at all tend to diminish their pride,—precisely of that kind which goeth before destruction. De Ruyter was a good fellow, however, and, if he had had twenty thousand a year, he would have spent it all. One summer, four years ago, he went with his child—his wife had died the year before—and his two sisters to spend a few weeks at a quiet little watering-place on the Jersey shore, frequented by people of good standing, but not fashionably inclined. De Ruyter praised the sporting in the neighborhood, and persuaded me to go with him.
"His sisters were very agreeable women,—cultivated and lively, but proud as Lucifer, and desperately exclusive. A nouveau riche was, in their eyes, equivalent to every thing that is odious and detestable; and to call a man a parvenu was to steep him in infamy forever. The men at the house were, for the most part, of no great account—chiefly old bachelors, or sober family men run to seed, with a number of awkward young boobies not yet in bloom. The two ladies liked the company of a lazy fellow like me, a butterfly of society, with the poets, at least the sentimental ones, on my tongue's end, and the latest advices from the fashionable world. I staid there a week, and when that was over they persuaded me to stay another.
"On the day after, there was a fresh arrival,—a gentleman from Philadelphia, with his sister and his daughter. He only remained for the night, and went away in the morning, leaving the ladies behind. The sister was a starched old person,—a sort of purblind duenna, with grizzled hair, gold spectacles, and cap. The daughter I need not describe, for you saw her half an hour ago.
"Her family was good enough; her father a lawyer in Philadelphia. She was well educated—played admirably, and spoke excellent French and Italian. How much or how little she had frequented cultivated society, I do not know,—her own assertions went for nothing; but she had the utmost ease and grace of manner, and an invincible self-possession. Her ruling passion was a compound of vanity and pride, an insatiable craving for admiration and power. Whatever associates she happened to be among, nothing satisfied her but to be the cynosure of all eyes, the centre of all influence. I have known women enough,—women of all kinds, good, bad, and indifferent; but such a one as she I never met but once. I shall not soon forget the evening when I first saw her, seated opposite me at the tea table. She was a small, light figure,—as you saw her just now,—the features, perhaps, a trifle too large. I never recall her, as she appeared at that time, without thinking of Byron's description of one of his mischief-making heroines:—
| "'Her form had all the softness of her sex, Her features all the sweetness of the devil, When he put on the cherub to perplex Eve, and paved—God knows how—the road to evil.' |
"She was utterly unscrupulous. The depth of her artifice was unfathomable. She soon became the moving spirit of that little cockney watering-place—some admiring her, some hating her, some desperately smitten with her. I can see through her manoeuvres now, but then I was blind as a mole. She understood every body about her, and held out to each the kind of bait which was most likely to attract him. There was a sort of dilettante there whose heart she won by talking to him of the Italian poets, which, by the way, she really loved, for there was a dash of genius in her. She aimed to impress each one with the idea that in her heart she liked him better than any one else; and it was her game to appear on all occasions perfectly impulsive and spontaneous, while, in fact, every look, word, or act of hers had an object in it. In short, she was an accomplished actress; and, had her figure been more commanding, she might have rivalled Rachel on the stage. No two people were exactly agreed in opinion concerning her; but all—I mean all the men—thought her excessively interesting; and I remember that two young collegians had nearly fought a duel about her, each thinking that she was in love with him. Nothing delighted her more than to become the occasion of the jealousy of married women towards their husbands,—nothing, that is, except the still greater delight of fascinating a certain young New Yorker who had come to the house on a visit to his betrothed.
"For some time every one supposed her to be unmarried. She did her best, indeed, to encourage the idea, since she thus gained to herself more notice and more marked attentions. At length, to the astonishment of every body, it came out that she had been, for more than a year, married to a cousin of her own, a weak and imbecile youngster, as I afterwards learned, who was then absent on an East India voyage, and who, happily for himself, has since died.