Mrs Peixada

by Henry Harland

Where the warm light loves to dwell.’.rdquo;

“I dare say you’ll think me sentimental, but I can’t help it. The fact is that those eyes of hers glowed with all the tenderness and pathos and mystery of a martyr’s. Pale, ethereal fires burned deep down in them, and showed where her soul dwelt. They haunted me for days afterward. Days? No—months. They haunt me now. My heart thrills at this moment, thinking of them, just as it did then, when I was looking into them. I tell you it hurt here”—thumping his chest—“when I had to part with her. It was like—yes, sir; you needn’t smile—it was like having my heart wrenched out. My senses were in confusion. I walked up and down my floor pretty much all night. You never saw such a wretched fellow. At least I fancied I was wretched. The thought of how hopeless my case was—of how unlikely it was that she would ever care a farthing for me—drove me about frantic. All the same, I wouldn’t have exchanged that wretchedness for all the other treasures of the world.” In this exaggerated vein, he would gladly babble on for the next twenty pages; but to what profit, since it is already clear that he was head-over-ears in love?

Of course Arthur had no idea of making a declaration. That she should cherish for him a feeling at all of the nature of his for her, seemed the most improbable of contingencies. So long as he could retain the privilege of seeing her frequently, he would be contented; he would not run the risk of having it withdrawn by revealing to her a condition of affairs which, very likely, she would not sanction. His supremest aspiration, he derived a certain dismal satisfaction from fancying, would be realized if he could in some way become useful and helpful to her, no matter after how lowly a fashion. Henceforward he spent at least one evening a week in her company. ’She never received him alone; but Mrs. Hart’s presence was not objectionable, because she had the sensible custom of knitting in silence, and leaving the two younger folks to do the talking. Their talk was generally about music and literature and other edifying themes; rarely about matters personal. Arthur got pretty well acquainted with Mrs. Lehmyl’s views and tastes and habits of thought; but when he stopped to reckon up how much he had gathered concerning herself, her family connections, her life in the past, he acknowledged that it could all be represented by a solitary nought. Not that she was conspicuously reserved with him. She made it unmistakably evident that she liked him cordially. Only, the pronouns, I and thou, played a decidedly minor part in her ordinary conversation.

He experienced all the pains and pleasures of first love, and all the strange hallucinations that it produces. The man who looks at the world through a lover’s eyes, is as badly off as he who looks at it through a distorting lens—objects are thrown out of their proper relations; proportion and perspective go mad; big things become little, and vice versa. Especially is it remarkable how completely his notions of time will get perverted. For instance, the hours flew by with a rapidity positively astounding when Arthur was in Mrs. Lehmyl’s presence. He would sit down opposite her at eight o clock; they would converse for a few moments; she would sing a song or two; and then, to his unutterable stupefaction, the clock would strike eleven! On the other hand, when he was away from her, time lagged in an equally perplexing manner. He and Hetzel, to illustrate, would finish their dinner at half past seven—only a half hour before he would be at liberty to cross the street. But that half hour! It stretched out like an eternity, beyond the reach of Arthur’s imagination. Life had changed to a dream or to a delirium—it would be hard to say which. The laws of cause and effect had ceased to operate. The universe had lost its equilibrium. Arthur’s heart would swing from hot to cold, from cold to hot, without a pretense of physiological rhyme or reason. He became moody and capricious. A fiber in his composition, the existence of which he had never hitherto suspected, acquired an alarming prominence. That was an almost womanish sensitiveness. It was as if he had been stripped of his armor. Small things, trifling events, that had in the past left him entirely unimpressed, now smote his consciousness like sharpened arrows. Sights of distress in the streets, stories of suffering in the newspapers, moved him keenly and profoundly. He had been reading Wilhelm Meisler. He could not finish it. The emotions it occasioned him were poignant enough to border upon physical pain. The long and short of it is that Love had turned his rose-tinted calcium light upon the world in which Arthur moved, and so made visible a myriad beauties and blemishes that had lain hidden in the darkness heretofore. Among other things that Arthur remarked as curious, was the frequency with which he saw her name, Lehmyl, or other names resembling it, Lemyhl, Lehmil, etc., on sign-boards, as he was being whirled through the streets on the elevated railway. He was sure that he had never seen it or heard it till she had come to dwell in Beekman Place. Now he was seeing it all the time. He was disposed to be somewhat superstitious anent this circumstance, to regard it as an omen of some sort—but whether for good or evil, he could not tell. Of course its explanation was simple enough. With the name uppermost in his mind, it was natural that his attention should be caught by it wherever it occurred; whereas formerly, before he had known her, it was one of a hundred names that he had passed unnoticed every day. And yet, emerging from a brown study of which she had been the subject, it was a little startling to look out of the window, and find Lehmyl staring him in the face.

Now and then, if the weather was fine, he would go up-town early and accompany her for a walk in Central Park. Occasionally he would tuck a book into his pocket, so that when they sat down to rest he could read aloud to her. One day the book of his selection chanced to be a volume of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s shorter tales. They had appropriated unto themselves a bench in a secluded alley; and now Arthur opened to “The Snow Image.”

But before he had proceeded beyond the second sentence, Mrs. Lehmyl stopped him. “Oh, please—please don’t read that,” she cried, in a sharp, startled tone.

Arthur looked up. He saw that her face had turned deathly pale, that her lips were quivering, and that her eyes had moistened. Thrusting the book into his pocket, he stammered out a few hasty words of anxiety. She was not ill?

“Oh, no,” she said, “not ill. Only, when you began to read that story—when I realized what it was that you were reading—I—it—it recalled disagreeable memories. But—shall we walk on?” She was silent or monosyllabic, and her face wore a grave expression, all the rest of their time together. At the door of her house she gave him her hand, and looked straight into his eyes, and said, “You must forgive me if I have spoiled your afternoon. I could not help it. You know how it is’ when one is happy—very happy—to be reminded suddenly of things one would like to forget.”

Arthur’s heart went out to her in a mighty bound. “When one is happy—very happy!” The phrase echoed like a peal of gala bells in his ears. He had a hard struggle to keep from flinging himself at her feet there in the open street. But all his love burned in the glance he gave her—an intense, radiant glance, which she met with one that threw his soul into a transport. She knew now that he loved her! There could be no doubt about that. And, since her eyes did not quail before his—since she had sustained unflinchingly the gaze which, more eloquently than any words, told her of the passion that was consuming him—might he not conclude—? Ah, no; he would trust himself to conclude nothing till he had spoken with her by word of mouth.

“Good-by,” she said.