"Father! father!" she whispered, huskily, "I cannot bear that! Shut the doors!—all of them, or I shall go mad!"
She was obeyed; Mr. Hunt hurrying down to the parlor to silence the lovers, with the representation that Sarah was too nervous to endure the excitement of music. For the remainder of the evening, a profound stillness pervaded the upper part of the mansion—a silence that, to Sarah, throbbed with the melody she had tried to hush; and look where she might, she gazed into that rainy, ghastly night—the pale, comfortless watcher, the shadowy type of her deeper, more blighting sorrow.
CHAPTER VIII.
For three days Philip Benson lingered near his beautiful enslaver; on the fourth, he carried a sad, yet trustful heart upon his Southern journey. Sarah had not seen him once since the evening of his coming. Through Lucy, she received his adieux and wishes for her speedy recovery. On the next day but one she left her room, and appeared again in the family circle—now complete in all its parts.
In that short season of bodily prostration, the work of years had been wrought upon her inner life. Outwardly there was little alteration save that effected by physical weakness; but in her views of existence and character, of affections and motives, the doubter had become the skeptic; the dreamer the misanthrope. To the gentle and more womanly aspirations that had for a season supplanted the somewhat masculine tendencies of her mind and tastes had succeeded a stoicism, like the frozen calm of a winter's day, uniform as relentless. This was the surface that locked and concealed the lower depths she had sworn should be forever covered. Others could and did live without hearts. She could thrive as well upon the husks and Sodom apples of this world's goods as did they; holding as Life's chief good, complete and final subjugation of all genuine emotion, which, at the best, was but the rough ore—fit for nothing until purged, refined, and polished in its glitter. She found no other creed that suited her present desperate mood so well as the heartless code of the thorough worldling—the devotee to show, and fashion, and wealth.
Such was her mother, whose domestic virtues were extolled by all who knew her; such, behind her mask of tender grace and amiability, the sister who had won, by these factitious attractions, the heart for which Sarah would have perilled life, sacrificed ease and inclination, bowed her proud spirit to the estate of bond-servant to his every caprice, become the willing slave to his tyrannical behest. Yet Philip Benson was a professed judge of character; a man of sense, education, and experience, and, knowing both girls as he did, he had made his choice; set the stamp of his approval upon the shining, rather than the solid metal. The world, as its young would-be disciple believed she had at length learned, was made up of two classes; those who floated, and those who sank. To the latter she determined that she would not belong.
These and kindred thoughts were rife in her mind, and stirring up many a spring of gall within her bosom, one morning as she lay back in an armchair in the sitting-room, listening with secret scorn to the prattle of the pair of betrothed maidens—Lucy and her friend. Lucy's engagement ring was a diamond, or, rather, a modest cluster of these precious stones, whose extreme beauty did not strike the casual eye with the startling effect of Victoria's more showy gage d'amour. This apparent difference in the value of the two was the source of many discussions and considerable heart-burning, disguised, of course, and threatened in time to produce a decided coolness between the attached wearers of the articles under debate.
On this particular day, Victoria, after some adroit skirmishing, brought out as a "poser" the fact that, to lay the question to rest without more ado, she had, since their last interview, been to Tiffany's, and had her ring valued. Lucy's face was all aglow as her soul-sister named the price of her treasure. She clapped her hands joyously.
"Isn't that the joke of the season, mother?"—as that personage entered. "Don't you think that Vic. was as cunning as we were? She carried her ring to Tiffany's yesterday, too. Wouldn't it have been too funny if we had met there? Mine came from there, they said, and it cost a cool fifty dollars more than yours did, dear!"