The words of the air she hummed came with a dash of bravado from between her lips:
"--Ange ou diable, ec.u.me de la mer?"
Still smiling, she sank in an exhausted heap upon the floor.
Then she went to bed and fell asleep, lamenting that her head rested upon a cotton pillow-slip.
CHAPTER II
In time long past, when the Huguenots were better known, if less esteemed, an impecunious gentleman of France left his native land for the sake of faith and fortune.
Lured by that blatant boast of liberty which swelled the throats of the Western colonies, even while their hands were employed in meting out the reward of witchcraft and in forging the chains of slavery, he directed his way towards American soil.
His mission failed, and, in search of theological freedom, he only succeeded in weaving matrimonial fetters. Amid an una.s.sorted medley of creeds and customs he came upon the red-cheeked daughter of a Swiss adventurer--an ambitious pioneer who lived upon the theory that the New World having been created for the service of its foreign invaders, the might of the sword was the right of possession.
The gentleman of France, deciding to found a farm and family in the land of his adoption, awoke suddenly to the knowledge that, to insure the success of such an enterprise, feminine intervention is a necessary evil.
Accordingly, he set about his preparations with an economic industry.
Casting his eye upon a tract of land upon a Southern river, he acquired it for certain services rendered in an unguarded moment to the Swiss adventurer, who had acquired it in a manner that concerned himself alone.
The next step of the French gentleman was to build beside the Southern river a family mansion, whose door he promptly closed upon the Swiss adventurer, since virtue consists not so much in refusing to benefit by vice as in refusing to acknowledge the benefit. Not without a sense of nervous perturbation, he then proceeded to cast his gaze upon the most promising feminine pledges of progeny. From among a dozen or so of his fair neighbors he selected, with the experienced eye of a woman-fancier, the blooming specimen of Swiss buxomness, and, the adventurer coming to terms, the marriage had been celebrated without the r.e.t.a.r.ding curtain-raiser of a romantic prelude.
The gentleman"s name was Marcel Musin de Biencourt; the lady"s has no place in the following history.
For a period matters progressed in natural sequence. The land was tilled, the cotton picked, and the lady installed in the best bedroom of the newly erected mansion. Had she played the part for which nature and her lord intended her, there is reason to suppose that she would have become a serviceable instrument in the preservation of the species.
But the gentleman had reckoned without Providence. With the ending of the year of her bridehood the roses in the lady"s cheeks grew waxen, and she turned with a sigh of relief from the labor of travail to the rest of the little church-yard upon the hill.
The aspens shivered above her, the river purled between level fields far down below, and from the uprooted furrows around the dutiful corn put forth tender sprouts; but the lady had shirked her mission in its first fulfilment, and with the birth-time of the year she neither rose nor stirred.
In the best bedroom the dust thickened upon the chintz curtains, and a weak and sickly hostage to fortune yelled his new throat hoa.r.s.e with premonition of the inhospitality of the planet upon which he had been precipitated.
Disappointed in his estimate of woman"s nature, the gentleman of France decided to economize in material, and to rear a race from the unpromising specimen in his possession. Faithfully he strove to fulfil his part, and when the boy reached manhood, he laid himself down beside his wife upon the hill.
From this time on the family record is biblically concise. Marcel begot Marcel, and again Marcel begot Marcel, and yet again.
While the root Musin languished, De Biencourt, the lofty family tree, withered and died, to be forgotten. Neither in history nor in tradition, nor in the paths of private virtue, was a Musin known to have distinguished himself. If he took up arms in the American Revolution, he took them up in a manner unworthy of record; if he favored the Declaration of Independence, he did not commit his preference to paper; if he excelled in any way, it was in the way of mediocrity--which is perhaps the safest way of all.
But extinction was not to be the end of the venturesome blood of the French gentleman. His spirit animated one of his name to confide to the care of his ex-slaves the mansion crumbling above his head, and to become a wanderer in the States which had been so nearly disunited. Like the minstrels of old, he strung his harp from his shoulder, and journeyed from South to North and from East to West. His Norman blood still ran blue in his veins, and his faith was the faith of his fathers.
In his travels he played his pa.s.sage into the vivacious affections of an Irish maiden, who wore a rosary about her neck and a cross upon her sleeve. But these conspicuous badges of Popery failed to chill the pa.s.sion of Marcel. And, in truth, if the maiden"s heart was as black as the arch-fiend, her eyes (which is more to the point) were not less blue than heaven. With an improvidence sufficient to bleach the ghost of his colonial progenitor, he tossed forebodings into the capacious lap of the future, and stormed the yielding heart of young Ireland.
Love was lord, and their marriage-bonds were double-locked and barred by Protestant and Catholic clergy. But there is a power which laughs at religious locksmiths. Within six months the illusions with which each had draped the other melted before the fire and brimstone of ecclesiastical dispute. Between the kisses of their lips each offered pet.i.tions to a patient Omnipotence for the salvation of the other"s soul. As the kisses grew colder the prayers grew warmer. There is a tendency in man, when he has fallen out with the human brother whom he has seen, to wax more zealous in his attentions to the Divine Father whom he has not. To be courteous to one"s neighbor is so much more difficult than to be cringing to one"s G.o.d.
And then a child was given. In the large family Bible upon the father"s desk the event is recorded in two different hands, and the child was christened with two different names.
The first reads:
"MARIE MUSIN, _born April_ 24, 1868."
And the second:
"MARY ANN MUSIN, _born April_ 24, 1868."
After fifteen years the matter was settled, as were most family matters, by the child herself.
"I will be both," she said, decisively. "I will be Mariana."
And Mariana she became.
In the same high-handed fashion the theological disputes of the parents were reduced to trifles as light as air.
"I will be a Presbyterian one Sunday and a Catholic the next," she concluded, with amiable acquiescence; "only on fast-days and lecture-nights I"ll be a heathen."
For a time these regulations were observed with uncompromising impartiality, but, upon moving to a smaller town, she foresaw a diplomatic stroke.
"I think it better," she announced, sweetly, "for one of us to become an Episcopalian. I have noticed that most of the society people here are Episcopalians--and in that way the family will be so evenly distributed.
I see that it will be easier for me to make the sacrifice than for either of you. Of course, I should love to go with you, mamma, but incense makes me sneeze; and you know, papa, I can"t stand congregational singing. It grates upon my nerves. And I must be something, for I have so much religious feeling. I will be an Episcopalian."
She cast herself into the arms of the Church with all the zeal of a convert. From an artistic stand-point she repudiated insincerity, and, though cultivated, her professions were as fertile as the most natural product. Even to herself she scorned to admit that her alliance with a particular creed was the result of aught but a moral tendency in that direction. And the burden of the truth was with her. She was as changeable as wind and as impressionable as wax, and the swelling tide of sentiment had taken an ecclesiastical turn.
She dressed in sober grays, and attended service with the regularity of the s.e.xton; she decorated her walls with Madonnas; and she undertook, by way of the Sunday-school room, to lead a cla.s.s of eight small boys into the path of righteousness. She read Christina Rossetti and George Herbert, and she placed tiny silver crosses, suspended from purple ribbons, in her school-books.
At the age of sixteen she attached herself to a society whose mission it was to cultivate, by frequent calls, the religious poor, and she neglected social observances to r.e.t.a.r.d by her presence the domestic duties of the indigent members of the community. She descended in a special detachment upon a series of beer saloons, enforcing the pledge upon a number of helpless gentlemen, and thereby multiplying the sin of intemperance by that of perjury. While her mother mended the rents in her garments, Mariana promoted a circle of stocking-darners for the inhabitants of the almshouse.
At that period her expression was in perfect harmony with the tenor of her mind. The dramatic effect was always good.
In the daily school, which she attended when the fancy seized her, she ruled as a popular fetish. Between the younger children, whom she terrorized, and the elder, whom she mesmerized, there was an intermediate cla.s.s with whom she was in high favor. As a tiny child she had caught the street songs quicker than any other, and had sung them better; and to the accompaniment of a hand-organ she could render a marvellous ballet.
During her tenth year she fell into a pa.s.sionate friendship for one of the scholars--a stately girl with phlegmatic eyes of gray. For six months she paid her lover-like attentions in surrept.i.tious ways, and expended her pocket-money in nosegays, with which to adorn the desk of her divinity. She wore a photograph of the gray-eyed girl above her heart, and lingered for an hour to walk home with her upon Fridays.
The friendship was sundered at last by visits exchanged between them, and Mariana"s emotions became theological.
But this pa.s.sed also. Vague amatory impulses of old racial meaning were born. At sixteen she was precipitated into a sentiment for the photograph, printed by the daily press, of a young fellow who was at that time in the custody of the State, preparatory to responding to a charge of highway-robbery. The photograph was romantic, the crime was also. It was a nineteenth-century attempt at a revival of the part of Claude Duval.
Mariana attended missions less and meditated more. She divided her time between her journal and the piano, showing a preference for songs of riotous sentiment. Without apparent trouble to herself, she grew wan and mysteriously poetic. She wore picturesque gowns with romantic draperies.
Her hair possessed a charming disorder, the expression of her face pa.s.sed from the placid into the intense. The dramatic effect was as good as ever. Her journal of that year contains a declaration of undying constancy. The object of this avowal is nominally the young highwayman--in reality the creation of an over-fertile brain craving the intoxicant of a great pa.s.sion. The highwayman was but a picturesque nucleus round which her dreams cl.u.s.tered and from which they gathered color. She existed in a maze of the imagination, feasting upon the unsubstantial food of idealism. Her longings for fame and for love were so closely interwoven that even in her own mind it was impossible to disa.s.sociate them. If she bedewed her pillow with tears of anguish for the sake of a man whom she had never seen, and whom, seeing, she would have pa.s.sed with averted eyes, the tears were often dried by ecstatic visions of artistic aspirations. And yet this romance of straw was not the less intense because it was the creation of overwrought susceptibilities; perhaps the more so. If real troubles were the only troubles, how many tortured hearts would be uplifted to the hills. And Mariana"s mystical romance was a _daemon_ that lured her in a dozen different disguises towards the quicksands of life.
But this pa.s.sed also and was done with.
Her mother died, and her father married an early love. Mariana, who had been first, declined to become last. Dissensions followed swiftly, and the domestic atmosphere only cleared when Mariana departed from the paternal dwelling-place.
From the small Southern village, under the protection of an elderly female relation, she had flown to New York in search of theatrical employment. Failing in her object, she turned desperately to the culture of her voice, living meanwhile upon a meagre allowance donated by her father. The elderly female relation had remained with her for a time, but finding Mariana intractable in minor ways, and foreseeing a future in which she would serve as cat"s-paw for the girl"s vagaries, she had blessed her young relative and departed.