""I shall have to ask you for the use of the office for a short time, gentlemen. This is an affair I prefer to investigate immediately, and I would like to see this young lady alone." They both began to speak again, but he interrupted them.
""I will send for you presently; not a word more now, if you please;" and in spite of themselves they were obliged to walk out of the room. As they turned to shut the door their faces frightened me.
""Oh!" I exclaimed; "oh, Mr. Maynard, they will kill Nat I must go home at once," and I rose trembling in every nerve. He made me sit down again, and brought me a gla.s.s of wine, and said, "Do not be afraid, my dear child, they will not dare harm your brother. Drink this, and tell me your whole story."
"Then I told him all. He interrupted me only once, to ask me about the prices paid us for two or three especial patterns which he happened to recollect. When I stopped, he jumped up from his chair and walked up and down in front of me, ejaculating, "By Jove! this is infernal--I never heard of such a contemptible bit of rascality in my life. I have told my father ever since I came home that these men had bad faces, and I have looked carefully for traces of cheating in their accounts. But they were too cowardly to try it on a large scale."
"He then told me that the originality and beauty of the designs which the Wilkinses had furnished the firm of late had attracted general attention; that they had said the best ones were the work of a sister in England, the others of the sister living with them. When he told me the prices which had been paid for them, I could not help groaning aloud and burying my face in my hands. "Oh, my poor Nat!" I exclaimed, "you might have had everything you wanted for that."
""But he shall have it still, Miss Kent," said Robert--"I shall give you a check for the whole amount before you leave this room, and I do a.s.sure you that your brother has a fortune in his talent for drawing. Probably this work is only the beginning of what he will do."
"As Robert opened the office-door for me to pa.s.s out, I saw the two Mr.
Wilkinses standing together at the gate through which I must go. Robert answered my look of alarm by saying, "I shall walk home with you, Miss Kent. They shall not annoy you."
"As we came near, they both lifted their hats with obsequious, angry bows.
Robert did not look at them, but said in a low tone, as we pa.s.sed, "Go to the office and wait there till I return."
"When he bade me good-by at my door, he said, "I shall go now to find my father, and if he is at home the brothers Wilkins will be dismissed from our employ in less than one hour," I looked after him as long as I could see him. Then I went into our little sitting-room, sank into a chair, and sat motionless, turning the check over and over in my hand, and wondering if I really were awake and alive, or if all were a dream. In a few moments Nat came home. As Patrick lifted the wagon up over the door-steps, and Nat caught sight of my face, he called out, "Oh, sister, what is the matter--are you ill?" I ran to him and put the check into his hands, but it was some minutes before I could speak. The wonderful fortune did not overwhelm Nat as it had me. He was much stronger than I. Every stroke of his pencil during the last year had developed and perfected his soul. He was fast coming to have that consciousness of power which belongs to the true artist, and makes a life self-centred.
""I have felt that all this would come, dear," he said, "and more than this too," he added dreamily, "we shall go on; this is only the outer gate of our lives,"
"He prophesied more truly than he knew when he said that--my dear blessed artist-souled martyr!
"I need not dwell on the details of the next half-year. A few words can tell them; and then, again, worlds of words could not tell them.
"Three months from the day I carried the piece of chintz into the overseer"s office, Robert and I were married in the beautiful chapel where papa used to preach. All the mills were shut, and the little chapel was crowded with the workmen and workwomen. When we came out they were all drawn up in lines on the green, and Robert and Mr. Maynard both made them little speeches. Nat and Miss Penstock and Patrick were in Mr. Maynard"s carriage, and Robert and I stood on the ground by the carriage-door. After the people had gone, Mr. Maynard came up to me and put both his hands on my shoulders, just as he had done three years before, and said, "You were a brave girl, but you had to take me for your father, after all."
"Nat"s wedding-present to me was a wood-carving of the "One-Legged Dancers"--the one which stands on the little gilt table. I shall never be separated from it.
"When I first found out how very rich Robert was, I was afraid; it seemed to me almost wrong to have so much money. But I hope we shall not grow selfish. And I cannot but be grateful for it, when I see what it has done for my darling brother. He is living now in a beautiful apartment in New York. Patrick is with him, his devoted servant, and Miss Penstock has gone to keep house for them. Nat is studying and working hard; the best artists in the city are his friends, and his pictures are already known and sought. When Robert first proposed this arrangement, Nat said, "Oh no, no!
I cannot accept such a weight of obligation from any man, not even from a brother."
"Robert rose and knelt down by Nat"s chair, and even then he was so far above him he had to bend over.
""Nat," said he, in a low tone, "I never knelt to any human being before: I didn"t kneel to Dora when I asked her to give herself to me, for I was sure I could so give myself to her as to make her happy; but it is to you, after all, that I owe it that she is mine; I never can forget it for an hour, and I never can repay you--no, not in my whole life-time, nor with all my fortune."
"Then he told him that the sum which it would need to support him and Miss Penstock and Patrick in this way was so small, in comparison with our whole income, that it was not worth mentioning. "And at any rate," he said, "it is useless for you to remonstrate, Nat, for I have already made fifty thousand dollars" worth of stock so entirely yours, that you cannot escape from it. The papers are all in my father"s hands, and the income will be paid to you, or left subject to your order, quarterly. If you do not spend it, n.o.body else will;" and then Robert bent down lower, and lifting Nat"s thin hands tenderly in his, pressed them both against his check, in the way I often did. It was one of the few caresses Nat loved. I stood the other side of the chair, and I stooped down and kissed him, and said:--
""And, Nat, I cannot be quite happy in any other way."
"So Nat yielded.
"It was hard to come away and leave him. For some time I clung to the hope that he might come with us; but the physicians all said it would be madness for him to run the risk of a sea-voyage. However, I know that for him, the next best thing to seeing Europe himself is to see it through my eyes. I write to him every week, and I shall carry home to him such art-treasures as he has never dreamed of possessing.
"Next year we shall go home, and then he will come back to Maynard"s Mills and live with us. Robert is having a large studio built for him on the north side of the house, with a bed-room and little sitting-room opening out of it. Miss Penstock, too, will always live with us; we shall call her "housekeeper," to keep her contented, and Patrick is to stay as Nat"s attendant. Poor fellow, he is not quite full-witted, we think; but he loves Nat so devotedly that he makes a far better servant than a cleverer boy would with a shade less affection.
"And now you have heard the story of my life, dear friend," said Dora, as she rose from the seat and lighted the rose-colored tapers in two low swinging Etruscan candlesticks just above our heads--"all that I can tell you," she added slowly. "You will understand that I cannot speak about the happiest part of it. But you have seen Robert. The only thing that troubles me is that I have no sorrow. It seems dangerous. Dear Nat, although he has all he ever hoped for, need not fear being too happy, because he has the ever-present pain, to make him earnest and keep him ready for more pain. I said so to him the day before I came away, and he gave me those verses I told you of, called "The Angel of Pain,""
Then she repeated them to me:--
The Angel of Pain.
Angel of Pain, I think thy face Will be, in all the heavenly place, The sweetest face that I shall see, The swiftest face to smile on me.
All other angels faint and tire; Joy wearies, and forsakes desire; Hope falters, face to face with Fate, And dies because it cannot wait; And Love cuts short each loving day, Because fond hearts cannot obey That subtlest law which measures bliss By what it is content to miss.
But thou, O loving, faithful Pain-- Hated, reproached, rejected, slain-- Dost only closer cling and bless In sweeter, stronger steadfastness.
Dear, patient angel, to thine own Thou comest, and art never known Till late, in some lone twilight place The light of thy transfigured face Sudden shines out, and, speechless, they Know they have walked with Christ all day.
When she had done we sat for some time silent. Then I rose, and kissing her, still silent, went out into the unlighted room where the gilt table stood. A beam of moonlight fell, broad and white, across its top, and flickered on the vine-leaves and the ferns. In the dim weird light their shapes were more fantastic than ever.
The door into the outer hall stood open. As I went toward it, I saw old Anita toiling slowly up the stairs, with a flat basket on her head. Her wrinkled face was all aglow with delight. As soon as she reached the threshold she set the basket down, and exclaiming, "Oh look, look, Signora!" lifted off the cover. It was full of fresh and beautiful anemones of all colors. She moved a few on top and showed me that those beneath were chiefly purple ones.
"Iddio mio! will not the dearest of Signoras be pleased now!" she said.
"The saints wish that she shall have all she desires; did not my Biagio"s brother come in from Albano this morning? and as I was in the Piazza Navona, buying oranges, I heard him calling from a long way off, "Ho Anita, my Anita, here are anemones for your beautiful Signora with the bright hair."
"They grow around an old tomb a mile away from his vineyard, and he set out from his home long before light to get them for me; for he once saw the Signora and he had heard me say that she never could have enough of anemones. Iddio mio! but my heart is glad of them. Ah, the dearest of Signoras!" and, with a tender touch, Anita laid the cool vine-leaves lightly back upon the anemones and hurried on in search of Dora.
How One Woman Kept Her Husband.
Why my sister married John Gray, I never could understand. I was twenty-two and she was eighteen when the marriage took place. They had known each other just one year. He had been pa.s.sionately in love with her from the first day of their meeting. She had come more slowly to loving him: but love him she did, with a love of such depth and fervor as are rarely seen. He was her equal in nothing except position and wealth. He had a singular mixture of faults of opposite temperaments. He had the reticent, dreamy, procrastinating inertia of the bilious melancholic man, side by side with the impressionable sensuousness, the sensitiveness and sentimentalism of the most sanguine-nervous type. There is great charm in such a combination, especially to persons of a keen, alert nature. My sister was earnest, wise, resolute. John Gray was nonchalant, shrewd, vacillating. My sister was exact, methodical, ready. John Gray was careless, spasmodic, dilatory. My sister had affection. He had tenderness.
She was religious of soul; he had a sort of transcendental perceptivity, so to speak, which kept him more alive to the comforts of religion than to its obligations. My sister would have gone to the stake rather than tell a lie. He would tell a lie unhesitatingly, rather than give anybody pain. My sister lived earnestly, fully, actively, in each moment of the present. It never seemed quite clear whether he were thinking of to-day, yesterday, or to-morrow. She was upright because she could not help it. He was upright,--when he was upright,--because of custom, taste, and the fitness of things. What fatal discrepancies! what hopeless lack of real moral strength, enduring purpose, or principle in such a nature as John Gray"s! When I said these things to my sister, she answered always, with a quiet smile, "I love him." She neither admitted nor denied my accusations.
The strongest expression she ever used, the one which came nearest to being an indignant repelling of what I had said, was one day, when I exclaimed:--
"Ellen, I would die before I"d risk my happiness in the keeping of such a man."
"My happiness is already in his keeping," said she in a steady voice, "and I believe his is in mine. He is to be my husband and not yours, dear; you do not know him as I do. You do not understand him."
But it is not to give an a.n.a.lysis of her character or of his, nor to give a narrative of their family history, that I write this tale. It is only one episode of their life that I shall try to reproduce here, and I do it because I believe that its lesson is of priceless worth to women.
Ellen had been married fourteen years, and was the mother of five children, when my story begins. The years had gone in the main peacefully and pleasantly. The children, three girls and two boys, were fair and strong. Their life had been a very quiet one, for our village was far removed from excitements of all kinds. It was one of the suburban villages of ----, and most of the families living there were the families of merchants or lawyers doing business in the town, going in early in the morning, and returning late at night. There is usually in such communities a strange lack of social intercourse; whether it be that the daily departure and return of the head of the family keeps up a perpetual succession of small crises of interest to the exclusion of others, or that the night finds all the fathers and brothers too tired to enjoy anything but slippers and cigars, I know not; but certain it is that all such suburban villages are unspeakably dull and lifeless. There is barely feeling enough of good neighborhood to keep up the ordinary interchange of the commonest civilities.
Except for long visits to the city in the winter, and long journeys in the summer, I myself should have found life insupportably tedious. But Ellen was absolutely content. Her days were unvaryingly alike, a simple routine of motherly duties and housekeeping cares. Her evenings were equally unvaried, being usually spent in sewing or reading, while her husband, in seven evenings out of ten, dozed, either on the sofa, or on one of the children"s little beds in the nursery. His exquisite tenderness to the children, and his quiet delight in simply being where they were, were the brightest points in John Gray"s character and life.
Such monotony was not good for either of them. He grew more and more dreamy and inert. She insensibly but continually narrowed and hardened, and, without dreaming of such a thing, really came to be less and less a part of her husband"s inner life. Faithful, busy, absorbed herself in the cares of each day, she never observed that he was living more and more in his children and his reveries, and withdrawing more and more from her. She did not need constant play and interchange of sentiment as he did.
Affectionate, loyal, devoted as she was, there was a side of husband"s nature which she did not see nor satisfy, perhaps, never could. But neither of them knew it.
At this time Mr. Gray was offered a position of importance in the city, and it became necessary for them to move there to live. How I rejoiced in the change. How bitterly I regretted it before two years had pa.s.sed.
Their city home was a beautiful one, and their connections and a.s.sociations were such as to surround them at once with the most desirable companionships. At first it was hard for Ellen to readjust her system of living and to accustom herself to the demands of even a moderately social life. But she was by nature very fond of all such pleasures, and her house soon became one of the pleasantest centres, in a quiet way, of the comparatively quiet city. John Gray expanded and brightened in the new atmosphere; he had always been a man of influence among men. All his friends,--even his acquaintances,--loved him, and asked his advice. It was a strange thing that a man so inert and procrastinating in his own affairs, should be so shrewd and practical and influential in the affairs of others, or in public affairs. This, however, was no stranger than many other puzzling incongruities in John Gray"s character. Since his college days he had never mingled at all in general society until this winter, after their removal to town; and it was with delight that I watched his enjoyment of people, and their evident liking and admiration for him. His manners were singularly simple and direct; his face, which was not wholly pleasing in repose, was superbly handsome when animated in conversation; its inscrutable reticence which baffled the keenest observation when he was silent, all disappeared and melted in the glow of cordial good-fellowship which lighted every feature when he talked. I grew very proud of my brother as I watched him in his new sphere and surroundings; and I also enjoyed most keenly seeing Ellen in a wider and more appreciative circle. I spent a large part of the first winter in their house, and shared all their social pleasures, and looked forward to ever increasing delight, as my nieces should grow old enough to enter into society.
Early in the spring I went to the West and pa.s.sed the entire summer with relatives; I heard from my sister every week; her letters were always cheerful and natural, and I returned to her in the autumn, full of antic.i.p.ations of another gay and pleasant winter.
They met me in New York, and I remembered afterwards, though in the excitement of the moment I gave it no second thought, that when John Gray"s eyes first met mine, there was in them a singular and indefinable expression, which roused in me an instant sense of distrust and antagonism. He had never thoroughly liked me. He had always had an undercurrent of fear of me. He knew I thought him weak: he felt that I had never put full confidence in him. That I really and truly loved him was small offset for this. Would it not be so to all of us?