Читать книгу: «The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2», страница 6
"No," she said, drawing back. "If you know any secrets belonging to this family, I don't want to hear them. You will be obliged to apologize to the Colonel for defacing his wall, and whatever explanation you have to give, will be given to him."
Edmonson watched her with a smile.
"Do you know," he said, "that you have an exaggerated conscience? But you have the faculty of making it seem charming. As you please, then. I will give my explanation to the Colonel as soon as he is ready for it—as soon, and even before. Shall we go into the garden again until somebody comes?"
Elizabeth did not answer immediately. She stopped on the threshold where she had been standing and looked at the speaker with an expression he could not read. She had thought well of this young man. Was it going to be that she could no longer believe in him? She did not care so much for that in itself, but it seemed as if all the world in which she had moved, the ideal world founded on beauty and nobleness, even if, indeed, one cornerstone of it were pain, had fallen to pieces about her. Among so many ruins the ruin of another ideal would not be so very much, but it would give more pain than was due to itself. As she looked up at him Edmonson's face lost its exultation. "Perhaps I am mistaken; I ought to hear before I judge," she thought.
"I would rather stay here," she said at last. "There are footsteps now—it is Master Archdale." She thought as she spoke that the girlish figure walking beside him was Katie's, but when the two came nearer she saw that it was not his cousin to whom Stephen was talking so merrily, but another of his mother's guests. Katie was in the distance with Kenelm Waldo. Bulchester had disappeared for the moment—no, he was with Madam Archdale. As these and others sauntered up to the hall, Edmonson partially closing the opening by pushing the tapestry behind the antlers, retreated, and occupied himself with an examination of these long branches that like a personal weapon had divided the thick underbrush of his way before him. It was not until most of the party were in the hall, not until the Colonel had come in with Madam Pepperell, that he suddenly went forward and drew down the cut tapestry, and at the moment put himself into the same attitude with the man in the picture, and in this attitude stood with his eyes glancing keenly from one to another of the spectators.
There was a murmur, not rising to articulateness, which seemed to be surprise at the sight of the portrait so unexpectedly disclosed. Then followed a breathless hush. It was in the hush that Edmonson's eyes were busiest. But that, too, was short. For, a cry of astonishment rose from nearly every one in the hall. This, though coming from many throats, had but one import.
"What a likeness! Perfect! Wonderful! How came it there? How came he here? What does it mean?"
From Edmonson, standing motionless, the assembly looked toward Stephen, and from him, plainly as much at a loss as themselves, they turned their eyes where his were already fixed, upon the face of his father. But the Colonel, pale and amazed, with a dark shadow fallen upon his face from the door near by him—or perhaps from some door opening in his own breast—seemed no more able than the others to read the riddle. Indeed, he was the first to ask the explanation that all were seeking.
"When and how did you bring that picture here?" he said. "And whose portrait is it?" For he had rejected the first suggestion of its being Edmonson himself. The dress belonged to an earlier period, and the face was that of a man somewhat older; it could not be thought of as the portrait of the young man standing beside it; it was simply a marvellous likeness.
"I found it here," returned Edmonson with a bow. "I have seen the copy of it many times, this is the original painting by Lely. It came here—I mean to the Colonies—by one of those mistakes that one member of a family sometimes, perpetrates upon the others. How it ever got behind this hanging it is out of my province to tell. I yield the field to Colonel Archdale."
"I know nothing of it," said that gentleman. "The house was built when I was a child. It was one of the preparations for my father's second marriage. The tapestry is an heirloom; it is so old that I am always afraid of its tearing, and it is never taken from the wall. My house is at the disposal of my guests, to be sure, but none of them could have destroyed anything else that I should have felt the injury to so keenly."
"It was not willingly done," returned Edmonson, "it was by the impulse of fate. As to the picture, it does not seem strange that we expect Colonel Archdale to know whom his own family portraits represent."
"It may not seem strange, but it is not unprecedented to be ignorant," answered his host. "My father must have known, but in obeying his injunctions as to care of the tapestry I had no idea that I was keeping anything but bare walls from view. Even these antlers are fastened to a great nail in one of the beams. I remember it since I was a child. The hanging was fitted over it, and I was glad when it was put to use in this way."
"Yes, no doubt he could tell us about the portrait if we could only get at him," returned Edmonson coming back to his subject. "But as to who the gentleman is, and why you have flattered me so far as to be able to discover any likeness between us, I owe you all an explanation. And Colonel Archdale, another one besides, which I am most ready to make, for having presumed to search out the painting when I found by accident that there was one behind here. No time is so good as the present. Then, too, I have aroused the curiosity of these ladies and gentlemen, and I am afraid they will owe me a grudge if I don't gratify it by telling the whole story."
"Indeed we shall," cried Katie Archdale.
Bulchester had entered behind the others unseen in the concentration of attention upon the portrait and its exhibitor, and had spent his moment of amazement in silence. He now glided up to Edmonson and said something to him in an undertone too low to be caught by anyone else. The other replied by a look of scorn, and a muttered something that sounded very like, "You always were a fool." Then he stood silent, glancing first at Stephen, and then at the Colonel. The young man faced him in haughty defiance of his manner which made his words almost insulting. The elder stood with his suavity a little disturbed, it is true; but no one except Edmonson found fear in his face, or interpreted what he said as a desire of postponement when he suggested that if there were anything interesting to be heard they should wait until all the stragglers had come up, and then adjourn to the drawing-room where they would be more comfortable.
Edmonson bowed slightly in answer, smiled, thanked him, but observed that it was most flattering to an orator to find his audience increase as he went on, and began:
"I am to tell you who this gentleman of the portrait is, and why I resemble him."
All at once Stephen glanced at Elizabeth. He had found her in the hall with Edmonson. Had she any hand in this unveiling of an ancestral face? He thought of the possibility of shame that might follow—of shame, because he remembered the talk of the two men in the woods and the old butler's look at Edmonson that very morning. If this triumphant fellow had any such thing to tell, did she already know it? Was she upon such terms of intimacy with him as this? She stood apart, still near the doorway where Edmonson had left her. None of the curiosity expressed everywhere else was in her face. She seemed scarcely listening; she looked as if she were far away and the people about her and the words they were saying belonged to a different world. But it was not so, for it was the consciousness that she was in the world about her and bound to it that gave her the expression of struggle. Chains held her when she wanted to be free. She was one too many here. Before her was Archdale's face as he had looked at Katie, and between these two a stupid woman whom she had no patience with, whom she hated—herself. And now there might be coming an added pain that she had brought. She did not care especially for Archdale's pain, except that it was of her bringing.
But Edmonson went on talking, and Stephen, like the others, forgot everything in listening. He saw his father's brows contract, and knew that he was biting his under lip hard, as he did when he was much troubled.
Edmonson still went on with his story. He certainly made it interesting. Stephen's secret uneasiness passed into surprise, distrust, conviction, inward disturbance as he stood with his haughty air unchanged.
CHAPTER XIX
RANKLING ARROWS
Elizabeth was alone at last, that is, as much as a thought pursuing like a personality lets one be alone. When she crossed her room in the silence it was a relief to hear no voices, not to be obliged to answer when she had not listened and was afraid lest she should not answer rightly. Yet the events of the last few hours, the stray words as they seemed to her that she had heard, the faces that had been before her kept moving on before her now and repeating themselves faintly for a little time, just as one whose head is throbbing with some continued sound still hears it through all his pulses, even when he has gone out of reach of the reality. She seemed to be driving home with Lady Dacre's face full of tenderness opposite her. The sympathy had been almost too much for Elizabeth, her eyes had not met the compassionate glances. Sir Temple had conversed for three; he had been very kind, too, but the kindness hurt her, for she knew they pitied her.
Elizabeth had an humble way with her sometimes, and, as has been said, her own achievements seemed to her worthless. She had nothing of that blatant quality, vanity, which claims from others and by reason of its arrogance gets to be called pride; but her dignity strove above everything to be sufficient for itself. Such a spirit shrinks from claiming the appreciation it hungers for, shrinks back into itself, and passes for shyness, or humility, or anything but what it is, that supreme pride that seeks from the world its highest, the allegiance of love, in return for its own love of what is true and grand. Finding a denial in those it meets, it draws away in a silence that to people who rate assertion as power seems tameness, for its action is beyond them, like sights that need a telescope, or sounds out of reach of the ear. Pride like this has two possibilities. It is a Saint Christopher that will serve only the highest. That unfound, it grows bitter, and shrinks more and more into itself, and withers into hopelessness. But if it find the Highest and draw upon that love too great for change or failure, then all things have a new proportion, for grown up to the shelter of the eternities, human judgments dwindle, and human slights, however they may scar, cannot destroy.
The person Elizabeth seemed to see most clearly was Archdale in that one moment in which all his heart had been revealed. Yet it seemed to her that it was not of him that she was thinking most but of Katie's pain and anger. If she were to be separated from Stephen Archdale forever, what wonder that she was grieved with the woman who had done it? For Elizabeth knew that though Katie liked admiration, she loved Stephen. Elizabeth herself saw that he was superior, not only in appearance, but in mind, to any of the suitors with whom she confessed that in event of the worst it was possible that the girl might console herself.
But Elizabeth was by no means so far above thoughts of herself that any other woman's suffering was bringing to her face the look that came upon it as her pride and her fear forced her away from the belief she had determined to hold, into a horror lest all she dreaded was true, lest she was really the wife of the man who at the very lightest disliked her. She could not blame him for that, and it would not have been the worst thing, since she cared nothing about him; she had not fotgotten his look of scorn on that day of the wedding, it came back to her often; but what of that, she asked herself, since she returned it? But to-night there was more than this; to-night his heart had been shown, and Elizabeth had seen how she stood for misery to him, seen, too, another danger which she had never thought of before. This possibility, remote enough, would not be put out of sight now. It might happen that if there were proved to have been no marriage between herself and Stephen Archdale, the certainty of this would come too late to save Katie for him. Elizabeth turned wild at the sense of her own helplessness. "I am one too many in the world," she thought; she could not have spoken, all her will was concentrating into action. Night had overswept her; she forgot everything in her thought for the beings whom she saw were covered by the same cloud. She was to be always an ugly obstacle to the happiness of Katie and of a man she pitied. Whichever way she turned it seemed that there was no other chance for her. She would not go through the world one too many. On coming into the room she had put back the curtains for more air and had blown out the candles. She did not light them again; all that she was going to do she could see well enough to do by the stars and the long summer twilight. She sat down in the armchair beside her table, drew her dressing-case toward her, and opening it, unlocked one compartment with a tiny key found in another. The package so carefully locked away here was something that Mrs. Eveleigh in one of her nervous moods had given her to keep, lest some accident should happen. To be sure, she had given it under promise that no one should know of it, for she had used it for only a little while for her complexion, she explained to Elizabeth, and might never want it again. But, on the other hand, she might. It had been a good deal of trouble to buy it; she did not want to run another gauntlet of questions. So the powder had lain in Elizabeth's dressing-case, unremembered even, until to-night. Now she took it out with a firm hand; there was no sign of shrinking or fear about her, not because she was incapable of it, for she had her terrors, though she showed them less than some women. But she was a soldier in the midst of battle whose only object is to dislodge the enemy; what it will cost is not counted. She waited a moment, then opened the paper so steadily that she spilled none of the powder in the dimness. She had no last words to say, nothing to leave; it would be understood. She spread out the paper a little more, still firmly, still so absorbed in the thought of escape as to have taken no account of the way. Then she bent her face over it and slowly drew nearer. Suddenly she raised her head; it seemed as if a voice had called her, a voice so clear, so still, so full of power that she waited submissive and wondering. In another moment she came to herself, the brave self that suffering had thrust away usurping its place by a wicked will. She drew a long breath as if waking from a horrible dream, and sat quiet for a while, her hands clenched and brought together. She shivered in the summer air. Suddenly she rose, took up the paper, and going to the window, tossed it out, scattering its contents. "It shall never tempt any one like this again," she said aloud.
Then slipping down to the floor, she leaned her arms upon the windowsill and buried her face in them.
"God, forgive me," she cried. "It was Thy cross that I was casting off. But my life is in Thy guidance. I will take all the pain from Thy hand. Forgive me. Help me against my wicked pride. And in return for the misery I have brought, give me something good that I may do, some little favor. And yet—Thy will be done," she added brokenly, then trembled lest that Will should refuse the one request which seemed to promise any relief; trembled, but did not retract. "I will wait, I will trust," she said, and looked into the depths beyond the stars with no fear that her prayer would fall back into itself like a sound which, finding no home, returns weary, and robbed of its meaning and strength. She knew that the something which fell upon her was forgiveness too deep for words and an assurance of guidance. For the telephone is not new but as old as humanity and with a call in every man's consciousness. It summons him at times to leave what he is doing and listen. And when in some depth of need he sends a message, then, because no other ear than his may catch the answer given, is there for that reason none? The soul is like science; it cannot break through its boundaries and burst in upon the unknowable that surrounds its little realm of knowledge, but wherever it presses against these barriers they recede without being destroyed, and the adventurer, still in his own domain, brings back new treasures to the old life. The source of power is, we know, forever beyond us, but in going out toward that we enter the realm of power and are charged with it.
In the stillness that had fallen upon her Elizabeth rose softly, and made her preparations for the night.
Archdale came down early the next morning. He stood a few moments in the hall waiting for the appearance of the person he had come to meet. As he looked out into the garden, a picture seemed to rise before him, one that was not within his horizon at present. He seemed to be looking out into a garden as he had been that morning when, with his mother, Sir Temple and Lady Dacre, he had paid a visit to Madam Pepperell. Looking into this garden absently he had seen Elizabeth. Unaware of visitors in the house, she was going on with her occupation of gathering roses. Archdale the day before, wondering about her complicity with Edmonson's scheme had had this vision of her come between him and any belief in this. It came again that next morning as he was waiting to see Edmonson alone, and imagined his mind full only of what he had learned from him the day before. He remembered the expression of her face; he had never seen it gentle like this. She had been standing only a few rods distant with scarcely so much as her profile turned toward him. A cluster was in her left hand; in her right a stem just broken off, holding a rose and several buds. She was perfectly still, seeming to have forgotten to move, to be lost in reverie. She saw him no more than her roses; she was alone with her thoughts. There was a strength and a sadness in the delicate outline, especially in the mouth, which he had not seen before, perhaps, because he had never studied her profile. As he had thought of this expression while he had stood before the uncovered portrait, he had said to himself that certainly she had not been willingly concerned in helping forward another's misfortune. While he sat watching her he had been inclined to go to her, obeying his impulse rather than his judgment, which told him that even if he were in any way the cause of her sorrow, he could do nothing to help her. But Lady Dacre had spoken to him at the moment, and before he could answer her he had seen a servant go up to Elizabeth, and had perceived that she was coming into the house.
This morning also it was Lady Dacre's voice that broke in upon him. She was hurrying through the hall with eyes on the open door.
"Good morning," she said. "Has Madam Archdale gone into the garden yet? I told her I should be there first this morning, and now she has stolen a march upon me." Archdale was startled. Yes, his mother was in the garden, he saw her now. Was the other only a vision? "Will you follow, Temple?" cried her ladyship. Her husband, who had been coming down stairs as his wife spoke, greeted Archdale hastily and accepted her invitation, for some one else stood in the hall, having entered it, his observer supposed, from the library, for he had not seen him on the stairs. This other one was coming forward to his host when Sir Temple passed, and in another moment he stood face to face with Archdale.
"Good morning," he said with a bow. His expression had changed from the sneer it had worn as he stood in the shadow covertly watching Archdale's face. "Friends, is it not?" he added, and he smiled and held out his hand tentatively. His host hesitated in the least, then took it. He had been obliged to remind himself first that instinct was not an autocrat of one's manners. Edmonson perceived the hesitation, slight as it was, and the shadow in his heart sprang up and darkened his face for a moment. Then he gave a short laugh, and turned toward the sunshine. "That's right," he said; "let us part on good terms; it's luck, not I, that you find against you."
"It was about this very thing that I was waiting here to speak to you this morning," returned Stephen. "I was going to beg you to remain until we can look into things a little; you, and my father, and I, you understand? It can be done more conveniently here than anywhere else,—and I trust I need not assure you that you are welcome. Of course, I don't pretend to like the turn of affairs."
"Not necessary," interposed the other, the covert impertinence under his frank smile making Archdale flush, and return haughtily:
"I was merely going to say that we must accept with the best grace possible the consequences of things that happened so long before our day."
"This philosophy is delightful on your lips. As for myself, I shall not find that acceptance of the situation makes any demand for philosophical endurance."
He tossed his head a little as he ended in amusement at having finished his opponent at the same time as his speech.
"Perhaps that is well," returned Archdale quietly. "Then it is settled that you stay a few days longer with us?" he added.
"Thank you. I shall be happy to do so. When you need me, I am at your service; for you will find that I have proofs enough to be satisfactory. I have not considered that my unsupported word would be taken as sufficient guarantee in a case like this, where, you know, incredulity is so desirable."
"Yes, Master Edmonson, I confess, where incredulity is so desirable. Well, then, after breakfast I shall be obliged to trouble you."
"Thank you," answered Edmonson, marching off immediately. "I think Lady Dacre is in need of my services. She is struggling with a rose that has climbed up out of her reach, and her husband has disappeared altogether; he is probably assisting Madam Archdale. These husbands are not in the right place, you see." With which Parthian arrow he disappeared, and was soon filling Lady Dacre's hands with her coveted treasures.
Archdale watched him a few moments noticing his easy movements and his air of assurance.
"Impudent fellow," he muttered, setting his teeth, "to speak to an Archdale in that style. I can't believe him. I shall have Allston examine his proofs; he has a hawk's eye for flaws. But there's the likeness. Yes, his story may be true; but the man has the making of a knave in him, if the work is not done already."
It was almost dinner time. Elizabeth had been out sailing with Madam Archdale, Colonel Pepperell, and Sir Temple, and Lady Dacre. They were in the Colonel's boat; and Madam Pepperell, who had been detained, had sent her young guest to represent her. But Edmonson had gone off with his host to Colonel Archdale's, and Bulchester had mysteriously disappeared soon afterward. Elizabeth suspected that he had gone to pay a visit to Katie and had found her so fascinating that he could not tear himself from her society, or that he had wandered off somewhere by himself to dwell upon her perfections. "Poor simpleton!" she said to herself in the revulsion from her fears of the night before. At all events, the result was the same; there were only three at Seascape to accept the Colonel's invitation to go sailing.
It was always a refreshment to Elizabeth to be with Sir Temple and Lady Dacre; that morning it was even better than being alone; they were the only ones purely spectators in the drama of struggle and suffering going on under the courtesies that were its scenic accompaniments. When they talked and jested it was out of happy hearts, at least so far as the things about them were concerned, and for this reason the strain was taken from her in their presence. She had only to be gay enough, and there was no need of watching her words lest they should be misconstrued. If she had been asked why anything that she said or did was liable to be misconstrued, she could not have told. This was her feeling, but she did not see her way; no flash of the electric storm that the blackness foreboded had yet shown her where she stood; but the elemental conditions affected her.
The boat on its return had landed Madam Archdale and her guests on the pebbly beach at Seascape, not far from the house. They had said farewell and sauntered up the path toward it and disappeared. The boat was about putting out again when a man came running up to the Colonel, and begged him to wait to speak with the Captain of a schooner standing out about half a mile. The Captain had come ashore on purpose to see him and was a little way down the beach now hurrying toward him. The business was urgent.
"Go back without me," the Colonel said. "I may be kept here for some time." But Elizabeth had had enough of sailing for that day; she was already on shore and said that she would rather walk home. As Pepperell left her with an apology she walked on a few rods, and stopped to speak to a fisherman cleaning his boat. She had seen him at the house and had heard that he had lost his child the week before. As she turned from him she went on slowly until she came to where a boulder towered over her head and seemed to bar her progress except along the shore. She knew the zigzag way that wound about its base and led her into the straight path again which would take her across the grounds of Seascape and bring her into the road not far from Colonel Pepperell's home. But before she had time to enter this way, voices on the other side of the boulder startled her. Her first thought was that Lady Dacre and her husband had come back. But she perceived that the tones were Bulchester's. She stood still an instant, wishing that she could reach the road without being obliged to talk to him or any one, she felt so little like it. But there was no hope of that. There was a rough seat cut in the stone on the other side; the views landward and seaward were delightful; the great elm near by shaded the place, and Bulchester had probably ensconced himself there with somebody else. She must go by, and if they even joined her, it was no matter. She made a movement forward, when Edrnonson's voice with a ring that she had never heard in it came to her ears. Yet it was not his tones, but his words, that made her cower and stand motionless with startled eyes and parted lips, until, slowly, as wonder grew into disgust, her face crimsoned from brow to throat and drooped, as if to hide from itself. Was this the way that men spoke of women, with sneers, with scoffing? In all her innocent life she had never looked even through bars at the world that such expressions revealed, dimly enough to her veiled in her simplicity.
The Puritan spirit of her country, that although it sometimes put bands on the freeman, chained the brute in human nature in his dungeon, lest his breath in the land should breed death, had been in such accord with her own fair womanhood that she had not realized that all the world was not as safe as her own home, as safe, though not as happy. Yet the sneer that Edmonson had spoken seemed to him so slight, so much a matter of course, that it was forgotten as soon as uttered; it was merely his way of looking at a world unknown to his listener. She did not know of what woman it was that he had dared to speak with such contempt; probably of some one she had never seen. It was not at the stranger alone; it was through her at all women that the mire of suspicion had been thrown.
She could not go forward now, and while she stood trying to grow calm through her indignation and seeing that she must go home by the other road, which would take her quite a distance out of her way, scraps of the conversation that fell upon her ears found lodgment in her mind. The two seemed to be talking of some man now. Then all at once she heard Bulchester say:
"It's the oddity that takes you;"—she had lost what went before—"that will soon wear off. But I'm glad enough you're not as wise as I, to prefer the other. What makes you so sure, though, that he has secured your—?" In some movement she lost the last word and the answer, unless it were merely a significant exclamation of belief. "You wouldn't stand upon the chances of change though," resumed Bulchester, "I know you well enough. But, according to you, there's the insuperable obstacle."
Edmonson laughed contemptuously.
"Insuperable?" he answered. "Stray shots have taken off more superfluous kings and men than the world knows of. And just now, with this prospect of war before the country, something is sure to happen,—to happen, Bulchester; luck has a passion for me, and after all her caprices, she is coming to—."
Elizabeth lost the rest of the sentence. She was already on her way home by the other road, treading softly while on the beach, lest the pebbles should betray her footsteps. When she was well out of hearing she stopped a moment to take breath. She stood looking out upon the expanse of ocean before her as if her sight could reach to the unknown world beyond it.
"Last night," she said, "I thought the worst had come to me. I was wrong."
