away, and for a few minutes she utterly lost her self-control. She buried her face in her hands, and her low, stifled sobs filled Van Berg with the keenest distress and perplexity.
“Miss Ida,” he said earnestly, “I would rather every tear you are shedding were a drop of my blood,” but his words only made them flow faster still.
Suddenly she sprang up, and turning her back upon him, dashed away her tears almost fiercely. “Oh! this is shameful!” she exclaimed, in low, indignant tones. “Mr. Van Berg, what must you think of me? Please turn Mr. Eltinge’s face away, for he is looking at me just as he did when my heart was breaking, and–and–I’ve lost my self-control, and I had better not come here till I can cease being so weak and foolish.”
“Is it weak to be grateful?” he asked, gently. “Is it foolish to love one so thoroughly entitled to your love? I honor you for your deep and tender affection for Mr. Eltinge, and every tear you have shed proves to me that in this perfect flower I am now finding the true emblem of yourself.”
“No,” she said, almost passionately, “I have no right to it. The other one that you threw away is true of me, and always will be. This but mocks me with its perfection. I would be a hypocrite if I should put it in my hair, and smile complacently while you painted it. My heart clings to the other emblem, and I know I must develop as best I can, as that would have done after its destroyer was taken away. No, Mr. Van Berg. I have seen myself in the strong, sharp light of truth. If you are willing to be my friend, please be an honest one. My faithful old friend in the country would scarcely take my portrait if this perfect flower were introduced with any such meaning as you attach to it, and I certainly would be ashamed to give it to him. Mr. Van berg, we MUST let bygones by bygones, or we never can get on. See how absurdly I have acted both yesterday and to-day, and all through recalling the past. Indeed, indeed, it will never do for me to come here again, and if you can make such a marvellous likeness of Mr. Eltinge as you have, I scarcely think there will be any need.”
“My success with Mr. Eltinge’s portrait is the result of a few happy strokes that I might not be able to give again if I tried a year. Believe me, Miss Mayhew, I not only wish to be an honest friend, but a very considerate one. I promise never to urge you to do anything that will cause you pain. I can understand how the features of your kind friend have touched the tenderest chords of your heart, and I respect your study fidelity to your conscience in refusing to let me paint this bud in your hair; but you must also do me the justice to believe that I meant no hollow compliment when I searched for it among the florists. Must I throw this one away, too?” he asked, with a glance that was very ardent for a friend; “for since I obtained it for you, it must receive its fate at your hands only.”
“I’ll wear it, simply as your gift, with pleasure,” and she fastened it in her breastpin, so that its crimson blush rested against the snowy whiteness of her neck.
He looked her full in the eyes and said, with low, sad emphasis: “I do not deserve such respect.” Then the knowledge that she was harboring a purpose which troubled her conscience, but which she could not abandon, became the cause of a trace of her old recklessness of manner. She assumed a sudden gayety, as if she had stepped out of shadows into too strong a light, as she said:
“Mr. Van Berg, you may well hesitate to bring the appetite you say had last night to our house this evening, and if I stay a moment longer, you will get no dinner at all. I have not been after the crude material–as you call it–yet, and I’m told that there is not a man living so amiable and philosophical, but that a poor dinner provokes martyr-like expression, if nothing worse;” and with a smile and a piquancy of manner that seemed peculiarly brilliant against the background of her deep and repressed feeling, she again left him.
He tried to return to his work, but found himself once more possessed by the demon of unrest and impatience. The spiritual wave that had been lifting him higher and higher was changing its character and becoming a smoothly gliding current. It was so irresistible that he never thought of resisting. “Why should he resist?” he asked himself. Circumstances had interested him in this rare Undine before she received a woman’s soul; circumstances had entangled his life and hers in what had almost been an awful tragedy; and now circumstances, or something far beyond, were swiftly developing before his eyes a spiritual loveliness that was the counterpart of her outward beauty, and he assured himself that it would be the greatest folly of his life to lose a trace of the exquisite process that he might be privileged to see. What artist or poet has not pictured himself the fair face of Eve as God first breathed into her perfect clay the breath of life, or has not, in imagination, seen the closed eyes opening in surprise and intelligence or kindling with the light of love? And yet the change in Ida Mayhew seemed to Van Berg far more wonderful and interesting; and to his fancy if, instead of lying in the beauty of her breathless, statuesque preparation for life, Eve had been possessed by a legion of distorting imps, she would have been the type of the maiden he first had recognized. But he had seen these evil spirits exorcised, and in their place was coming a noble, womanly soul–sweet, tender, and strong–and the perfect form and features seemed but a transparent mould, a crystal vase into which heaven was pouring a new and divine life. Why should he not long to escape from the dusty matter-of-fact world and witness this spiritual repetition of the most beautiful story of the past? Thus his philosophical mind was able once more to reason the whole matter out clearly and prove that his wish to annihilate the intervening hours before he could dare to present himself to Ida Mayhew, was the most natural and proper desire imaginable. He concluded that a walk through Central Park might banish his disquietude, and leave time for a careful toilet, since for some occult reason the occasion seemed to him to require unusual preparation.
He knew he was unfashionably early when he rang Mr. Mayhew’s door-bell, but he had found it impossible to curb his impatience to see in what new aspect Ida would present herself that evening. A hundred times he had queried how she would appear in her own home, how she would preside as hostess, and whether the taste of the florid and fashionable mother would not be so apparent as to annoy him like a bad tone in the picture. yes, that was Mrs. Mayhew’s parlor into which he was shown. It did not suggest the maiden who had come to visit, nor the quiet, dignified gentleman Mr. Mayhew was seen to be when at the touch of love’s wand a degrading vice fell away from him. But the artist could find no fault with the host who greeted him promptly, and when, a few moments later, there was a breezy rustle on the stairs and he turned to greet his hostess, his face flushed with admiration and pleasure. It became evident that the worshipper of beauty was in the presence of his divinity, and his every glance burned incense to her honor. She had twined a few rose-leaves in her hair, but wore no other ornament save the rose he had given her in the morning, which evidently had been kept carefully for the occasion, for it was unchanged, with the exception that it revealed its heart a little more openly, as did Ida herself. And yet she did her best to insure that her manner should be no more cordial than her character of hostess demanded.
But in spite of all she could do, the light of exultation and intense joy would flash into her eyes and tremble in her tones that evening. A maiden would have been blind indeed had she not been able to read the riddle of Van Berg’s ardent friendship now, and Ida had seen that expression too often not to know its meaning well. In the morning she had strongly hoped, now she believed. She no longer walked by faith but in full vision, and she trod with the grace of a queen who knows her power in the realm that woman loves best. The glow of her eyes, her repressed excitement, that vitalized everything she said or did, mystified while they charmed her guest. “She has become true to nature,” he thought, “and like nature is full of mysterious changes, for which we know not the cause. At one time it is a sharp north wind, again the south wind. This morning there was a sudden shower of tears, and before it was over the sunlight of smiles flashed through them. Now she appears like a June morning, and I pray the weather holds.”
“Oh,” thought Ida, in the wild, mad glee of her heart, “how can I behave myself and look innocent and unconscious, seeing what I do? He is my very good friend is he? I wish for only one such friend in the world. It wouldn’t be proper to have another. Oh, but isn’t it rich to see how unconscious he is of himself! He is passing into an exceedingly acute attack of my own complaint, and the poor man doesn’t know what is the matter. I don’t believe he ever looked at Jennie Burton as he looks at me. Ah, Jennie Burton!” The joyousness suddenly faded out of her face and she sighed deeply. It seemed to Van Berg for a time that his June morning might become clouded after all, but while his face was turned towards her with the expression it now wore no sad thoughts or misgivings could shadow Ida very long.
Chapter L. Swept Away.
There was no vulgar profusion in the dinner which Ida had ordered, nor were its courses interminable; and as she gracefully and quietly directed everything, the thought would keep insinuating itself in Van Berg’s mind, that the home over which she might eventually preside would be a near suburb of Paradise. He heartily seconded Ida’s purpose that her father should take part in their conversation, and it was another deep source of her gladness that the one whom she had seen so depressed and despairing, now looked as she would always wish him to appear. “Oh, it’s too good to last,” she sighed, as her heart fairly ached with its excess of joy.
After dinner Mr. Mayhew asked Van Berg to light a cigar with him in his study, but the artist declined and followed Ida to the parlor.
“Mr. Van Berg,” she said, with a great show of surprise, “how is it you don’t smoke this evening? It seemed to me that you and Cousin Ik were drawn to a certain corner of Mr. Burleigh’s piazza with the certainty of gravitation after dinner, and then you were lost in the clouds.”
“On this occasion I have taken my choice of pleasures and have followed you.”
“This is a proud moment for me,” she said, with a mirthful twinkle in her eyes. “I never expected to rival a gentleman’s cigar, and I don’t think I ever did before.”
“Another proof of my friendship, Miss Ida.”
“Yes,” she replied demurely, “an act like this goes a good way towards making me believe you are sincere.”
“Miss Ida, you are always laughing at me. I wish I could find some way to get even with you, and I will too.”
“You do me injustice. I, in turn, will lay an offering on the altar of friendship and will go with you this evening to the concert garden.”
“I think you exceedingly, but will leave the offering on the altar, if you will permit me. I would much rather remain in your parlor.”
“Why, Mr. Van Berg, you are bent on being a martyr for my sake this evening.”
“Yes, wholly bent upon it.”
“How amiable gentlemen are after dinner!” she exclaimed. “But where was your appetite this evening? Clearly our cook knows nothing of the preparation of ambrosia nor I of nectar, although I made the coffee myself.”
“Did you? That accounts for its divine flavor. Don’t you remember I took two cups?”
“I saw that your politeness led you to send me your cup a second time. I suppose you accomplished a vast deal again to-day after you were once finally rid of an embodiment of April weather?”
“I would lose your respect altogether if I should tell you how I have spent the afternoon. You would think me an absurd jumble of moods and tenses. I may as well own up, I suppose. I have done nothing but kill time, and to that end I took a walk through Central Park.”
“This hot afternoon! Mr. Van Berg, what possessed you?”
“A demon of impatience. It seemed as if old Joshua had commanded the sun to stand still again.”
“You must indeed by a genius, Mr. Van Berg, for I’ve always heard that the peculiarly gifted were full of unaccountable moods.”
“I understand the satire of your expression ‘PECULIARLY gifted,’ but my turn will come before the evening is over,” and he leaned luxuriously back against the sofa cushion with a look of infinite content with the prospect before him. “Bless me, what is this over which I have half broken my back,” he exclaimed, and he dragged out of its partial concealment a huge volume.
“Please let me take that out of your way,” said Ida, stepping hastily forward with crimson cheeks.
“Don’t trouble yourself, Miss Mayhew; fortune is favoring me once more, and I am on the point of discovering the favorite author you would not mention this morning. An encyclopedia, as I live! from A to B, with a hair-pin inserted sharply at the word Amsterdam. Really, Miss Ida, I can’t account for your absorbing interest in Amsterdam.”
“Mr. Van Berg, there is no use in trying to hide anything from you. You find me out every time and I’m really growing superstitious about it.”
“I wish your words were true; but, for the life of me, I can’t understand why you should crave encyclopaedias as August reading, nor can I see the remotest connection between the exquisite color of your face and the old Dutch city of Amsterdam.”
“Well, the Fates are against me once more. Why I left that book there I don’t know, for I’m not usually so careless. Mr. Van Berg, I scarcely need to remind you of a fact that you discovered long ago–I don’t know anything. Do you not remember how you tried to talk with me one evening? You touched on almost as many subjects as that huge volume contains, and my face remained as vacant through them all as the blank pages in that book before the printed matter begins.”
“But now, Miss Ida, your face is to me like this book after the printed matter begins, only I read there that which interests me far more than anything which this bulky tome contains, even under the word Amsterdam.”
“You imagine far more than you see. I think artists are like poets, and are given to great flights. Besides, you are becoming versed in my small talk. When you tried it on the evening I referred to, you were just a trifle ponderous.”
“Yes, I can now see myself performing like a lame elephant. Did you propose to read this encyclopaedia entirely through?”
“I might have skipped art as a subject far too deep for me.”
“When you come to that let me take the place of the encyclopaedia. I will sit just here where you keep your book and give you a series of familiar lectures.”
“I never enjoyed being lectured, sir!”
“Then I’ll teach you after the Socratic method, and ask you questions.”
“I fear some of them might be too personal. You have such a mania for solving everything.”
“And did you fear that at some of the many sittings I shall need this fall I might again broach every subject under the sun, and so you were led to read an encyclopaedia to be prepared?”
“Is that what you mean by the Socratic method? I decline any lessons concerning art or anything else on that plan, for you would find out everything.”
“I shall, anyway. How long ago it seems since we took that stupid walk together on Mr. Burleigh’s piazza! We are nearer together now, Miss Ida, than we were then.”
“Oh! no, indeed,” she replied quickly; “I had your arm on that occasion.”
“But you have my sincere friendship and respect now. I can’t tell you how pleased I was when I saw how you had honored the little emblematic flower I gave you this morning. That you wear it to-night as your only ornament gives me hope that you do value my respect and regard.”
“I think I had better let the rose-bud answer you, and I confess I like to think how perfect it is when I remember the meaning you gave to it, though how you can respect me at all I cannot understand. Still, I am like father–next to God’s favor the respect of those I esteem does most to sustain and reassure me. But, oh! Mr. Van Berg, you can’t know what an honest sense of ill-desert I have. It is so hard just to do right, no matter what the consequences may be.”
“The trouble with me is that I am not trying as you are. But I know, with absolute certainty, that the strongest impulse of true friendship, or at least of mine, in this instance, is to render some service to my friend. You will make me very happy if you will tell me something I can do for you.”
“You are helping me very much in your manner towards father, and I do thank you from the very depths of my heart. In no way could you have won from me a deeper gratitude. And–well–your kindness almost tempts me to ask for another favor, Mr. Van Berg.”
He sprang to her side and took her hand.
Quickly withdrawing it, she said with a little decisive node: “You must sit down and sit still, for I have along, tiresome story to tell, and a very prosaic favor to ask;” for she had resolved, “he shall go forward now with his eyes open, and he shall never say I won him by seeming what I was not. If I can’t deal right by Jennie Burton, I will by him.”
“I shall find no service prosaic; see, I’m all attention,” and he did look very eager indeed.
“That encyclopaedia suggests my story, and I may have to refer incidentally to myself.”
“Leave the book out; I’ll listen for ages.”
“I should be out of breath before that. Mr. Van Berg, I’m in earnest; I don’t know anything worth knowing. My life has been worse than wasted, and the only two things I understand well are dancing and flirting. Now I know you are disgusted, but its the truth. My old, fashionable life seems to me like the tawdry scenes of a second-rate theatre, where everything is for effect and nothing is real. I have hosts of acquaintances, but I haven’t any friends except Mr. Eltinge.”
“And Harold Van Berg,” put in the artist, promptly.
“It’s good of you to say that after such confessions,” she continued, with a shy glance. “I hope it wasn’t out of politeness. Well, I’ve waked up at last. I think you first startled me out of my insufferable stupidity and silliness at the concert garden, and I’m very much obliged to you for the remark you made to Cousin Ik on that occasion.”
“Yes, I remember,” Van Berg groaned. “I waked you up as if I were trying to put your shoulder out of joint. Well, I’m waking up also.”
“You have no idea what a perfect sham of a life I led,” and she told him frankly of her wasted school days and of her trip abroad, for which she had no preparation of mind or character. “A butterfly might have flown over the same ground and come back just as wise,” she said. “But I have suddenly entered a new world of truth and duty, and I am bewildered; I am anxious to fit myself for the society of sensible, cultivated people, and I am discouraged by the task before me. I went to father’s library yesterday and was perfectly appalled by the number of books and subjects that I know nothing about. The fact that I stumbled into that encyclopaedia, which gave you the laugh against me, shows how helpless I am. Indeed, I’m like a little child trying to find its way through a wilderness of knowledge. I blundered on as far as Amsterdam, and there I stopped in despair. I didn’t know what was before me, and I was getting everything I had been over confused and mixed up in my mind. And now, Mr. Van Berg, with your thorough education and wide experience you can tell me what to read and how to read.”
Van Berg’s face was fairly alive with interest, and he said eagerly: “The favor you ask suggests a far greater one on my part. Let me go with you through this wilderness of knowledge. We can take up courses of reading together.”
At this moment Mr. Mayhew entered, and the artist hesitated to go on with his far-reaching offers, and, indeed, he suddenly began to realize, with some embarrassment, how much they did involve.
But Ida maintained her presence of mind, and said, simply: “That would be impossible, though no doubt exceedingly helpful to me. Here, as in the instance of the pictures, your good-nature and kindness carry you far beyond what I ever dreamed of asking. I merely thought that in some of your moments of leisure you could jot down some books and subjects that would be the same as if you had pointed out smooth and shady paths. You see, in my ignorance, I’ve tried to push my way through the wilderness straight across everything. Last evening I pestered my father with so many questions about politics and the topics of the day, that he thought I had lost my wits.”
Mr. Mayhew leaned back in his chair and laughed heartily, as he mentally ejaculated: “Well done, little girl!”
“I will brush up my literary ideas, and do the best I can, very gladly,” said Van Berg. “But you greatly underrate yourself and overrate my ability. I am still but on the edge of this wilderness of knowledge myself, and in crossing a wilderness one likes company.”
“Oh, I could never keep up with your manly strides,” said Ida, with a sudden trill of laughter. “Having secured my wish, I shall now reward you with some very poor music, which will suggest my need of lessons in that direction also.”
Van Berg was not long in discovering that she would never become a great musician, no matter how many lessons she had. But she played with taste and a graceful rhythm, which proved that music in its simplest forms might become a language by which she could express her thought and feeling.
“Ida,” said Mr. Mayhew, a little abruptly, “I wish to see a friend at the club. I’ll be back before the evening is over.”
“Please don’t stay long,” Ida answered, looking wistfully after him.
Then they found some ballad-music that they could sing together, and Van Berg expressed great pleasure in finding how well their voices blended.
“You have modestly kept quite all summer, and I am just finding out that you play and sing,” he said.
“I would not have the confidence to do either at a hotel. I shall never be able to do any more than furnish a little simple home music to friends, not critics.”
“I’m content with that arrangement, for I have finally dropped my character of critic.”
“But true friends never flatter,” she said. “If you won’t help me overcome my faults I shall have to find another friend.”
“As you recommended an ancient woman as nurse, so I will recommend the venerable friend you have already found, and ask you to let him do all the fault-finding.”
She turned to him and said earnestly: “Mr. Van Berg, are you not a sufficiently sincere friend to tell me my faults?”
“Yes, Miss Ida, if you ask me to.”
“Only as you do so can you keep my respect.”
“You are very much in earnest. I never saw greater fidelity to conscience before; and I should be very sorry if, for any cause, your conscience were arrayed against me.”
She suddenly buried her face in her hands and trembled. Then turning from him to her piano again she faltered: “I disregarded conscience once and I suffered deeply,” and in the depths of her soul she added, “and I fear I shall again.”
“Miss Ida,” he said impetuously, “I cannot tell you what a fascination your new, beautiful life has for me as seen against the dark background of memories which neither you nor I can ever wholly banish. But I am causing you pain now,” for she became very pale, as was ever the case when there was the faintest allusion to the awful crime which she had contemplated. “Forgive me,” he added earnestly, “and sing, please, that little meadow brook song, of which I caught a few bars last evening. That, I think, must contain an antidote against all morbid thoughts.”
“You are mistaken,” she said. “It’s very silly and sentimental; you won’t like it.”
“Nevertheless please sing it, for if not to my taste, you will prevent it from running in my head any longer, as it has ever since I heard it.”
“You will never ask for it again,” she said, and she sang the following words to a low-gliding melody designed to suggest the murmur of a small stream:
‘Twas down in a meadow, close by a brook, A violet bloomed in a shadowy nook.
She gazed at the rill with a wistful eye— “He cares not for me, he’s hastening by,” She sighed.
In sunshine and shade the brook sped along, Nor ceased for a moment his gurgling song. “‘Twould sing all the same were I withered and dead”— And the blue-eyed violet bowed her head
And died.
But the rill and the song went on the same Till the pitiless frost of winter came,
When the song was hushed in an icy chill, And the gay little brook at last stood still And thought—
“Oh, could I now see the violet blue that looked at me once with eyes of dew, I’d spring to her feet and lingering stay Till sure I was bearing her love away,
Well sought.”
The song seemed to disturb the artist somewhat. “The stupid brook!” he exclaimed. “It was so stupid as to be almost human.”
“I knew you wouldn’t like it,” she said, looking up at him in surprise.
“I like your singing and the music, but that brook provokes me, the little idiot! Why didn’t it stop before?”
“I take the brook’s part,” said Ida. “Because the violet gazed at it in a lackadaisical way was no reason for its stopping unless it wanted to. Indeed, if I were the violet I should want the brook to go on, unless it couldn’t help stopping.”
“It did stop when it couldn’t help itself, and then it was too late,” said Van Berg, with a frown.
Ida trilled out one of her sudden laughs, as she said, “Don’t take the matter so to heart, Mr. Van Berg. When spring came the brook went on as merrily as ever, and was well contented to have other violets look at it.”
“Miss Ida, you are a witch,” said the artist, and with an odd, involuntary gesture he passed his hand across his brow as if to brush away a mist or film from his mind.
“Oh!” thought Ida, with passionate longing, “may my spells hold, or else I may feel like following the example of the silly little violet.” But she pirouetted up to her father, who was just entering, and said: “It’s time you came, father. Mr. Van berg has begun calling me names.”
“I shall follow his example by calling you my good fairy. Mr. Van Berg, I have been in paradise all the week.”
“I shall not join this mutual admiration society, and I insist that you two gentlemen talk in a sensible way.”
But Van Berg seemed to find it difficult to come down to a matter-of-fact conversation with Mr. Mayhew, and soon after took his leave. Before going he tried to induce Ida to come to the studio again, but she declined, saying:
“Mother has entrusted to me several commissions, and I must attend to them to-morrow morning. As it is, my conscience troubles me very much that I have left her alone all the week, and I shall try to make all the amends I can by getting what she wishes.”
“Oh! your terrible conscience!” he said.
“Yes, it has been scolding me all day for wasting so much of your time. Now don’t burden yours with any denials. Good-night.”
He turned eagerly to protest against her words, but she was retreating rapidly; she gave him a smile over her shoulder, however, that was at once full of mirth and something more–something that he could not explain or grasp any more than he could the soft, silvery light of the moon that filled the sky, and was as real as it was intangible. He walked away as if in a dream; he continued his aimless wanderings for hours, but swift as were his strides a swifter current of passion, deep and strong, was sweeping him away from Jennie Burton and the power to make good his open pledge to win her if he could. He still was dreaming, he still was lost in the luminous mists of his own imagination. But the hour of waking and clear vision was drawing near, and Harold Van Berg would learn anew that the cool, well-balanced reason on which he had once so prided himself was scarcely equal to all the questions which complex human life presents.
Chapter LI. From Deep Experience.
With the night dreams began to vanish and the prose of reality gradually to take form and outline in Van Berg’s mind. He was compelled to admit that the plausible theories by which he had hitherto satisfied himself scarcely accounted for his moods and sensations the past few days, and memory quietly informed him that it had never had any consciousness of such a friendship as he now was forming. But like many another man in the process of conviction against his will, he became irritable and angrily blind to a truth that would place him in an intolerable dilemma. He went to his studio, and worded with dogged obstinacy on the picture designed for Ida, giving his time to those details which required only artistic skill, for his perturbed mind was in no mood for any nice creative work.
He had agreed to meet Ida and her father on the afternoon boat; and his impatience, and the early hour he started to keep the appointment, was another straw which he was compelled to see in spite of himself; nor could he fail to note which way the current was bearing him.
“Well,” he muttered, with the fatuity common in all strong temptations, “I’ll spend a few more hours with this rare Undine, this genuine woman, who–infinitely more beautiful than Venus–is rising out of the dark waters of sorrow, shame, and despair, and then if I find that it will be wiser and safer to be only a somewhat unobtrusive and distant friend, showing my good-will more by deeds than by seeking her society, I can gradually take this course without wounding her feelings or exciting suspicion of the cause. She was right, although she little imagines the reason; we could never have those readings together, and I fear I must manage with far fewer visits to my studio than I had hoped for. What an accursed chaotic old world it is anyway! How grateful she is because I merely treat her father politely! It would be impossible to do anything else, now that he is himself again, and yet, by this simple, easy method, I have won a friendlier regard than I could by any other means. Like an idiot, I once thought she would have to withdraw from her father to develop her new and beautiful life. If even in faintest suggestion I had revealed that thought to her, I don’t believe she would have spoken to me again; and I foresee that I shall have to be exceedingly polite to Mrs. Mayhew also, for my Undine is developing a conscience that might become a man’s implacable enemy. But what am I thinking about! If I do not intend to see much of the daughter, I shall not waste any time on the mother. I wonder if Miss Mayhew meant anything by that odd little ballad last evening. Could she have intended to remind me of blue-eyed Jennie Burton? No, for she was singing it by herself, when she did not know I was listening. The idiotic brook! If I had given my whole heart to the effort I might have won Jennie Burton by this time. Ida Mayhew was right; no woman that I wish to win will show a lover any favor till he cannot help stopping and staying, too.”
A moment later he stopped short in the street. “Great God!” muttered he, “do I wish to win Jennie Burton? Whither am I drifting? Would to heaven I had not made this appointment this afternoon. Well, I’m in for it now,” and he strode along as if he were going to battle, resolving to be guarded to the last degree, lest Ida should suspect his weakness.
He saw her come on the boat with her father at the last moment, her cheeks flushed with the heat and her eyes aglow with the hurry and excitement of the occasion. He saw one and another of her young gentlemen acquaintances step eagerly forward to speak to her and admiring eyes turning towards her on every side. “She won’t lack for friends and companions now, and I soon will be little missed,” he thought bitterly. One gentleman, in his impatience for her society, sought to obtain her small travelling-bag, ad was assuring her that he could obtain seats for herself and father on the crowded boat, when, by her timid glance around, she showed that she was expecting some one, and Van Berg hastened forward and said quietly, “I have seats reserved in the pilot-house.”
She gave him a glad smile of welcome; but almost instantly her face became grave and questioning in its expression; and she looked at him keenly as he cordially shook hands with her father. As they went away with him, as if by a prearrangement several guests of the Lake House looked at each other and nodded their heads significantly.
While on the way to the pilot-house, and during their conversation after arriving there, Ida often turned a quick, questioning glance towards Van Berg, and her expression reminded him of some children’s faces he had seen as they tried to read the thoughts or intentions of those who had their interests in keeping. He tried his best to be cordial and natural in manner–to be, in brief, the sincere friend that he had professed himself–and Mr. Mayhew did not notice anything amiss; but even at some inflection of his voice, or at a pause in the conversation, Ida would turn towards him this sudden, questioning, child-like look, which touched him deeply while it puzzled him. But she gradually began to grow “distrait” and quiet, and to look less and less often. Van Berg had a deep affection for the noble river on which they were sailing, and had familiarized himself with its history and legends. By means of these he sought to entertain Ida and her father, and with the latter he succeeded abundantly; but he often doubted whether Ida heard him, for her eyes and thoughts seemed to be wandering beyond the blue Highlands which they now were entering. At last Mr. Mayhew left them for a while, and Van Berg turned and said gently:
“Miss Ida, you are not in good spirits this afternoon.”
She did not answer for a moment, but averted her face still further from him. At last she said, in a low tone: “Mr. Van Berg, did you ever have a presentiment of evil?”
“I don’t believe in such things,” he replied promptly.
“Of course not; you are a man. But I have such a presentiment this afternoon, and it will come true.”
“What do you fear, Miss Ida?”
“What does a woman always fear? Earthquakes, political changes, disturbances in the world at large, of course.”
“I have heard that a woman’s kingdom was her heart,” Van Berg was indiscreet enough to say.
“It is a pity,” Ida replied with one of her reckless laughs, “for it so often happens that she cannot keep it, and those who wrest it from her do not care to keep it, and so it comes to be what the geographies used to call one of the ‘waste places of the earth.’ As the world goes, I think I had better retain my kingdom, small as it is.”
He turned very pale, and swift as light he thought: “Has she, by the aid of her woman’s intuition, read my thoughts? Has she seen the beginnings of a regard for her far warmer than my professed friendship, and, remembering my suit to Jennie Burton, is she learning to despise me as fickle, or, worse, as a hypocritical specimen of that meanest type of human vermin–a male flirt?” and his face grew so white that Ida in her turn was not only perplexed, but alarmed.
But after a moment he said quietly: “It is not the size of the kingdom that makes its value, but what it contains. I hope you will keep treasures of yours till you find some one worthy to receive them, and I can scarcely imagine that such an idiot exists that he would not retain them if he could. That is Fort Montgomery yonder,” and he resolutely continued the story of its defence and capture, until her father returned saying it was time to come down ad prepare to land.
Ida had scarcely heard a word. Her heart almost stood still with dread and foreboding, and like a dreary refrain the words kept repeating themselves, “Oh, I’m punished, I’m punished. I thought to win him from Jennie Burton, and my reckless words will now make him true to her at every cost to himself. He knows that I must have seen how he won the kingdom of her heart, and he’ll keep it now in spite of my love and something I thought love that I saw in his face. Oh, my punishment is greater than I can bear; but it is deserved, well deserved. If he had won my love first, what would I think of the woman who tried to win him from me? She would have suffered what I now must suffer. My bright but guilty dream is over forever.”
Van Berg assisted her down to the gangway and out on the wharf with a grave and scrupulous politeness, but she felt even more than she saw that her words had stung his very soul. It was their apparent truth which he could never explain away that gave them their power to wound so deeply, and every moment brought to him a clearer realization of the fact that he had tried to win, and was pledged to win a woman whom to wrong even unwittingly would be an act for which he could never forgive himself. And yet his heart sank at the thought of meeting her; indeed, so guilty and embarrassed did he become in his feelings that he decided he would not meet her before others, and sprang out of the stage, saying to the driver that he preferred walking the remainder of the way. Mr. Mayhew looked at him in some surprise, for his manner had changed so now as to attract his attention and excite disagreeable surmises.
To Ida’s great relief Stanton had come down to meet her with his light-wagon. He had seen Van Berg at her side again with surprise, and, after his fast horses had whirled them well away by themselves, he asked a little abruptly:
“Ida, have you seen Van this week?”
She hesitated a moment, and then said briefly: “Yes. We met at the concert-garden again, and he dined with us last evening.”
Stanton turned and looked at her earnestly, and her color rose swiftly under his questioning eyes.
“My poor little Ida, we are in the same boat, I fear,” he said compassionately.
She hid her face on his shoulder. “Oh, Ik, spare me,” she faltered.
“It’s just as I feared,” Stanton resumed, with a deep sigh. “Maledictions on such a world as ours! The devil rules it, sure enough.”
“Oh, hush, hush,” Ida sobbed.
“I see it all, now; indeed, I’ve thought it all out this past week. You Sibley used only as a blind, poor child.”
“Yes, Ik, I loathed and detested him almost from the first.”
“And in the meantime the sagacious Van Berg and myself were trampling on you like a couple of long-eared beasts. How did you ever forgive us!”
“Oh, Ik, Ik, my heart is breaking. I’ve had such dreams the last two weeks. I’ve dared to think I had learned a little of God’s love, and oh–was I blinded by my wishes, by my hopes, by the passionate longing of my heart?–I thought I saw love in his eyes, and heard it in his tones, last evening. Everything now is slipping from me–happiness, hope, and even my faith. But I deserve it all,” she added in her heart. “I could almost curse the woman who tried to win him from me.”
Stanton turned his horses off into a shady and unfrequented side road where they would not be apt to meet any one. “Good heavens!” he thought; “this is just the condition of mind that Van warned me to guard against, and, confound him, he is the cause of the evils he feared, and in their worst form. I be hanged if I can understand him. All through July he was Jennie Burton’s open suitor–at least he made no secret of it to me, although his cool head enabled him to throw the people of the house off the scent–and now he follows another lady to New York, and leaves his first love on very flimsy pretexts. By Jove! I don’t like it, even though it were possible for me to profit by his folly.”
“My poor little Ida,” he said gently, putting his arms around her, “you and I must stand by each other, for we are like to have rough weather ahead for awhile. It’s no kindness to you now to hide the truth. I do not know that Van Berg has formally proposed to Miss Burton, but, as an honorable man, he is committed to her, and I believe he has won her affections, although I confess I don’t understand her very well. She has evidently had very deep sorrows in the past, and I am satisfied that she has felt his absence keenly this week.”
“I deserve it all,” Ida murmured again, but so low he could not hear her, and she gave way to another outburst of grief.
“It will pain even your heart, Ida, to see how slight and pale Miss Burton is becoming. She also appears strangely restless, and takes long walks that are far beyond her strength.”
“It’s all plain,” groaned Ida. “How can she act otherwise! Well, she will be comforted now, no matter what becomes of me.”
“You will be a brave woman, Ida, and pull through all right.”
“No, Ik, I’m not brave. I could easily die for those I love; but I can’t just suffer and be patient, at least I don’t see how I can; but I suppose I must.”
His arm tightened about her waist, and she felt it trembling. “Ida,” he said, in a low solemn tone, “promise me before God that whatever happens you will never—“
“Hush!” she gasped, shuddering, “I will die in God’s own way. I will endure as best I can.”
He stooped down and kissed her tenderly as he said: “Ida, dear, from this hour I’m no longer your cousin merely, but a brother, and your companion in misfortune. I’m going to stand by you and see you through this trouble. Just count on me to shield you in every possible way. I don’t care what the world thinks of me, but never a tongue shall wag against you again, or there will be a heavy score to settle with me. Van and I have been good friends, but he’s on ticklish ground now. He’ll find he can’t play fast and loose with two such women as you and Jennie Burton. Curse it all! it isn’t like him to do it either. But the world is topsy-turvey, anyhow.”
“Ik, I plead with you, say nothing, do nothing. Be blind and deaf to everything of which we have spoken. Only help me hide my secret and get away from this place to some other where I am not known.”
“Has your father any idea of all this?”
Ida explained in part her father’s knowledge.
“We can easily manage it then,” he said. “I had decided to leave next week. Miss Burton leaves for her college duties very soon also. The idea of that fragile flower being trampled on nine months of the year by a crowd of thoughtless, heedless girls! And so our disastrous summer comes to an end. And yet I’m wrong in applying that term to my own experience. I wish you felt as I do, Ida. I haven’t a particle of hope, and yet I would not give up my love for Jennie Burton for all the world; and I don’t believe I ever shall give it up. I think she is beginning to understand me a little better now, although she does not give me much thought. One day, while you have been gone, I met her returning from one of her walks, and she looked so faint and sad that I could not endure it, and I went straight to her and took her hand as I said: ‘Miss Burton, is there anything Ik Stanton can do to make you happier? It’s none of my business, I suppose, but it’s breaking my heart to see you becoming so sad and pale. I may seem to you very foolish and Quixotic, but there is no earthly think I would not do or suffer for you.’ She did not withdraw her hand as she replied, very gently: ‘Mr. Stanton, please do me the kindness to be happy yourself, and forget me.’ I could only say, in honesty: ‘You have asked just the two things which are utterly impossible.’ Tears came into her eyes as she replied, with emphasis: ‘Then, my FRIEND, you can understand me. There is one whom I can never forget.’ She was kind enough to say some words about my having been generous and considerate of her feelings, etc., but no matter about them. We parted, and it’s all over as far as she is concerned. When I left town last June I thought I’d be a bachelor always, because I loved my jolly ease. I’ve a better reason now, Ida. Of course Van must be the one referred to by Miss Burton. You have seen how she looks at him at times when thinking herself unobserved!”
“Yes,” sighed Ida, “it’s all right. God is just, and there is no use of trying to thwart his will.”
“Well, Ida, I don’t know. It’s all a snarl to me. Sometimes I think the world goes on the toss-up-a-penny plan, and again it seems almost as if Old Nick himself was behind the scenes.
“Dear Brother Ik, don’t talk to me that way. If I do lose ALL my faith now, I don’t know what will happen.”
“Forgive me, Ida, I will try to do better by you though I fear I shall prove one of Job’s comforters. We’ll stop in the village, get some supper there, and, thus you won’t have to face anybody to-night, and by to-morrow you will be your own brave self.”
“Oh,” moaned Ida, “I am almost as sorry for father’s sake as for my own. How can I keep him up when I am sinking myself?”
Mr. Mayhew stood on the piazza, waiting for Ida and wondering why she did not come, as Van Berg mounted the steps. The majority of the people had gone in to supper, but Miss Burton, who was a little late, recognized him from the hallway, and she came swiftly out to greet him. Her very cordiality was another stab, and he exerted the whole power of his manhood to meet her in like spirit.
“I did not know I should miss you so much,” she said, her eyes growing a little moist from her strong feeling. “I suppose we never value our friends as we ought till taught their worth to us by absence. But if you have been successful in your work I shall be well content.”
“Yes, Miss Jennie,” he replied, “I think I have been successful. The picture is far from being complete, but I’ve been able to obtain a much better likeness of Mr. Eltinge than I even hoped to catch.”
“Mr. Van Berg, you have been working too hard. You look exceedingly weary. What possessed you to walk all these miles? Leave us women to do the unreasonable things, and least of all are they becoming in you; come at once and get a good supper.”
He could not disguise the pain and humiliation that her words caused him, and said hurriedly, “I will join you in a few moments,” and then hastened to his room.
Mr. Mayhew, with the delicacy of a gentleman, had withdrawn out of earshot as they conversed, but the warmth of Miss Burton’s greeting had suggested a thought that was exceedingly disquieting. As if from a sudden impulse he went directly to the supper table, and his quiet courtesy masked the closest observation.
Van Berg stood in his room a moment and fairly trembled with shame and rage at himself. Then, with a bitter imprecation, he made the brief toilet the dust of his walk required, and his face was so stern and white one might think he was about to face an executioner instead of Jennie Burton’s blue eyes beaming with friendship at least. The thought of discovering anything warmer in their expression sent a mortal chill to her former wooer’s heart. He expected to meet Ida at the table, and the ordeal of meeting the woman to whom he was pledged in the presence of the woman he loved was like the ancient Trial by Fire.
“Curse it all,” he muttered, “they both can read one’s thoughts as if they were printed on sign-boards. I was scarcely conscious of what my ardent friendship for Miss Mayhew meant before she looked me in the face and saw the whole truth, and she almost the same as charged me with winning Jennie Burton’s heart then throwing it away, while in the same breath she hinted that I need not attempt any such folly and meanness in her case. If ever a man’s pride and self-respect received a mortal wound mine has to-day. And now I feel with instinctive certainty, that Miss Burton will see the truth just as clearly, and then my burden for life will be the contempt of the two women whom I honor as I do my mother’s name. Well, there is no help for it now, my ship is on the rocks already.”
He was greatly relieved to find that Ida was not at the table, but, in spite of his best efforts, Miss Burton soon saw that something was amiss, and that it was difficult for him to sustain his part of the conversation. With her graceful tact, however, she was blind to all she imagined he would not have her notice, and tried to enliven both Mr. Mayhew and himself with her cheery talk–a vain effort in each instance now.
“How slight and spirit-like she is becoming!” groaned Van Berg, inwardly. “Great God! if I have wronged her, how awful will be my punishment!”
“She loves him,” was Mr. Mayhew’s conclusion, “and from his manner I fear he has given her reason. At any rate, for some cause, he is in great perplexity and trouble.”
After supper Van Berg stood near the main stairway, still conversing with Miss Burton, when a light, quick step caused him to look up and he saw Ida who had entered by a side door. He knew she must have seen him and Miss Burton also, but she passed him with veiled and downcast face, and went swiftly up the stairway to her room. It seemed to him a cut direct. “she and Stanton have been comparing notes,” he said to himself, and he crimsoned at the thought of what he must now appear to her. Miss Burton had been standing with her back towards the stairway and had not seen Ida at first, but Van Berg’s hot flush caused her to glance around and see the cause, and then she understood his manner better. But it was her creed that people manage such things best without interference, even from the kindliest motives, and she therefore made no allusion to Miss Mayhew that evening.
“Miss Jennie,” said Van Berg, yielding to what he now felt had become a necessity, “I may seem more of a heathen to you to-morrow than ever. There is a distant mountain and lake that I wish to visit before I return to town, and I shall start early to-morrow. So if I do not come back very early you need not think that the earth has swallowed me up or that I have fallen a prey to wild beasts. Good night,” and he pressed her hand warmly.
She looked at him wistfully and seemed about to speak, for she was vaguely conscious of his deep trouble. She checked the impulse, however, and parted from him with a kindly smile that suggested sympathy rather than reproach.
Stanton called Mr. Mayhew aside and the two gentleman spoke very frankly together.
“Ida seems even more concerned about you than herself,” said Stanton in conclusion, “and it would kill her, as she now feels, if you should give way to your old weakness again. She fears that she won’t be able to sustain and cheer you as she intended, but I told her that we would both stand by her and see her through her trouble.”
“I understand you, Ik,” said Mr. Mayhew, quietly. “From my heart I thank you for your kindness to Ida. But you don’t understand me. I had a deeper thirst than that for brandy, and when my child gave me her love, my real thirst was quenched, and the other is gone.”
“That’s noble; we’ll pull through yet!” Stanton resumed, heartily. “Ida and I got our supper at a village inn–at least, we went through the motions–for I was bound no one should have a chance to stare at her to-night.”
“No matter,” said her father, decisively. “I have had prepared as nice a supper as Mr. Burleigh could furnish, and I shall take it to her room. She shall see that she is not forgotten.”
Ida tried to eat a little to please him, but she soon came and sat beside him on her sofa, saying, as she buried her face against his shoulder, “Father, I shall have to lean very hard on you now.”
“I won’t fail you, Ida,” was the gentle and simple reply, but they understood each other without further words. With unspoken sympathy and tenderness he tried to fill the place her mother could not, for if Mrs. Mayhew had gained any knowledge of Ida’s feelings, she would have had a great deal to say on the subject with the best and kindest intentions. With heavy touch she would try to examine and heal the wound twenty times a day.
Mr. Mayhew was right when he said the Van Bergs were a proud race, and this trait had found its culmination, perhaps, in the hero of this tale. He was justly proud of his old and unstained name; he was proud of those who bore it with him, and he honored his father and mother, not in obedience to a command, but because every one honored them; and if his sister was a little cold and stately, she embodied his ideas of refinement and cultivation; he was proud of his social position, of his talent–for he knew he had that much, at least–and of the recognition he had already won in the republic of art. But chief of all had he been proud of his unstained manhood, of the honor, which he believed had been kept unsullied until this miserable day. But now, as he strode away in the moonlight, he found himself confronting certain facts which he felt he could never explain to any one’s satisfaction, not even his own. He had openly professed to love a poor and orphaned girl, and had pledged himself to win her if he could–to be her friend till he could become far more. Even granting that she still looked on him merely as a friend, that did not release him. It was while possessing the distinct knowledge that she cherished no warmer feeling that he had made the pledge, and though she might not be able or willing to-day or to-morrow, or for years to come, to give up a past love for his sake, his promise required that he should patiently woo and wait till she could bury the past with her old lover, and receive, at his hands, the future that he was in honor bound to keep within her reach. Of course, if, after the lapse of years, she assured him she could not and would not accept of his hand in marriage, he would be free, but he had scarcely waited weeks before giving his love to another. For aught he knew, the hope of happier days, which he had urged upon her, might be already stealing into her heart.
It gave him but little comfort now to recognize the fact that he had never loved Jennie Burton–that he had never known what the word meant until swept away by the irresistible tide of a passion, the power of which already appalled him. To say that he did not feel like keeping his promise now, or that his feelings had changed, he knew would be regarded as an excuse beneath contempt, and a week since he himself would have pronounced the most merciless judgment against a man in his present position.
Before the vigil of that night was over, he decided that he could not meet either Ida Mayhew or Jennie Burton again. He believed that Ida Mayhew understood him only too well now, and that she thoroughly despised him. Indeed, from her manner of passing him, he doubted whether she willingly would speak to him again, for her veil had prevented him from seeing the pallor and traces of grief which she was so anxious to hide. In his morbidly sensitive state, it seemed a deliberate but just withdrawal of even her acquaintance. He felt that the brief dream of Ida Mayhew was over forever, and that she would indeed keep the priceless kingdom of her heart from him above all others. He believed that now, after her conversation with Stanton, she clearly saw that the absurdly ardent friendship he had urged upon her was only the incipient stage of a new passion in a fickle wretch who had dared to trifle with a girl like Jennie Burton–a maiden that, of all others in the world, a man of honor would shield.
As for Miss Burton herself, now that he realized his situation, he felt that he could never look her in the face again. To try to resume his old relations seemed to be impossible. He never had and never could say to her a word that he knew was insincere. Besides, he was sure that such an effort would be futile, for she would detect his hollowness at once, and he feared a glance of scorn from her blue eyes more than the lightning of heaven. He resolved to leave the Lake House on Monday, and from New York write to Miss Burton the unvarnished truth, assuring her that he knew himself to be unworthy even to speak to her again. Then, as soon as he could complete his preparations, he would go abroad and give himself wholly to his art.
Having come to these conclusions, he stole by a side entrance like a guilty shadow to his room and tried to obtain such rest as is possible to those who are in the hell of mental torment. After an early breakfast the following morning, he started for the mountains, and no wild beast that ever roamed them would have torn him more pitilessly than did his own outraged sense of honor and manhood. He returned late in the evening, weary and faint, and with the furtiveness of an outlaw, again reached his room without meeting those whom he so wished to avoid. After the heavy, unrefreshing sleep of utter exhaustion he once more left the house early, with his sketch-book in hand to disguise his purpose, for it was his intention to visit the old garden before he finally left the scenes to which he had been led by following a mere freak of fancy. He learned from one of Mr. Eltinge’s workman that the old gentleman would be absent from home the entire day, and thus feeling secure from interruption, he entered the quite, shady place in which had begun the symphony which was now ending in such harsh discord. Seeing that he was alone he threw himself into the rustic seat, and burying his face in his hands, soon became unconscious of the lapse of time in his painful revery.
Chapter LII. An Illumined Face.
Ida’s expression and manner when she came down to breakfast on Sabbath morning, reminded Miss Burton of the time when the poor girl believed that the man she loved, both despised and misjudged her. And yet there was a vital difference. Then she was icy and defiant; now, with all and more than the old sadness, there was an aspect of humility and gentleness which had never been seen in former times, but the woman who should have been so glad to cheer her and remove all misunderstandings found that she was absolutely unapproachable except by a sort of social violence of which Jennie Burton was not capable. Ida’s effort–which was but partially successful–to be brave and even cheerful for her father’s sake, caused Mr. Mayhew more than once to go away by himself in order to hide his feelings. Mrs. Mayhew became more and more mystified and uncomfortable. She had enjoyed, in her cold-blooded way, a tranquil, gossipy week during her daughter’s and husband’s absence, but now she felt as if some kind of a domestic convulsion might occur any moment.
“I don’t see why people have to make such a fuss over life,” she complained. “If they would only do what was stylish, proper and religious they wouldn’t have any trouble,” and the strong and not wholly repressed feeling of Ida and her father, of which she was uncomfortably conscious, seemed to her absurd and uncalled for. Like the majority of matter-of-fact people, she had no patience or charity for emotion or deep regret. “Do the proper thing under the circumstances and let that end the matter,” was one of her favorite sayings.
Stanton learned from Mr. Burleigh that Van Berg had gone on a mountain tramp, and, when he told Ida, hope whispered to her, “If he loved Jennie Burton or felt that he could return to her side, he would not do that after his long absence.”
But when he did not return to supper she began to droop and become pale like a flower growing in too dense a shade. She was glad when the interminable day came to an end and she could shut herself away from every one, for there are wounds which the heart would hide even from the eyes of love and sympathy. It had been arranged during the day that Mr. Mayhew should find another place at which to spend his vacation, and that as early in the week as possible Stanton should take his wife and daughter thither.
When at last poor Ida slept she dreamt that she was sailing on a beautiful yacht with silver canvas and crimson flags–that Van Berg stood at her side pointing to a lovely island which they were rapidly approaching. Then a sudden gust of wind swept her overboard and she was sinking, sinking till the waters became so cold and dark that she awoke with a cry of terror. “Oh,” she sobbed, “my dream is true! my dream is true!”
Mr. Mayhew returned to the city in the morning, leaving his daughter very reluctantly, and Ida, as early as possible, set out again in the low phaeton to visit Mr. Eltinge, for never before had she felt a greater need of his counsel and help. Tears came into her eyes when informed of his absence. “Everything is against me,” she murmured; but she decided to spend some time in the garden before she returned. She had almost reached the rustic seat when a turn in the walk revealed that it was occupied. Her first impulse was to retreat hastily, but observing that Van Berg had not heard her light step, she hesitated. Then, his attitude of utter dejection so won her sympathy that she could not leave him without speaking, for she remembered how sorely in need she once had been of a reassuring word. Moreover, her heart said, “Speak to him;” hope cried, “Stay;” and her temptation to win him if possible, right or wrong, sprang up with tenfold power and whispered: “The man whom Jennie Burton welcomed so cordially Saturday evening would not wear this aspect if he had the power to return readily to her side again.” Still she hesitated and found it almost as hard to obtain words or courage now as when she saw him pulling apart the worm-eaten rosebud. At last she faltered:
“Mr. Van Berg, are you ill?”
He started to his feet with a dazed look and passed his hand across his brow–the same gesture she so well remembered seeing him make at the close of the happy evening he had spent at her home. As he realized that the maiden before him was flesh and blood, and not a creation of his morbid fancy, the hot blood rushed swiftly into his face, and his eyes fell before her.
“Yes, Miss Mayhew, I am,” he said, briefly.
“I am very sorry. Can I not do anything for you?” she asked, kindly.
He looked up at her in strong surprise, and was still more perplexed by the sympathetic expression of her face, but he only said, “I regret to say you cannot.”
“Mr. Van Berg,” said Ida, in tones full of distress, “your words and appearance pain me exceedingly. You look as if you had been ill a month. What has happened?” His aspect might trouble one less interested in him than herself, for his eyes were blood-shot, and he had become so haggard that she could scarcely realize that he was the man who but four days previous had compared his hearty merriment with the “laughter of the gods.”
“Miss Mayhew,” he said, bitterly and slowly, too, as if he were carefully choosing his words, “you had a presentiment last Saturday that some evil was about to happen. As far as I am concerned the worst has happened. I have lost my self-respect. I have no right to stand here in your presence. I have no right to be in this place even. I once tossed away a little flower that had been sadly marred, through no fault of its own, and as I did so I said in my pride and self-complacency that its imperfection justified my act. You understood me too well, and my accursed Phariseeism wounded your very heart. You afterwards generously forgave my offence and a worse one, but God is just and I am now punished in the severest possible way. I perceive now that you do not understand me, or you could not look and speak so kindly. I thought you had learned me better, for you spoke words on the boat that pierced my very soul, revealing me to myself, and later you passed me without a glance. You were right in both instances. You are wrong now, and i shall not take advantage of your present ignorance, which circumstances will soon remove. I repeat it, Miss Mayhew, I have no right to be here and speaking to you, and yet”–he made a passionate and despairing gesture, and was about to turn hastily away, when Ida said, earnestly, with her eyes fixed on his face, as was her instinctive custom when she sought to learn more from the expression of the speaker than from his words:
“Mr. Van Berg, before we part, answer me one question. Have you deliberately and selfishly intended to do wrong, or to wrong any one?”
“No,” he promptly replied meeting, her searching look unhesitatingly. Then, with an impatient gesture, he added: “But no one will ever believe it.”
“I believe it,” she said with a reassuring smile.
“You? You of all others? But you are talking at random, Miss Mayhew. When you learn the truth you will look and speak very differently. And you shall learn it now. You once told me of a wicked and desperate purpose to which you were driven by the wrong of others. Your sin seems to me a deed of light compared with the act I have been led to commit, under the guidance of my proud reason, my superior judgement, my cool, well-balanced nature–infernally cool it was, indeed! Pardon me, but I am beside myself with rage and self-loathing. True, I have not been intentionally false, but there are circumstances in which folly, weakness, and stupid blundering are nearly as bad, and the results quite as bad. What can you say of the man who pays open suit and makes a distinct offer and pledge to a lady, and the retreats from that suit and breaks that pledge, and through no fault whatever in the lady herself? What can you say of that man when the lady is a poor and orphaned girl, whom any one with a spark of honor would shield with his life, but that he is a base, fickle wretch, who deserves the contempt of all good men and women, and that he ought to be–as he shall be–a vagabond on the face of the earth?”
Ida had buried her face in her hands as she learned how thoroughly Van Berg had committed himself to Miss Burton, and the artist concluded, abruptly: “One thing is certain, he has no right to be here. I shall not wait and see your look of scorn, or–worse–of pity, for I could not endure it,” and he snatched up his sketch-book and was about to hasten from the place, when Ida sprang forward and said passionately:
“Wait. This is all wrong. Answer me this–when you discovered the awful crime, which in heart I had already committed, how did you treat me?”
“Your purpose was wicked, but not base.”
“You have not intended to be either base or wicked,” she began.
“Hush!” he interrupted sternly, “you shall not palliate my weakness by smooth words, and to a man, weakness and stupidity, in some circumstances, are more contemptible than crime. Oh, how I envy Stanton! His course has been straightforward, noble, regal–I have acted like one of the ‘canaille.'”
“You deeply regret then, that your feelings have so changed towards Miss Burton?” said Ida, with her eyes again fastened upon his face.
“I do not think my feelings have changed towards her,” he replied; “she is admirable, perfect, and I honor her from the depths of my heart. Don’t you see? I mistook my deep respect, sympathy, and admiration for something more, and I smiled complacently in my superior way and flattered myself that it was in this eminently well-bred and rational manner that Harold Van Berg would pay his addresses to a lady, and that Stanton’s absorbing passion was only the result of ungoverned, unbalanced nature–accursed prig that I was! While in this very complacent and superior condition of mind I committed myself to a course that I cannot carry out, and yet my failure to do so slays my honor and self-respect. Now, I have been as explicit with you as you were with me, and with what you have seen of yourself, you know the whole miserable truth. By a strange fate we who only met a few months since have come to share a common, very sad knowledge. The memory of your own past, and I suppose, your Christian faith also, have made you very merciful and generous, but I shall tax these qualities no further.”
“What will you do, Mr. Van Berg?” Ida asked in sudden dread.
“I shall never look Miss Burton in the face again, and after I have written to her simply and briefly what I have told you, her regret will be small indeed. Good-by, Miss Mayhew. If I stay any longer I may speak words to you that would be insults, coming from me.”
“Stay,” she said, earnestly, “I have something very important to say to you.”
He hesitated and looked at her in strong surprise.
“Give me a few minutes to think,” she pleaded, and he saw, from the quick rise and fall of her bosom and the nervous clasp of her hands, that she was deeply agitated. She turned from him and looked wistfully at the young tree on which she had inscribed her name the day she had promised Mr. Eltinge to receive all heavenly influences and guidance. She soon lifted her eyes above the tree and her lips moved in earnest prayer as ever came from a human heart. She was facing the sorest temptation of her life, for she had only to be silent now, she believed, and the success of her efforts to win him from Jennie Burton would be complete. If left to himself in this wild, distracted mood he would indeed break every tie that bound him to her rival; but after time had blunted his poignant self-condemnation he would inevitably come back to her. The conscience whispered: “Who forgave you here? What did you promise here? What does that tree mean with its branches reaching out towards heaven? What would you think of Jennie Burton were she trying to win him from you?”
“O Friend of the weak! be though my strength in this moment of desperate need,” she sighed.
Van Berg watched her with increasing wonder, and his heart beat thick and fast as she at last turned to him with an expression such as he never had seen before on a human face. Was it the autumn sunlight that illumined her features? He learned eventually that it was the spiritual radiance of the noblest self-sacrifice of which a woman is capable.
“Mr. Van Berg,” she said, in tones that were quiet and firm, “please take Mr. Eltinge’s seat, for I wish to speak to you as a friend.”
He obeyed mechanically, without removing his eyes from her face.
“I once took counsel of passion and despair,” she resumed, “and you know what might have resulted, but on this spot God forgave me and I promised to try to do right. With shame I confess I have not fully kept that promise, but I shall try to do so hereafter, be the consequences what they may. Pardon me for speaking so plainly, but you are now taking counsel of passion and turning your back on duty. While almost insane from self-reproach and wounded pride you are taking steps that may blast your own life and the lives of others. To my mind there is an infinite distance between the error you naturally fell into in view of Miss Burton’s loveliness of character and any base intent, but even if I should share in your harsh judgement–which I never can–I would still say that you cannot help the past, and you are now bound by all that’s sacred to ask only what is right, and to do that at every cost to yourself. You are pledged to Miss Burton, and you must make good your pledge.”
“What! I go to that snow-white maiden with a lie on my lips!” he exclaimed indignantly.
“No! go to her with truth on your lips and in your heart, except as in unselfish loyalty to her and to your word you may hide some truth that would give her pain. Mr. Van Berg, you word is pledged. You have won her love and this is your only honorable course. Thus far you have not done her intentional wrong, but if you rush away from duty now in cowardly flight you will do her a bitter and fatal wrong, for she loves you as only few women can love. She has grown wan and pale in your absence, and it touched me to the heart to see her yesterday, though she made such brave efforts to be cheerful and to encourage father. O God, forgive me that I–Go to her when you have become calm–your true self. Love like hers will take what you can give till you can give more, and surely one so lovely will soon win all. If ever I have seen human idolatry in any face it has been in hers, and she will soon banish all this wild passion from your mind. But be that as it may you must keep your word if you would keep my respect, and I would not lose my respect for you for the world. I know you too well to doubt but that you will take up this sacred duty and seek to perform it with the whole strength of your manhood.”
Never for a moment had Van Berg removed his eyes from Ida’s face, and her words and manner seemed both to awe and control him. As she spoke, his expression became quiet and strong, and when she concluded he came to her side and said earnestly:
“Miss Mayhew, since it is still possible, I will keep your respect, for it is absolutely essential to me. God has indeed given you a woman’s soul, and he NEVER MADE A NOBLER WOMAN. You are a friend in truth and not in name, and you have saved me from madly destroying my own future, and perhaps the future of others, which is of far more consequence. If I fail in obeying both the letter and spirit of your words it will be because I cannot help myself.”
Her face, which had been so sweet and luminous with her generous impulse and noble thoughts, was growing very pale now, but she rose and gave him her hand, saying with a faint smile that was like the fading light of evening, “I knew you would not disappoint me; I was sure you were worthy of my trust. Let the honest right be our motto henceforth, and all will be well some day. Good-by.”
He pressed her hand in both of his as he said fervently, “God bless you, Ida Mayhew!” Then he turned and hastened away, flying from his own weakness and a womanly loveliness which at the moment far excelled any ideal he had ever formed.
He had scarcely reached the road before he remembered that he had left his sketch-book, and he went back for it, but as he turned the corner of the shady path he stopped instantly. The strong, clear-eyed maiden who had rallied the forces of his shattered manhood, and given him the vantage-ground again in life’s battle, had bowed her head on the arm of the rustic seat and was sobbing convulsively. Indeed, her grief was so uncontrollable and passionate that in his very soul he trembled before it.
“Oh, Jennie Burton,” she moaned, “it would have been easier for me to die for you than to give him up. God help him–God help me through the dreadful years to come!”
His first impulse was to spring to her side, but he hesitated, and then with a gesture and look of infinite regret he turned and stole silently away.
Chapter LIII. A Night’s Vigil.
As Van Berg left Mr. Eltinge’s grounds he had the aspect of a man who had seen a vision. He had seen more, for the human face expressive of absolute, even though brief, mastery over evil is a nobler object than can be the serene visage of a sinless and untempted angel.
At last he understood Ida Mayhew. If he had deeply honored her when he supposed that as a sincere, honest friend only she had spoken her strong, true words, which might save him from wrecking his life from impulses of shame and wounded pride, how instantaneously was this honor changed into reverence and wonder as he recognized her self-sacrifice at the dictates of conscience. All was now perfectly clear. The truth of her love had flashed out from the dark cloud of her passionate grief, and in its white radiance all the baffling mystery of her past action was dissipated instantly. Now he knew why the brilliant music at the concert garden could not brighten her face, and the end of the symphony saw her in tears. Now he understood why she could not be Jennie Burton’s friend, even though capable of becoming a martyr for her sake from a sense of duty. The despairing farewell letter she had once written to him now became fraught with a deeper meaning, and he saw that in throwing away the imperfect rose-bud, and in looking at her as a creature akin to Sibley, he had inflicted mortal wounds on a heart that gave him only love in return. In her desperate effort to conceal an unsought love she had sought the nearest covert, and the stains Sibley had left upon her were no more hers than if he had been a blackened wall. After all her woman’s soul had come to her as in the old and simple times when even water nymphs had hearts, and love was still the mightiest force in the universe.
His feeling now was far too deep for his former half-frenzied excitement. There was not a trace of exultation in his manner, and there was indeed no ground for rapture. Only the knowledge that he carried away her respect, and that he was going to the performance of what he believed a sacred duty, kept him from despair.
He did not blame himself as bitterly as might have been supposed that he had not discovered her secret earlier, and it increased his admiration for her, if that were possible, that she had so carefully maintained her maidenly reserve. A conceited man, or at least a man whose soul was infested with the meanest kind of conceit–that of imagining that the woman who gives him a friendly word or smile is disposed to throw herself into his arms–would no doubt have surmised her secret before; but although Van Berg was intensely proud, as we have seen, and had been rendered self-complacent and self-confident by the circumstances of his lot, he had none of this contemptible vanity. The discovery of Ida’s love caused him far greater surprise than when he recognized his own, and it was a source of deep satisfaction to him that this modern and conventional Undine had received a nature of such true and womanly delicacy that it had led her to conceal her love like the trailing-arbutus that hides its fragrant blossoms under fallen leaves.
The light had been so clear that he even saw the temptation which he unconsciously had suggested to her while in the city. Unlike the little violet that weakly bowed its head and died because the brook would not stop, she had resolutely set about the task of making him stop, and yet never let him suspect that she was even looking at him. Hence her attempt to penetrate the wilderness of knowledge which was at once so pathetic and comical; hence also her wish to learn the authors and subjects which interested him.
“And she had every reason to believe that she might have won me from the one honorable allegiance I can give,” he exclaimed, in deep humiliation, “and probably she would have done so eventually had she not acted liek a saint rather than a woman. I’ve lost faith utterly in Harold Van Berg, and it will require a great many years to regain it.”
When he reached a dense tract of woodland through which the road ran, he concealed himself and waited till she should pass. Two hours elapsed before she did so. The passionate grief that had overwhelmed her was no slight and passing gust. He saw that she leaned back weakly and languidly in the phaeton, and had hidden her face by a vail of double thickness. He followed her at a distance far too great for recognition until she entered the hotel, and then sought to obtain a little rest and food at the nearest village inn; for he found now that his fierce paroxysm of rage and mental torment was over, he had become very faint and exhausted. After he had regained somewhat the power to think and act, he turned his steps towards a narrow, secluded ravine, about a mile from the hotel, knowing that here he would find the deepest solitude in which to grow calm and prepare himself for the quiet self-sacrifice of which Ida had given the example, and which no eye must be able to detect save his to whom the secrets of all hearts are open.
He made no effort to follow any path, but sprang carelessly and rapidly down the steep hillside. When he had almost reached the bottom of the ravine, his foot slipped on a rock half hidden by leaves, and he fell and rolled helplessly down. Before he could recover himself, the rock, which had been loosely imbedded in the soil and which his foot had struck so heavily, rolled after him and on his leg and foot. In sudden and increasing dismay, he found that he could not extricate himself. The stone would have been beyond his ability to lift even if he had the full use of all his powers; but he was held in a position that gave him very little chance to exert his strength.
When he found that it was utterly impossible to push the stone away, he tried to excavate the earth, by means of sticks and his small pocket-knife, from under his leg, but soon found, with a sense of mortal fear, that his limb was resting in a little depression between two other large rocks deeply imbedded in the bottom of the ravine. This depression, and the soft, dry leaves which had covered it like a cushion, prevented the stone from crushing his limb and foot, but also held him in a sort of natural sock.
As these appalling facts became clear, he saw that he was in imminent danger of death by starvation. Then a worse fear than that chilled his very soul. He might die in that lonely spot and never be discovered. The prowling vermin of the night might tear away his flesh, and drag his bones hither and thither, till the leaves that now would soon fall covered them forever from sight and knowledge; but Ida Mayhew, and the orphan girl to whom his honor bound him, would think that he had broken his pledges, and was in truth a vagabond on the earth–eating and drinking, rioting, perhaps in ignoble obscurity. The prospect made him sick and faint for a time, for that which in his first blind sense of shame he had proposed to do, now that he had heard Ida’s heaven-inspired words, seemed base and cowardly to the last degree. If she had not brought to him sane and quiet thought, he would have grimly said to himself that fate had taken him out of his dilemma in a fitting way, punishing and destroying him at one and the same time; but now to die and forever seem unworthy of the trust of the woman he so loved and revered was a kind of eternal punishment in itself. He called and shouted with desperate energy for aid but the freshening wind of early September rustled millions of leaves in the forest around him and drowned his voice. He soon realized that one standing on the bank just above him would scarcely be able to hear, even though listening. Oh, why would that remorseless wind blow so steadily! Was there no pity in nature?
Then in a frenzy he struggled and wrenched his leg till it was bruised and bleeding, but the rocky grip would not yield. He soon began to consider that he was exhausting himself and thus lessening his chances of escape, and he lay quietly on his side and tried to think how long he could survive, and now deeply regretted that his wild passion for the past two days had drawn so largely on his vital powers. Already, after but an hour’s durance, he was weak and faint.
Then various expedients to attract attention began to present themselves. By means of a stick he drew down the overhanging branch of a tree and tied to it his handkerchief. He also managed to insert a stick in the ground near him, and on its top placed his hat, but he saw that they could not be seen through the thick undergrowth at any great distance. Then more deliberately, and with an effort to economize his strength, he again attempted to undermine the rocks on which his leg rested, but found that they ran under him and hopelessly deep. At intervals he would shout for help, but his cries grew fainter as he became weak and discouraged.
“O God,” he said, “there is just the bare chance that some one may stumble upon me, and that is all;” and as the glen fell into deeper and deeper shadow in the declining day, even more swiftly it seemed to him that the shadow of death was darkening about him.
At last the bark of squirrels and the chirp and twitter of birds that haunted the lonely place ceased and it was night. Only the notes of fall insects in their monotonous and ceaseless iteration were heard above the sighing wind, which now sounded like a requiem to the disheartened man. Suddenly a great owl flapped heavily over him, and lighting in a tree near by, began its discordant hootings.
“That’s an omen of death,” he muttered, grimly. Then at last, in uncontrollable irritation, he shouted, “Curse you, begone!” and the ill-boding bird flapped away with a startled screech, that to Van Berg’s morbid fancy was like a demon’s laugh. But it alighted again a little further off and drove him half wild with its dismal cries. At last there was a radiance among the trees on the eastern side of the ravine, and soon the moon rose clear and bright; the wind went down, and except the “audible silence” of insect sounds all was still. Nature seemed to him holding her breath in suspense, waiting for the end. He called out from time to time till, from the lateness of the hour, he knew that it was utterly useless.
He began in a dreamy way, to wonder if Ida had missed him yet and was surprised that he had not returned. He thought how strange, how unaccountable even, his conduct must appear to Miss Burton, and how very difficult it would have been to explain it at best. “Ida was wrong, however, in thinking that it is for me that she is grieving so deeply,” he murmured, “although she may be right in believing that I have raised hopes in Jennie’s mind of a happier future, when time had healed the wounds made in the past. If I had lived, if by any happy chance I DO live, my only course will be to maintain the character of a friend until she gives up the past for the sake of what I can offer. In a certain sense we will be on equal footing, for her lover is dead and my love is the same as dead to me. But what is the use of such thoughts! I shall be dead to them both in a few hours more, and what is far worse, despised by them both,” and for the first time in all that awful vigil bitter tears rolled down his cheeks.
Then, slowly and minutely, he went over all that had occurred during that eventful summer. He found a melancholy pleasure which served to beguile the interminable hours of pain–for now his leg and unnatural position began to cause very severe suffering–in portraying to himself the changes in Ida’s mind and character from the hour of their first meeting, and it seemed to him very mysterious indeed that the thread of his life should have been caught in hers by that mere casual glance at the concert garden, and then that it should have been so strangely and intimately woven with hers only to be snapped at last in this untimely and meaningless fashion. He groaned, “its all more like the malicious ingenuity of a fiend seeking to cause the weak human puppets that it misleads the greatest amount of suffering, than like the hap-hazard of a blind fate, or the work of a kind and good God. Oh, if I had only waited till my Undine received her woman’s soul, what a heaven I might have had on earth! She would have filled my studio with light and beauty, and my life with honor and happiness. Never, never was there a more cruel fate than mine! I shall die, and my only burial will be the infamy which will cover my memory forever.”
Then, with a dreary sinking of heart, his mind reverted to the long future before him that was now so terribly vague and dark. In the consciousness of solitude and in order to break the oppressive stillness, he spoke aloud at intervals between his paroxysms of pain. “After all, what is dying? I know how deeply rooted in the human mind is the belief that it is only a departure to another place and a different condition of life. Can a conviction that has been universal in all ages and among all peoples be a delusion? Then whoever or whatever created human nature built it on a lie. This accursed rock has fallen on my body, and holds it as if it were a mere clod of earth, as it soon may be; but it does not hold my mind. My thoughts have followed father and dear, dear mother, and sister Laura across the sea a hundred times to-night. But oh, how strangely my thoughts come back from every one–everything to that dear saint who sacrificed herself for me to-day.–And yet I’m leaving her, I’m leaving all. Whither am I going? It’s all dark, DARK; vague and dreary. Oh, that I had her simple faith! Whether true or no it would be an infinite comfort now. What did she say?–‘I’ve found a Friend pledged to take care of me.’ That is all I would ask. I would not be afraid to go out into this great universe if I only had such a Friend as she believes in, waiting to receive me. Who cares how strange a place may be if a loved friend meets and greets us. But to go alone, and away from so much to which my heart clings–oh, it is awful! awful!—
“A man can’t die, ought not to die, like a stupid beast unless he is a beast only; nor should death drag us like trembling captives from the shores of time. And yet I must do one of three things: either wait helplessly and in trembling expectancy, or take cousel of pride, and stubbornly and sullenly meet the future, or else appeal to Ida’s Friend. It seems mean business to do the last now in my extremity, but I well know that Ida would counsel it, and by reaching her Friend I may at some time in the future reach her again. I know well how my mother–were I dying–would urge me to look to him, whom she in loyal faith worships daily, and thus I may see her once more. The Bible teaches how many in their extremity looked to Christ and he helped them. But then they had not known about him, and coldly and almost contemptuously neglected him for years as I have. Oh, what has my reason, of which I have been so proud, done for me, save blast my earthly life with folly, and permitted the neglect of all preparation for an eternal life. If ever a self-confident man was taught how utterly incapable he was of meeting events and questions that might occur within a few brief days, I am he, and yet, vain fool that I was! I was practically acting as if I could meet all that would happen to all eternity in a cool, well-bred, masterful way. Poor untrained, untaught Ida Mayhew said she had ‘found a Friend pledged to take care of her,’ and he has taken care of her. He has made her life true, noble, heroic, beneficent. I was content to take care of myself, and this is the result. God might well turn away in disgust from any prayer of mine now, but may I be accursed if I do not become a Christian man, if by any means I now escape death!”
But in his intense longing to see again those he loved so well, and tell them that he had not basely broken his pledges and fled like a coward from duty, he did pray with all the agonized earnestness of a soul clinging to the one hope that intervened between itself and utter despair, but the moon moved on serenely and sank among the trees on the western bank of the ravine. The night darkened again and the stars came out more clearly with their cold distant glitter. Nature’s breathless hush and expectancy continued, and there was no sound without and no answer within the heart of the despairing man. At last, in weakness and discouragement, he moaned:
“Well, thank God, brave Ida Mayhew put an honorable purpose in my heart before I died, and I meant to have carried it out. There’s no use of praying, for it seems as if I were no more than one of these millions of leaves over my head when it falls from its place. Nature is pitiless and God is as cold towards me as I was once to one who turned her appealing eyes to me for a little kindness and sympathy. O God! if I must die, let it be soon, for my pain and thirst are becoming intolerable.”
The dawn was now brightening the east. Nature as if tired of waiting–like some professed friends–for one who was long in dying, ceased its breathless hush. A fresh breeze rustled the motionless leaves, birds withdrew their heads from under their wings, and began the twittering preliminary to their morning songs; and two squirrels, springing from their nest in a hollow tree, like children from a cottage door, scrambled down and over Van Berg’s prostrate form in their wild sport, but he was too weak, too far gone in dull, heavy apathy to heed them.
At last he thought he was dying, and he became unconscious. He learned that it was only a swoon from the fact that he revived again, and was dimly conscious of sounds near him. It seemed to him that he was half asleep, and that he could not wake up sufficiently to distinguish whether the sounds were heard in a dream or in reality. But he soon became sure that some one was crying and moaning not far away, and he naturally associated such evidences of distress with what he had seen last in Mr. Eltinge’s garden. He therefore called feebly:
“Ida–Ida Mayhew.”
“Merciful God!” exclaimed a voice, “who is that?”
His heart beat so fast he could not answer at once, but he heard a light, swift step; the shrubbery and low branches of the trees were swept aside, and Jennie Burton’s blue eyes, full of tears but dilated with wonder and fear, looked upon him.
“O, Jennie Burton, good angel of God! he has sent you to me,” cried the rescued man, who with a glad thrill of joy felt that life was coming back in the line of honor and duty.
“Harold Van Berg! what are you doing here?” she asked in wild amazement.
“I was dying till you came and brought me hope and life, as you have to so many others.”
“Thank God, thank God,” she panted, and she rushed at the rock that had held him in such terrible durance.
He struggled up and tried to pull her hands away.
“Don’t do that, Jennie,” he said, “you are not quite an angel yet, and cannot ‘roll the stone away.'”
“O God!” she exclaimed, with a sharp cry of agony, “in some such way and place HE may have died,” and she sank to the ground, moaning and wringing her hands as if overwhelmed with agony at the thought.
Van Berg reached out and took her hand, forgetting for a moment his own desperate need, as he said: “Dear Jennie, don’t grieve so terribly.”
“God forgive me, that I could forget you!” she said, starting up. “I must not lose a second in bringing you help.”
But he clung feebly to her hand. “Wait, Jennie, till you are more calm. My life depends on you now. The hotel is a long way off, and if you start in your present mood you will never reach it yourself, and I had better die a thousand times than cause harm to you.”
She put her hand on her side and her convulsive sobbing soon ceased. After a moment or two she said quietly: “You can trust me now, Mr. Van Berg; I won’t fail you.”
“Do you think you could bring me a little water before you go?” he asked.
“Yes, there’s a spring near; I know this place well,” and it seemed to him that she flitted back and forth like a ray of light, bringing all the water she could carry in a large leaf.
“Oh,” he said, with a long deep breath, “did ever a sweeter draught pass mortal lips, and from your hands, too, Jennie Burton. May I die as I would have died here if I do not devote my life to making you happy!”
“I accept that pledge,” she said, with a wan smile that on her pale, tear-stained face was inexpressibly touching. “It makes me bold enough to ask one more promise.”
“It’s made already, so help me God!” he replied fervently.
A faint, far-away gleam of something like mirth came into her deep blue eyes as she said, “I’ve bound you now, and you can have no choice. Your pledge is this–that you will make me happy in my own way. Now, not another word, not another motion; keep every particle of life and strength till I come again with assistance,” and she brought him water twice again, silencing him by an imperious gesture when he attempted to speak, and then she disappeared.
“That was an odd pledge that she beguiled me into,” he murmured. “I fear that in the wiles of her unselfish heart she has caught me in some kind of a trap.” But after a little time he relapsed again into a condition of partial unconsciousness.
Chapter LIV. Life and trust.
Ida did not leave the refuge of her room for several hours after her return from the memorable visit to Mr. Eltinge’s garden,–for far more than the long hot drive, her heroic, spiritual conflict with temptation, the sense of immeasurable loss, and the overwhelming sorrow that followed, had exhausted her. As she rallied from her deep depression, which was physical as well as mental, and found that she could think connectedly, she turned to her Bible in the hope of discovering some comforting and reassuring truths spoken by that Friend for whose sake she had given up so much.
These words caught her attention, and in accordance with the simplicity and directness of her nature she built upon them her only hope for the future: “HE THAT LOSETH HIS LIFE FOR MY SAKE SHALL FIND IT!”
She sighed: “I have lost that which is life and more than life to me, and it was for Christ’s sake. It was because he forgave me and was kind in that awful moment when my crime was crushing my soul. I could not have given up my chance of happiness just because it was right, but the thought that he asked it and that it was for his sake, turned the wavering scale; and now I will trust him to find my life for me again in his own time and way. As far as this world is concerned, my life probably will be an increasing care of father and others, who, like myself, have, or have had ‘a worm i’ the bud.’ But be the future what it may, I’ve made my choice and I shall abide by it.”
Then she turned to the xiv. chapter of St. John, that window of heaven through which the love of God has shone into so many sad hearts; and by the time she had read the words–“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid”–she found that the peace promised–deep, quiet, sustaining–was stealing into her heart as the dawn turns night into day. Simple-minded Ida Mayhew believed that Jesus Christ had kept his word, for that was all faith meant to her. The rationalist practically maintains that such effects are without causes, and the materialist explains that they are physical conditions to be accounted for, by the state of the nervous system.
Ida went down to supper, and spent the evening with her mother in the parlor. She resolved to take up her burden at once, and that there should be no sentimental sighing in solitude. Though so sorely wounded, she meant to keep her place in the ranks and win from society something better than pity. Jennie Burton looked at her wistfully and wonderingly many times, for the impress of the spiritual experience of that day was on her face, and made it more than beautiful. The blending of sadness and serenity, of quiet strength with calm resolve, was apparent to one possessing Miss Burton’s insight into character. “Can it be,” she thought, “that Van Berg has discovered her secret, and finds that while he can give her warm friendship and sympathy in her new life, he cannot give any more, and has made as much apparent to her by his manner? I thought I detected a different tendency in his mind before he went to the city. Something has occurred between them evidently, that to poor Ida means giving up a hope that is like life to a woman. I wish she would let me talk with her, for I think we could help each other. There is certainly a sustaining element in her faith which I do not possess or understand. Year after year I just struggle desperately to keep from sinking into despair, and the conflict is wearing me out. How to meet to-morrow with all its memories I do not know. I can see from the expression of Miss Mayhew’s face how I ought to meet this anniversary of a day that once seemed to me like heaven’s gate; but all I can do is just cling to my hope in God, while I cry like a child that has lost itself and all it loves in a thorny wilderness. I DO wish we could talk frankly, but she is utterly unapproachable.”
Poor Stanton stalked up and down on the piazza without, smoking furiously and muttering strange oaths. If the troubles that preyed upon the two maidens towards whom his heart was so tender, were outward enemies, the smallest grain of discretion would have kept them out of his way that night, and if Van Berg had quietly walked up the piazza steps as Ida was expecting, he would have received anything but a friendly greeting. That he did not come was a disappointment to Ida, and yet deep in her heart there was a secret satisfaction that he found it so difficult to enter on the task that duty and honor demanded. “I shall see him at breakfast, however,” she thought; “and he’ll be quiet, sane, and true to his pledge.”
But when she did not see him the next morning, and also learned from Stanton that he had not been in his room during the night, forebodings of some kind of evil began coming like prowling beasts of he night that the traveler cannot drive very far away from his camp-fire. Could he have broken his promise to her, and have fled from duty after all? She felt that she would love him no matter what he did–for poor Ida could not love on strictly moral principals, and withdraw her love in offended dignity if the occasion required; but her purer and womanly instincts made her fear that if he forfeited her respect her love might degenerate into passion.
Her wish that he would come grew more intense every moment, and from her heart she pitied Jennie Burton as she saw her turn away from an almost untasted breakfast, and with a face that was so full of suffering that she could not disguise it. “If he fails her utterly she’ll die,” murmured Ida, as she climbed wearily to her room. “Merciful Saviour, forgive me that I tried to tempt him from her.”
She watched from her window, but he did not come. She saw Jennie Burton hastening away on one of the lonely walks to which she was given of late. She saw Stanton drive off rapidly, and when a few hours later he came back, she went down to meet him, and asked hesitatingly:
“Have you seen or heard anything of Mr. Van Berg?”
“Confound him! no. I don’t see what the deuce he means by his