Through one administrati.., p.25
Through One Administration, page 25
“Will he struggle?” said Tredennis, still immovably. “ I don’t think I would in his place.”
“Oh, no,” she answered. “You mustn’t struggle.”
“I will not,” he returned.
She went on with a smile, as if he had spoken in the most responsive manner possible.
“Mr. Arbuthnot’s struggles will not be of the usual order,” she remarked. “He will not be struggling with his emotions, but with his vanity. He knows that she will not fall in love with him, and he has no intention of falling in love with her. He knows better — and he does not like affairs. But he will find that she is able to do things which will flatter him, and that it will require all his self-control to refrain from displaying his masculine delight in himself and the good-fortune which he has the secret anguish of knowing does not depend upon his merits. And his struggles at a decently composed demeanor, entirely untinged by weak demonstrations of pleasure or consciousness of himself, will be a very edifying spectacle.”
She turned her glance from Arbuthnot and Mrs. Sylvestre, whom she had been watching as she spoke, and looked up at Tredennis. She did so because he had made a rather sudden movement, and placed himself immediately before her.
“Bertha,” he said, “I am going away.”
Her Jacqueminot roses had been lying upon her lap. She picked them up before she answered him.
“You have made too many calls,” she said. “ You are tired.”
“I have not made too many calls,” he replied; “but I am tired. I am tired of this.”
“I was afraid you were,” she said, and kept her eyes fixed upon the roses.
“You were very fair to me,” he said, “and you gave I told you I should not profit by it, and I. did not. I don’t know what I expected when I came here to-day, but it was not exactly this. You are too agile for me; I cannot keep up with you.”
“You are not modern,” she said. “You must learn to adjust yourself rapidly to changes of mental attitude.”
“No, I am not modern,” he returned; “and I am always behindhand. I do not enjoy myself when you tell me it is a fine day, and that it was colder yesterday, and will be warmer to-morrow; and I am at a loss when you analyze Mr. Arbuthnot’s struggles with his vanity.”
“I am not serious enough,” she interrupted. “You would prefer that I should be more serious.”
“It would avail me but little to tell you what I should prefer,” he said, obstinately. “I will tell you a simple thing before I go, — all this counts for nothing.”
She moved slightly.
“All this,” she repeated, “counts for nothing.”
“For nothing,” he repeated. “You cannot change me. I told you that. You may give me some sharp wounds, — I know you won’t spare those, — and because I am only a man I shall show that I smart under them; but they will not move me otherwise. Be as frivolous as you like, mock at everything human if you choose; bat don’t expect me to believe you.”
She put the flowers to her face and held them there a second.
“The one thing I should warn you against,” she said, “would be against believing me. I don’t make the mistake of believing myself.”
She put the flowers down.
“You think I am trying to deceive you,” she said. “There would have to be a reason for my doing it. What should you think would be the reason?”
“So help me God!” he answered, “I don’t know.”
“Neither do I,” she said.
Then she glanced about her over the room, — at Planefield, rather restively professing to occupy himself with a pretty girl; at Miss Varien, turned a trifle sidewise in her large chair so that her beautiful sleeve was displayed to the most perfect advantage, and her vivacious face was a little uplifted as she spoke to Richard, who leaned on the high back of her seat; at Arbuthnot, talking to Agnes Sylvestre, and plainly at no loss of words; at the lights and flowers and ornamented tables seen through the portières, — and then she spoke again.
“I tell you,” she said, “ it is this that is real — this. The other was only a kind of dream.”
She made a sudden movement and sat upright on her chair, as if she meant to shake herself free from something.
“There was no other,” she said. “It wasn’t even a dream. There never was anything but this.”
She left her chair and stood up before him, smiling.
“The sky was not blue,” she said, “nor the hills purple; there were no chestnut trees, and no carnations. Let us go and sit with the rest, and listen to Mr. Arbuthnot and admire Miss Varien’s sleeves.”
But he stood perfectly still.
“I told you I was going away,” he said, “and I am going. To-morrow I shall come and see the children — unless you tell me that you do not wish to see me again.”
“I shall not tell you that,” she returned, “because it would be at once uncivil and untrue.”
“Then I shall come,” he said.
“That will be kind of you,” she responded, and gave him her hand, and after he had made his bow over it, and his adieus to the rest of the company, he left them.
Bertha crossed the room and stood near the fire, putting one foot on the fender, and shivering a little.
“Are you cold?” asked Miss Varien.
“Yes — no,” she answered. “If I did not know better, I should think I was.”
“Allow me,” said Miss Varien, “to make the cheerful suggestion that that sounds quite like malaria.”
“Thank you,” said Bertha; “that seems plausible, and I don’t rebel against it. It has an air of dealing with glittering generalities, and yet it seems to decide matters for one. We will call it malaria.”
Chapter 22
The room which Mrs. Sylvestre occupied in her friend’s house was a very pretty one. It had been one of Mrs. Amory’s caprices at the time she had fitted it up, and she had amused herself with it for two or three months, arranging it at her leisure, reflecting upon it, and making additions to its charms every day as soon as they suggested themselves to her. “It is to be a purely feminine apartment,” she had said to Richard and Arbuthnot. “And I have a sentiment about it. When it is complete you shall go and stand outside the door and look in, but nothing would induce me to allow you to cross the threshold.”
When this moment had arrived, and they had been admitted to the private view from the corridor, they had evidently been somewhat impressed.
“It is very pretty,” Mr. Arbuthnot had remarked, with amiable tolerance; “but I don’t approve of it. Its object is plainly to pamper and foster those tendencies of the feminine temperament which are most prominent and least desirable. Nothing could be more apparent than its intention to pander to a taste for luxury and self-indulgence, combined in the most shameless manner with vanity and lightness of mind. It will be becoming to the frivolous creatures, and will exalt and inflate them to that extent that they will spend the greater portion of their time in it, utterly ignoring the superior opportunities for cultivating and improving their minds they might enjoy downstairs on occasions when Richard remains at home, and my own multifarious duties permit me to drop in. It strikes me as offering a premium to feminine depravity and crime.”
“That expresses it exactly,” agreed Richard.
Arbuthnot turned him round.
“Will you,” he said, “kindly give your attention to the length and position of that mirror, and the peculiar advantages to be derived from the fact that the light falls upon it from that particular point, and that its effects are softened by the lace draperies and suggestions of pink and blue? The pink and blue idea is merely of a piece with all the rest, and is prompted by the artfulness of the serpent. If it had been all pink the blondes would have suffered, and if it had been all blue the brunettes would have felt that they were not at their best; this ineffably wily combination, however, truckles to either, and intimates that each combines the attractions of both. Take me away, Richard; it is not for the ingenuous and serious mind to view such spectacles as these. Take me away, — first, however, making a mental inventory of the entirely debasing sofas and chairs and the flagrant and openly sentimental nature of the pictures, all depicting or insinuating the drivelling imbecility and slavery of man, — ‘The Huguenot Lovers,’ you observe, ‘ The Black Brunswicker,’ and others of like nature.”
Mrs. Sylvestre had thought the room very pretty indeed when she had first taken possession of it, and its prettiness and comfort impressed her anew when, the excitement of the New Year’s day at last at an end, she retired to it for the night.
When she found herself within the closed doors she did not go to bed at once. Too many impressions had been crowded into the last ten hours to have left her in an entirely reposeful condition of mind and body, and, though of too calm a temperament for actual excitement, she was still not inclined to sleep.
So, having partly undressed and thrown on a loose wrap, she turned down the light and went to the fire. It was an open wood-fire, and burned cheerily behind a brass fender; a large rug .of white fur was spread upon the hearth before it; a low, broad sofa, luxurious with cushions, was drawn up at one side of it, and upon the rug, at the other, stood a deep easy-chair. It was this chair she took, and, having taken it, she glanced up at an oval mirror which was among the ornaments on the opposite wall. In it she saw reflected that portion of the room which seemed to have arranged itself about her own graceful figure, — the faint pinks and blues, the flowered drapery, the puffed and padded furniture, and the hundred and one entirely feminine devices of ornamentation; and she was faintly aware that an expression less thoughtful than the one she wore would have been more in keeping with her surroundings.
“I look too serious to harmonize,” she said. “If Bertha were here she would detect the incongruity and deplore it.”
But she was in a thoughtful mood, which was not an uncommon experience with her, and the faint smile the words gave rise to died away as she turned to the fire again. What she thought of as she sat and looked into it, it would have been difficult to tell; but there was evidence that she was mentally well occupied in the fact that she sat entirely still and gazed at its flickering flame for nearly half an hour. She would not have moved then, perhaps, if she had not been roused from her reverie by a sound at the door, — a low knock, and a voice speaking to her.
“Ames!” it said. “ Ames!”
She knew it at once as Bertha’s, and rose to reply to the summons almost as if she had expected or even waited for it. When she unlocked the door, and opened it, Bertha was standing on the threshold. She had partly undressed, too. She had laid aside the red dress, and put on a long white negligée, bordered with white fur; there was no color about her, and it made her look cold. Perhaps she was cold, for Agnes thought she seemed to shiver a little.
“May I come in?” she asked. “I know it is very inconsiderate, but I had a sort of conviction that you would not be asleep.”
“I was not thinking of going to sleep yet,” said Agnes. “I am glad you have come.”
Bertha entered, and, the door being closed, crossed the room to the fire. She did not take a chair, but sat down upon the hearth-rug.
“This is very feminine,” she said, “and we ought to be in bed; but the day would not be complete without it.”
Then she turned toward Agnes.
“You must have a great deal to think of to-night,” she said.
Agnes Sylvestre looked at the fire.
“Yes,” she answered, “I have a great deal to think of.”
“Are they things you like to think of?”
“Some of them — not all.”
“It must be a curious experience,” said Bertha, “to find yourself here again after so many years — with all your life changed for you.”
Mrs. Sylvestre did not reply.
“You have not been here,” Bertha continued, “since you went away on your wedding journey. You were nineteen or twenty then, — only a girl.”
“I was young,” said Mrs. Sylvestre, “but I was rather mature for my years. I did not feel as if I was exactly a girl.”
Then she added, in a lower voice:
“I had experienced something which had ripened me.”
“You mean,” said Bertha, “that you knew what love was.”
She had not intended to say the words, and their abrupt directness grated upon her as she spoke; but she could not have avoided uttering them.
Mrs. Sylvestre paused a moment.
“The experience I passed through,” she said, “did not belong to my age. It was not a girl’s feelings. I think it came too soon.”
“You had two alternatives to choose from,” said Bertha, — “that it should come too soon or too late.”
Mrs. Sylvestre paused again.
“You do not think,” she said, “that it ever comes to any one at the right time?”
Bertha had been sitting with her hands folded about her knee. She unclasped and clasped them with a sharply vehement movement.
“It is a false thing from beginning to end,” she said. “I do not believe in it.”
“Ah,” said Mrs. Sylvestre, softly, “I believe it. I wish I did not.”
“What is there to be gained by it?” said Bertha; “a feeling that is not to be reasoned about or controlled; a miserable, feverish emotion you cannot understand, and can only resent and struggle against blindly. When you let it conquer you, how can you respect yourself or the object of it? What do women love men for? Who knows? It is like madness! All you can say is, ‘I love him. He is life or death to me.’ It is so unreasoning — so unreasoning.”
She stopped suddenly, as if all at once she became conscious that her companion was looking at herself instead of at the fire.
“You love a man generally,” said Mrs. Sylvestre, in her tenderly modulated voice, — “ at least I have thought so, — because he is the one human creature who is capable of causing you the greatest amount of suffering. I don’t know of any other reason, and I have thought of it a great deal.”
“It is a good reason,” said Bertha, — “a good reason.”
Then she laughed.
“This is just a little tragic, isn’t it?” she said. “What a delightfully emotional condition we must be in to have reached tragedy in less than five minutes, and entirely without intention! I did not come to be tragic; I came to be analytical. I want you to tell me carefully how we strike you.”
“We?” said Mrs. Sylvestre.
Bertha touched herself on the breast.
“We,” she said, —”I, Richard, Laurence Arbuthnot, Colonel Tredennis, Senator Planefield, the two hundred men callers, — Washington, in short. How does Washington strike you, now that you have come to it again?”
“Won’t you give me two weeks to reflect upon it?” said Agnes.
“No. I want impressions, not reflections. Is it all very much changed?”
“I am very much changed,” was the reply.
“And we?” said Bertha. “Suppose — suppose you begin with Laurence Arbuthnot.”
“I do not think I could. He is not one of the persons I have remembered.”
“Agnes,” said Bertha, “only wait with patience for one of those occasions when you feel it necessary to efface him, and then tell him that, in exactly that tone of voice, and he will in that instant secretly atone for the crimes of a lifetime. He won’t wince, and he will probably reply in the most brilliant and impersonal manner; but, figuratively speaking, you will have reduced him to powder and cast him to the breeze.”
“We shall not be sufficiently intimate to render such a thing possible,” said Mrs. Sylvestre. “One must be intimate with a man to be angry enough with him to wish to avenge one’s self.”
Bertha smiled.
“You don’t like him,” she said. “Poor Larry!”
“On the contrary,” was her friend’s reply. “But it would not occur to me to ‘ begin with him,’ as you suggested just now.”
“With whom, then,” said Bertha, “would you begin.”
Her guest gave a moment to reflection, during which Bertha regarded her intently.
“If I were going to begin at all,” she said, rather slowly, “I think it would be with Colonel Tredennis.”
There was a moment of silence, and then Bertha spoke, in a somewhat cold and rigid voice,
“What do you like about him?” she asked.
“I think I like everything.”
“If you were any one else,” said Bertha, “I should say that you simply like his size. I think that is generally it. Women invariably fall victims to men who are big and a little lumbering. They like to persuade themselves that they are overawed and subjected. I never understood it myself. Big men never pleased me very much — they are so apt to tread on you.”
“I like his eyes,” said Agnes, apparently reflecting aloud; “ they are very kind. And I like his voice”—
“It is rather too deep,” remarked Bertha, “and sometimes I am a little afraid it will degenerate into a growl, though I have never heard it do so yet.”
Mrs. Sylvestre went on:
“When he bends his head a little and looks down at you as you talk,” she said, “he is very nice. He is really thinking of you and regarding you seriously. I do not think he is given to trifling.”
“No,” returned Bertha; “I do not think he is given to anything special but being massive. That is what you are thinking, — that he is massive.”
“There is no denying,” said her friend, “that that is one of the things I like.”
“Ah!” said Bertha, “you find the rest of us very flippant and trivial. That is how we strike you!”
A fatigued little sigh escaped her lips.
“After all,” she said, “it is true. And we have obliged ourselves to be trivial for so long that we are incapable of seriousness. Sometimes — generally toward Lent, after I have been out a great deal — I wonder if the other would not be interesting for a change; but, at the same time, I know I could not be serious if I tried.”
