Читать книгу Miriam Monfort - Catherine A. Warfield - Страница 6

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My father's marriage was solemnized very quietly in that old gray church with its fairy chime of bells, all alive on that occasion, which stood in the busy street not far from our quiet house. An aged and reverend bishop, who had administered the sacred communion to Washington and his wife when the city we dwelt in had been the temporary residence of that chief, performed the ceremony, which, with the exception of my father's immediate household and neighbors, none were invited to witness. When the solemn rite was ended, I made my way to Constance, so fair that day in her pearl-gray robes and simple white bonnet, and clasped her hand. She stooped down and kissed me many times, to conceal her tears, probably.

"Call me mamma now, dearest," she said, at last; "and let the name be as a new compact between us. Now let Evelyn come to me, my love, she, too, is my daughter; and go with Mrs. Austin."

I did as she directed, grasping Mrs. Austin's hand tightly as we walked home, and proceeding at so brisk a pace that she was often obliged to check me.

"Poor child, why should you rejoice so?" she said, mournfully. "Don't you know you have lost your father from this hour? Do you suppose he will ever love you as well again—you or Evelyn? Poor, ignorant, sacrificed babes in the woods!"

"I don't care," I said. "I have got my new mamma to love me, even if he does not. 'Mamma—mamma Constance!' how pretty that sounds. Oh, that is what I shall always call her from this time—'Constance,' as usual, you know, with 'mamma' before it." And I kept repeating "mamma Constance," childishly.

"Foolish thing," she rejoined. "I wish you had your sister Evelyn's consideration; but at any rate," she murmured, "the money will be all yours. He cannot alienate that; yours by marriage contract, not even to divide with Evelyn, and" (elevating her voice) "that you will surely do hereafter, will you not, Miriam?"

"I don't know," I replied; "not unless she is good to me and stops calling me 'little Jew,' and other mean, disagreeable names. But I always thought Evelyn was the rich one until now. She has so many fine clothes, and such great relations, you say, in England."

"True, true, gentle blood is a fine heritage; but your mother had great store of gold, and, when your papa dies, all this will belong to you (it is time you should know this, Miriam), and you will have us all to take care of and support; so you must be very good, indeed."

"I am so sorry," I said, with a deep sigh and a feeling that a heavy burden had been thrown suddenly on my shoulders; "but I tell you what I will do" (brightening up), "I will give it every bit to mamma, and she will support us all. She will live much longer than papa, because she is so much younger—twenty years, I believe. Isn't that a great difference?"

"Your father will outlive me, child, I trust, should such a state of things ever come to pass; but I am old, and shall not cumber the earth long," and a groan burst from her lips.

"How old are you, Mrs. Austin?" I asked, with a feeling of awe creeping over me, as though I had been talking to the widow of Methuselah, and I looked up into her face, pityingly.

"Fifty-five years old, child, come next Michaelmas, and a miserable sinner still, in the eyes of my Lord! I was a widow when I went to hire with Mrs. Erle, Evelyn's lady mother—that was soon after she married the captain, who had only his sword—and I have lived with her and hers ever since, and served them faithfully, I trust, and I hope I do not deserve to be cast on strangers and upstarts in my old age, even if one of them happens to marry your father. Constance Glen, forsooth!" and she drew up her stiff figure.

"To be wicked and old must be so dreadful," I said, thoughtfully shaking my head and casting my eyes to heaven.

"What are you thinking about, child?" she asked, jerking my hand sharply. "Who is it that you call such hard names—'wicked and old' forsooth? Answer me directly!"

"It was what you said a while ago about yourself I was thinking of, Mrs. Austin," I replied. "To be more than half a hundred years old! It is so many years to live; and then to be such a sinner, too—how hard it must be! I always thought you were very good before; and I am sure you are not gray and wrinkled and blear-eyed, like Granny Simpson!"

"Granny Simpson, indeed! You must be crazy, Miriam Monfort! Why, she is eighty if she is an hour, and hobbles on a cane! I flatter myself I am not infirm yet; and, if you call a well-preserved, middle-aged, English woman, like me, old, your brains must be addled. Look at my hair, my teeth, my complexion"—pausing suddenly before me and confronting me fiercely. "See my step, my figure, and have more sense, if you are a little foreign Jewish child. As to sinfulness, we are all sinful beings, more or less. To be wicked is a very different thing from sinful. I never told you I was wicked, child. What put that into your head?"

"Oh, I thought they were the same thing. Which is the worst, Mrs. Austin?" I asked, with unfeigned simplicity.

"There, Miriam, step on before! you walk too fast anyhow for me to-day. Besides, your tongue wags too limberly by half. You always did ask queer questions, and will to your dying day. No help for it, I suppose, but patience; but it is all of that Gipsy blood! Now, Evelyn's line of people was altogether different. She has what they used to call in England 'blue blood in her veins;' do you understand, Miriam? Blue blood! Catch her asking indiscreet questions! Take pattern by your elder sister, Miss Miriam Monfort, and you will do well."

Not knowing what evil I had done, or how I had offended, or how blood could be blue, yet sorry for having erred, I made my way as I was told to do, speedily and silently homeward, and was glad to find shelter from all misunderstanding and persecution in the arms and shadow of my "mamma Constance," as I called her from that hour.

But, to Evelyn she was "Mistress Monfort," from the time she espoused my father; and the coldness between them (they were never very congenial) was apparent from that time, in spite of every effort on the part of my sweet mamma to surmount and throw it aside.

It is time I should speak of those few neighbors who composed our society at this period, and to whom some allusion has already been made—the occupants of those two houses which, as I have said, divided with ours the square we lived in, with their grounds. These green-shaded yards were divided one from the other by slender iron railings, which formed a line of boundary, no more, and presented no obstacle to the exploring eye. Graceful gates of the same material opened from the pavement, common to all, and presented a symmetrical and uniform appearance to the passer-by. Stone lions guarded ours, but Etruscan vases crowned the portals of Mrs. Stanbury and Mr. Bainrothe, filled with blooming plants in the summer season, but bare and desolate and gray enough in winter.

Mrs. Stanbury, our right-hand neighbor (ay, in every way right-handed), was a widow lady of about thirty-five years of age. Her husband had been a sea-captain, and, being cut off suddenly, had, with the exception of the house she lived in, left her no estate. She owed her maintenance chiefly to the liberality of his uncle, a gruff old bachelor of sixty or more, who lived with and took care of her and her children in a way that was both kindly and disagreeable. He was a bald-headed man (who flourished a stout, gold-headed cane, I remember), with a florid, healthy, and honest face and burly figure, engaged in some lucrative city business, and entirely devoted to his nephew and niece, Mrs. Stanbury's only children, the one fifteen and the other about twelve years old at the time of my father's marriage.

Strangely enough, her own deepest interest, if not affection, seemed centred at this period in her little orphan ward and nephew, George Gaston, a child of nine years old, who had recently come into her hands; singularly gifted and beautiful, but lamed for life, it was feared, and a great sufferer physically from the effects of the fatal hip-disease that had destroyed the strength and usefulness of one limb, and impaired his constitution.

Mrs. Stanbury herself was a lady-like and pretty woman, fair and graceful, and her daughter Laura closely resembled her; both sweet specimens of unpretending womanhood; both devoted to the discharge of their simple duties and to one another; both entirely estimable.

Norman Stanbury was of a different type. He had probably inherited from his father his manly and robust person, his open, dauntless, dark, and handsome face, in which there was so much character that you hardly looked for intellect, or perhaps at a brief glance confounded one with the other. He was the avowed and devoted swain of my sister Evelyn, from the time when they first chased fireflies together, up to their dancing-school adolescence, and for me maintained a disinterested, brotherly regard that was never slow to manifest itself in any time of need, or even in the furtherance of my childish whims. Our relations with this family were most friendly and agreeable. There never was any undue familiarity; my father's reserve, and their own dignity, would of themselves have precluded that certain precursor to the decline of superficial friendship; but a consistent and somewhat ceremonious intercourse was preserved from first to last, that could scarcely be called intimacy.

Between George Gaston and myself alone existed that perfect freedom of speech and intuitive understanding that lie at the root of all true and deep affection. His delicacy of appearance, his stunted stature, his invalid requisitions, nay, his very deformity, for his twisted limb amounted to this, put aside all thought of infantile flirtation (for we know that, strange as it may seem, such a thing does exist) from the first hour of our acquaintance. He always seemed to me much younger than he was, or than I was—as boys, even under ordinary circumstances, are apt to appear to girls of their own age, from their slower development of mind and manner, if not of body.

But this lovely waxen boy, so frail and spiritual as to look almost angelic, and certainly very far my superior intellectually, seemed from his helplessness peculiarly infantile in comparison with my robust energy, and became consequently, in my eyes, an object of tenderest commiseration. From the first he clung to me with strange tenacity, for our tastes were congenial. He brought with him from his Southern home stores of books and shells and curious playthings and mechanical toys, such as I had never seen before, and to spread these out and explain them for my amusement was his chief delight.

My memory in turn was richly stored with poetry, some of it far above my own comprehension, but clinging irresistibly to my mind through the music of the metre. I had revelled in old ballads until I could recite nearly all of these precious relics of heroic times, or rather chant them forth monotonously enough in all probability, yet in a way that riveted his attention forcibly, and roused his high-strung poetic temperament to enthusiasm.

When ill or suffering, if asked what he needed for relief, he would say "Miriam," as naturally as a thirsty man would call for a glass of clear cold water. For his amusement I converted myself into a mime, a mountebank. When I went to the theatre, the performance must be repeated for his benefit, and many characters centred in one.

For him I danced the "Gavotte," the "shawl-dance," as taught to do by Monsieur Mallet, at the great dancing-school on Chestnut Street, or jumped Jim Crow to his infinite amusement and the unmitigated disgust of Evelyn, to whom his physical infirmity made him any thing but attractive. Such personal perfection as she possessed is, I am afraid, apt to make us cold-hearted and exacting as to externals in others. Evelyn could endure commonplace, but could not forgive a blemish. Once Norman Stanbury came very near, losing her favor for having a wart on his finger; another time, she banished him from her presence for weeks, for having stained his hands, beyond the power of soap-and-water or vinegar to efface, in gathering walnuts. Certainly no despot ever governed more entirely through the medium of fear than did she through the tyranny of a fastidious caprice united to a form and face of surpassing beauty and high-bred grace.

Even my father fell under this requisitive influence of hers. Propriety, the quality he worshipped, stood forth enshrined in her, and, from the lifting of her fan to the laying down of her knife and fork, all was faultless. The prestige, too, of birth, his special weakness, lingered about her, and elevated her to a pedestal above any other inmate of his household.

Her mother, who married him for convenience, and whose selfish requisitions had almost driven him mad, was the honorable Mrs. Erle, and an earl's daughter. He had loved my mother twice as well, found her ten times more attractive and interesting, devoted and congenial; admired her grace, recognized all her worth, not only in deed but in word, and with a fidelity of heart that never wavered even when he married again. Yet the prestige of descent was wanting in her and hers, or rather, such as it was, brought with it ignoble and repulsive associations only. He was not the man to reach a hand across Shylock and the old-clothes man, to grasp that of the poet-king of Israel; or Esther, the avenging queen of a downtrodden nation; or Joab, strong in valor and fidelity; or Deborah, inspired to rule a people from beneath the shelter of her palm-tree in the wilderness.

The grandeur of the past, in his estimation, was eclipsed by the ignominy of the present; but with me it was otherwise, and, as I grew old enough to recognize the peculiar traits of that ancient people from which I sprung, it pleased me to imagine that whatever there was about me of fiery persistency, of fearless faith, of unshrinking devotion, nay, of bitter remembrance of injuries, and power to avenge or forgive them, as the case might be, sprang from that remarkable race who called themselves at one time, with His permission, the chosen children of God.

I think these very characteristics of mine repelled my father and jarred on his nervous temperament, endangering that outward calm which it was his pride and care to preserve as necessary to high-bred demeanor, and thus intrenching on his ideas of personal dignity. Yet, with strange inconsistency, it was her very indulgence of these peculiarities that inclined him most strongly to Constance Glen, and finally, I am well convinced, determined him on making her his wife, as one well suited to secure the welfare of his turbulent and incomprehensible child, his "rebellious Miriam," as he sometimes called me when milder words availed not.

He had, as I have said, an "English" horror of scenes and excitement of any kind. He was conservative in every way. He believed in the British classics, and would not admit that any thing could ever equal, far less surpass them (dreary bores that many of them are to me!). Walter Scott's novels were the only ones of later days he ever allowed himself to read approvingly; for, once being beguiled, against his will almost, into sitting up late at night to finish a new work called "Pelham," he frowned down all allusion to the book or its author ever afterward, as derogatory to his dignity.

"Bulwer and Disraeli are literary coxcombs," he said, "who ought not to be encouraged, and who are trying to undermine wholesome English literature."

"O father," I ventured to observe on one occasion, "'Vivian Grey' is splendid. It is a delightful dream, more vivid than life itself; it is like drinking champagne, smelling tuberoses, inhaling laughing-gas, going to the opera, all at one time, and, if you once take it in your hand, nothing short of a stroke of lightning could rend it away, I am convinced. Do read it, sir, to please me, and retract your denunciation."

"Never," he said firmly, solemnly even, "and I counsel you, Miriam, in turn, to seek your draughts of soul from our pure 'wells of English undefiled,' rather than such high-flown fancies and maudlin streams as flow from the pen of this accomplished Hebrew. There is a little too much of the Jeremiah and Isaiah style about such extracts as I have seen, to suit my taste."

"The idea of a Jew writing novels!" said Evelyn, derisively as she sipped her wine.

"Or the grandest poem in the world!" added Mr. Bainrothe, who was dining with us that day, coming to the rescue quite magnanimously as it seemed, and for once receiving as his recompense a grateful look from the stray lamb of the tribe of Judah, reposing quietly in a Christian fold.

"What poem do you allude to?" said Evelyn, superciliously. "'Paradise Lost?'—Oh, I thought Milton was a Unitarian, not quite a Jew; almost as bad though!"

"No, the book of Job," replied Mr. Bainrothe. "It was that I alluded to."

"And the Psalms," I added, breathlessly.

"Dear me," said Evelyn, "what an array of learning we have all at once! Why, every Sunday-school child knows about the Psalms. David and Solomon did nothing else but sing and dance, I believe."

"Irreverent, very, Evelyn," said my father, looking at her a little severely, in spite of his own "Jeremiah" and "Isaiah" allusions. I had never heard him check her so openly before, and enjoyed it thoroughly. My smile of approbation provoked her, I suppose, for she pursued:

"I am so tired of having the Bible thrown at my head; you must excuse me, papa. For my part, I find the New Testament all-sufficient. I weary of the horrors of those Jews; worse than our Choctaw Indians, I verily believe."

"So they were, so they were, my dear," said my father, complacently, "but for some reasons we must always treat their memory with a certain respect. They were God's people, remember, in the absence of a better, and their history is written in this book, which we must all revere."

"A very great people, surely," said Mr. Bainrothe, "and destined to be so again. Don't you think so, Miriam?"

"I don't know," I said; "I have never thought of such a possibility before, I acknowledge, yet it is natural I should incline to my mother's people, and I can say heartily, I hope so, Mr. Bainrothe."

"Then you want to see the Christian religion trampled under foot," said Evelyn, spitefully, fixing her eyes on mine.

The blood rose hotly to my temples. "No, no, indeed! You know I do not, Evelyn, for it is mine; but Christ died for all, Jew as well as Gentile. Through him let us hope for change and mercy and peace on earth. When infinite harmony prevails, the Hebrew race will find its appointed place and level again, through one great principle."

"My idea is, that it has found its appointed place and level, and will abide there.—But to digress, when do you expect your son, Mr. Bainrothe?"

I have anticipated by many years in giving this snatch of conversation here. Let us go back to the time of my father's marriage, and to affairs as they stood then, for precious are the unities.

I need not drop Mr. Bainrothe, however, and it was of him, our left-hand neighbor, so intimately connected with our destiny, one and all, that I was about to speak when the digression occurred which led me from the high-road of my story.

Our "sinister neighbor," as my father laughingly called him sometimes with unconscious truth, in reference to his left-hand adjacency, was a handsome and gentlemanly-looking man of no very particular age, or rather in his appearance there was no criterion for decision on this subject. His form was as slender and elastic, his step as light, his teeth, hair, and complexion, as unexceptionable as though he had been twenty-five; nor were there any of those signs and symptoms about him by which the weather-wise usually measure experience and length of days.

If care had come nigh him at all, it had swept as lightly past him as time itself. His address was invariably urbane, self-possessed, well-bred; his voice was pleasant, his smile rather brilliant, though it never reached his eyes, except when he sneered, which was rarely and terribly.

They glittered then with a strange cold light, those variegated orbs, but their ordinary expression was earnest and investigatory. They were well-cut eyes, moreover, of a yellowish-brown color, and I used to remark as a little child—for children observe the minutiae of personal peculiarities much more closely than their elders—that the iris of both orbs was speckled with green and golden spots, which seemed to mix and dilate occasionally, and gave them a decidedly kaleidoscopic effect.

His skin was clear and even florid, and his lips had the peculiarity of turning suddenly white, or rather livid, without any evident cause. This my father thought betokened disease of the heart, but I learned later to know it was the only manifestation of suppressed feeling which the habit of his life could not overcome, and that proved him still mortal and fallible.

He had bought and moved into the house he occupied, in his single estate, with a few efficient servants, soon after my father had taken possession of his own larger mansion, and it was not long before the best understanding existed between these two. My father's hauteur was no safeguard against the steady and self-poised approaches—his shyness found relief in the calm self-reliance of his "left-hand" neighbor; and, as they were both lovers of books, rather than students thereof, a congeniality of tastes on literary subjects drew them together in those hours of leisure which Mr. Bainrothe usually passed in his own or my father's library, in the cultivation of the dolce far niente—I beg pardon—his mind.

What his occupation was, if indeed he had any worthy of a definite name, I never knew. That he was a kind of intermediate agent or broker I have since suspected. His leisure seemed infinite. He came and went to and from the business part of the city several times a day, and often in the elegant barouche he kept, with its span of highly-groomed horses and respectable-looking negro driver in simple livery—an old retainer of his house, as he informed my father, faithful still, though freed in the time of universal emancipation.

His association was undoubtedly, to some extent, with the best men of the town—bankers and merchants chiefly; and once, when my father had called in a considerable sum of money which he had loaned out at interest on good mortgages, for a term of years, he was so obliging as to interest the most notable bankers of the city in its safe and prompt reinvestment.

This gentleman dined with us on one occasion at this period, when his conference with my father intrenched on our late dinner-hour, and I shall never forget the singular beauty of his face and expression, nor the charm of his manner, as he sat at our board discoursing, with an abandon and witchery I have observed in no one else, on subjects of art and letters, on men and manners, of nations past and present, until hours fled like moments, and time seemed utterly forgotten in the presence of geniality and genius. Then, starting gayly and suddenly to his feet, he remembered an engagement, and sped away so abruptly that his visit seemed to me but a vision breaking in on the monotony of our lives, too bright to have been lasting.

Afterward, invitations came repeatedly to my father, for his grand dinners and levées, from this potentate, for he was a prince and a leader in those days of a society that, more than any other I have known, requires such leadership to make its conventionalities available; but these were not accepted, though appreciated and gratefully acknowledged. Nor could Mr. Bainrothe, with all his influence over him (that rare influence that a worldly and efficient man wields over a shy and retiring one unacquainted with the detail of affairs, and dependent upon active assistance in their management), prevail upon him to break through the monotonous routine of his life so far as to accept any one of them. His church, the theatre, when a British star appeared, his hearth and home—these were my father's hobbies and resources. Travel and society abroad he equally shrank from and abjured, or the presence of strange guests in his household circle.

"I will change all this, when I grow up, Mrs. Austin," I heard Evelyn say, one day. "We shall have parties and pleasures then, like other people, and, instead of masters and tedious old church humdrums, Mr. Lodore and the like, you shall see beaux and belles dashing up to this out-of-the-way place; and I will make papa build a ballroom, and we shall have a band and supper once a month. You know he can afford any thing he likes of that sort, and as for me—"

"Child, it will never be," she interrupted, shaking her head gravely. "Mr. and Mrs. Monfort" (my father was again married then) "are too much wedded to their own ways for that, and, besides, you and Miriam will not be ready to go out together, and the money is all hers—don't forget that, my dear Evelyn, and you must go back to England to your own, and I—"

"That I will never do," she in turn interrupted haughtily. "Play second fiddle, indeed, to mamma's grand relations, mean, and proud, and presumptuous, I dare say, and full of scorn for me (a poor army-captain's daughter), as they were for my father? No, I shall stay here and shine to the best of my ability. The money is all papa's while he lives, and he is still a young man, you know, and Miriam's turn will come when mine is over. One at a time, you see. Good gracious! it would seem like throwing away money, though, to dress up that little dingy thing in pearls and laces. Ten to one but what she will marry that lame imp next door as soon as she is grown, and endow him with the whole of it—that 'little devil on two sticks,' and I must have my run before then, of course." She laughed merrily at the conceit.

"I hear you, Evelyn Erie," I exclaimed tragically from the balcony on which I sat, engaged, on this occasion, in illuminating, with the most brilliant colors my paint-box afforded, a book of engravings for the especial benefit of George Gaston. It was his private opinion that Titian himself never painted with more skill, or gorgeous effect, than the youthful artist in his particular employ. "I hear you, miss, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself to talk so behind his back, of a poor, afflicted boy like George, too good, a thousand times too good, to marry any one, even Cinderella herself. 'The devil on two sticks,' indeed!"

"Don't preach, I pray, Miriam. You have quite a dispensation in that way lately, I perceive. If you must eavesdrop, keep quiet about it now and hereafter, I beg."

"I was not eavesdropping," I screamed. "I have been painting out here all the afternoon, and Mrs. Austin knows it, and so might you. You are always accusing me of doing wrong and mean things that I would cut off my"—hesitating for a comparison—"my curls rather than do. Let me alone!"

"Your curls, indeed!" and she came out of the window and stood on the balcony beside me. "Do you call those tufts your curls?" taking one of them disdainfully with the tips of her dainty fingers, then pulling it sharply. "They make you look like a little water-dog, that's what they do, and I am going to cut them off at once.—Bring me the scissors, Mrs. Austin, and let me begin."

In the struggle that ensued my paints were upset, my pallet broken, and my book drenched with the water from the glass in which I dipped my brushes, but, as usual, Evelyn gained the victory which her superior strength insured from the beginning, and fled from my wrath, after holding my hands awhile, laughingly entreating mercy.

"I will kill her some day, Mrs. Austin, if she persecutes me so," I cried, as I lay sobbing on the bed after the conflict was over. "I am afraid of myself sometimes when she tantalizes me so dreadfully. I am glad you held me when I got hold of the scissors; I am glad she held me afterward. I might—I might"—I hesitated—"have stabbed her to the heart," was in my mind, but the tragic threat faltered upon my lips.

"Pray to God, Miriam Monfort, to subdue your temper," said the well-meaning but injudicious nurse, solemnly. "Your sister is old enough to make sport with you whenever she likes, without such returns."

"I wish mamma was at home," I said, still sobbing. "She would not allow me to be so treated; but it is always the way—as soon as she turns her back, Evelyn besets me, and you look on and encourage her."

"I do no such thing," said Mrs. Austin, sharply. "You have no business to take up cudgels for every outsider that your sister mentions, as you do. She is afraid to speak her mind before you, for fear of a fuss."

"I hate deceit," I said, wiping my eyes; "and deceitful people, too. I love my friends behind their backs the same as to their faces—just the same."

"What makes you mock Mr. Bainrothe then, and show how he minces at table, and uses his rattan?" she asked.

"Mr. Bainrothe is not my friend; besides, I said no harm of him. I don't love him, and never will, and he knows it."

"Were you rude enough to tell him so, Miriam?"

"No, but he understands very well. I never mimic any one I love."

"Yet you love that rough, old Mr. Gerald Stanbury, as cross as a cur. What taste!"

"Yes, from my heart I love him. He is good, he is true, he is noble; that is what he is. He has no specks in his eyes. He does not say, 'Just so,' whenever papa opens his lips."

"O Miriam! not to like him for that!"