Читать книгу Hermia Suydam - Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton - Страница 5

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BROOKLYN AND BABYLON.

Thirteen years passed. Bessie had three of her desired children and a nice little flat in Brooklyn. Reverses and trials had come, but on the whole Mordaunt was fairly prosperous, and they were happy. The children did not wear white dresses and blue sashes; they were generally to be seen in stout ginghams and woolen plaids, but they were chubby, healthy, pretty things, and their mother was as proud of them as if they had realized every detail of her youthful and ambitious dreams.

Bessie’s prettiness had gone with her first baby, as American prettiness is apt to do, but the sweetness of her nature remained and shone through her calm eyes and the lines of care about her mouth. She had long since forgotten to sigh over the loss of her beauty, she had so little time; but she still remembered to give a deft coil to her hair, and her plain little gowns were never dowdy. She knew nothing about modern decorative art, and had no interest in hard-wood floors or dados; but her house was pretty and tasteful in the old-fashioned way, and in her odd moments she worked at cross-stitch.

And Hermia? Poor girl! She had not found the beauty her sister had lost. Her hair was still the same muddy blonde-brown, although with a latent suggestion of color, and she still brushed it back with the severity of her childhood. Nothing, she had long since concluded, could beautify her, and she would waste no time in the attempt. She was a trifle above medium height, and her thin figure bent a little from the waist. Her skin was as sallow as of yore, and her eyes were dull. She had none of Bessie’s sweetness of expression; her cold, intellectual face just escaped being sullen. Her health was what might be expected of a girl who exercised little and preferred thought to sleep. She had kept the promise made the night she had scratched her sister’s face; during the past fifteen years no one had seen her lose her self-control for a moment. She was as cold as a polar night, and as impassive as an Anglo-American. She was very kind to her sister, and did what she could to help her. She taught the children; and, though with much private rebellion, she frequently made their clothes and did the marketing. Frank and Bessie regarded her with awe and distant admiration, but the children liked her. The professor had taught her until he could teach her no more, and then had earned his subsistence by reading aloud to John Suydam. A year or two before, he had departed for less material duties, with few regrets.

But, if Hermia no longer studied, she belonged to several free libraries and read with unflagging vigor. Of late she had taken a deep interest in art, and she spent many hours in the picture galleries of New York. Moreover, she grasped any excuse which took her across the river. With all the fervor of her silent soul she loved New York and hated Brooklyn.

She was sitting in the dining-room one evening, helping Lizzie, the oldest child, with her lessons. Lizzie was sleepy, and was droning through her multiplication table, when she happened to glance at her aunt. “You are not paying attention,” she exclaimed, triumphantly; “I don’t believe you’ve heard a word of that old table, and I’m not going to say it over again.”

Hermia, whose eyes had been fixed vacantly on the fire, started and took the book from Lizzie’s lap. “Go to bed,” she said; “you are tired, and you know your tables very well.”

Lizzie, who was guiltily conscious that she had never known her tables less well, accepted her release with alacrity, kissed her aunt good-night, and ran out of the room.

Hermia went to the window and opened it. It looked upon walls and fences, but lineaments were blotted out to-night under a heavy fall of snow. Beyond the lower roofs loomed the tall walls of houses on the neighboring street, momentarily discernible through the wind-parted storm.

Hermia pushed the snow from the sill, then closed the window with a sigh. The snow and the night were the two things in her life that she loved. They were projected into her little circle from the grand whole of which they were parts, and were in no way a result of her environment.

She went into the sitting-room and sat down by the table. She took up a book and stared at its unturned pages for a quarter of an hour. Then she raised her eyes and looked about her. Mordaunt was sitting in an easy-chair by the fire, smoking a pipe and reading a magazine story aloud to his wife, who sat near him, sewing. Lizzie had climbed on his lap, and with her head against his shoulder was fast asleep.

Hermia took up a pencil and made a calculation on the fly-leaf of her book. It did not take long, but the result was a respectable sum—4,620. Allowing for her sister’s brief illnesses and for several minor interruptions, she had looked upon that same scene, varied in trifling details, just about 4,620 times in the past thirteen years. She rose suddenly and closed her book.

“Good-night,” she said, “I am tired. I am going to bed.”

Mordaunt muttered “good-night” without raising his eyes; but Bessie turned her head with an anxious smile.

“Good-night,” she said; “I think you need a tonic. And would you mind putting Lizzie to bed? I am so interested in this story. Frank, carry her into the nursery.”

Hermia hesitated a moment, as if she were about to refuse, but she turned and followed Frank into the next room.

She undressed the inert, protesting child and tucked her in bed. Then she went to her room and locked the door. She lit the gas mechanically and stood still for a moment. Then she threw herself on the bed, and flung herself wildly about. After a time she clasped her hands tightly about the top of her head and gazed fixedly at the ceiling. Her family would not have recognized her in that moment. Her disheveled hair clung about her flushed face, and through its tangle her eyes glittered like those of a snake. For a few moments her limbs were as rigid as if the life had gone out of them. Then she threw herself over on her face and burst into a wild passion of weeping. The hard, inward sobs shook her slender body as the screw shakes the steamer.

“How I hate it! How I hate it! How I hate it!” she reiterated, between her paroxysms. “O God! is there nothing—nothing—nothing in life but this? Nothing but hideous monotony—and endless days—and thousands and thousands of hours that are as alike as grains of sand?”

She got up suddenly and filling a basin with water thrust her head into it. The water was as cold as melting ice, and when she had dried her hair she no longer felt as if her brain were trying to force its way through the top of her skull.

Hermia, like many other women, lived a double life. On the night when, under the dramatic illusion of Monte Cristo, her imagination had awakened with a shock which rent the film of childhood from her brain, she had found a dream-world of her own. The prosaic never suspected its existence; the earth’s millions who dwelt in the same world cared nothing for any kingdom in it but their own; she was sovereign of a vast domain wrapped in the twilight mystery of dreamland, but peopled with obedient subjects conceived and molded in her waking brain. She walked stoically through the monotonous round of her daily life; she took a grim and bitter pleasure in fulfilling every duty it developed, and she never neglected the higher duty she owed her intellect; but when night came, and the key was turned in her door, she sprang from the life she abhorred into the world of her delight. She would fight sleep off for hours, for sleep meant temporary death, and the morning a return to material existence. A ray of light from the street-lamp struggled through the window, and, fighting with the shadows, filled the ugly, common little room with glamour and illusion. The walls swept afar and rolled themselves into marble pillars that towered vaporously in the gloom. Beyond, rooms of state and rooms of pleasure ceaselessly multiplied. On the pictured floors lay rugs so deep that the echo of a lover’s footfall would never go out into eternity. From the enameled walls sprang a vaulted ceiling painted with forgotten art. Veils of purple stuffs, gold-wrought, jewel-fringed, so dense that the roar of a cannon could not have forced its way into the stillness of that room, masked windows and doors. From beyond those pillars, from the far perspective of those ever-doubling chambers came the plash of waters, faint and sweet as the music of the bulbul. The bed, aloft on its dais, was muffled in lace which might have fringed a mist. Hidden in the curving leaves of pale-tinted lotus flowers were tiny flames of light, and in an urn of agate burned perfumed woods. * * *

For this girl within her unseductive frame had all the instincts of a beautiful woman, for the touch of whose lips men would dig the grave of their life’s ambitions. That kiss it was the passionate cry of her heart to give to lips as warm and imploring as her own. She would thrust handfuls of violets between her blankets, and imagine herself lying by the sea in a nest of fragrance. Her body longed for the softness of cambric and for silk attire; her eye for all the beauty that the hand of man had ever wrought.

When wandering among those brain-born shadows of hers, she was beautiful, of course; and, equally inferable, those dreams had a hero. This lover’s personality grew with her growth and changed with every evolution of the mind that had given it birth; but, strangely enough, the lover himself had retained his proportions and lineaments from the day of his creation. Is it to be supposed that Hermia was wedded peacefully to her ideal, and that together they reigned over a vast dominion of loving and respectful subjects? Not at all. If there was one word in the civilized vocabulary that Hermia hated it was that word “marriage.” To her it was correlative with all that was commonplace; with a prosaic grind that ate and corroded away life and soul and imagination; with a dreary and infinite monotony. Bessie Mordaunt’s peaceful married life was hideous to her sister. Year after year,—neither change nor excitement, neither rapture nor anguish, nor romance nor poetry, neither ambition nor achievement, nor recognition nor power! Nothing of mystery, nothing of adventure; neither palpitation of daring nor quiver of secrecy; nothing but kisses of calm affection, babies, and tidies! 4,620 evenings of calm, domestic bliss; 4,620 days of placid, housewifely duties! To Hermia such an existence was a tragedy more appalling than relentless immortality. Bessie had her circle of friends, and in each household the tragedy was repeated; unless, mayhap, the couple were ill-mated, when the tragedy became a comedy, and a vulgar one at that.

Hermia’s hatred of marriage sprang not from innate immorality, but from a strongly romantic nature stimulated to abnormal extreme by the constant, small-beer wave-beats of a humdrum, uniform, ever-persisting, abhorred environment. If no marriage-bells rang over her cliffs and waters and through her castle halls, her life was more ideally perfect than any life within her ken which drowsed beneath the canopy of law and church. Regarding the subject from the point of view to which her nature and conditions had focused her mental vision, love needed the exhilarating influence of liberty, the stimulation of danger, and the enchantment of mystery.

Of men practically she knew little. There were young men in her sister’s circle, and Mordaunt occasionally brought home his fellow clerks; but Hermia had never given one of them a thought. They were limited and commonplace, and her reputation for intellectuality had the effect of making them appear at their worst upon those occasions when circumstances compelled them to talk to her. And she had not the beauty to win forgiveness for her brains. She appreciated this fact and it embittered her, little as she cared for her brother’s uninteresting friends, and sent her to the depths of her populous soul.

The books she read had their influence upon that soul-population. The American novel had much the same effect upon her as the married life of her sister and her sister’s friends. She cared for but little of the literature of France, and the best of it deified love and scorned the conventions. She reveled in mediæval and ancient history and loved the English poets, and both poets and history held aloft, on pillars of fragrant and indestructible wood, her own sad ideality.