East Angels: A Novel

She over-estimated this trait in Lucian, as she did one or two other traits; he himself would never have dreamed of being so brave as she supposed him to be. He was brave enough, physically he had never known a fear; but that it was indomitable courage which made him smile so light-heartedly in the face of fortunes so modest – that it was a splendid defiance – this was where the slow, silent, passionate-hearted Rosalie was entirely mistaken. It was temperament more than anything else. But it was natural that she should fall into this error, brought up as she had been among people who were immovably set in all their ideas, proud of their mediocrity (they called it conservatism), who had inherited their wealth through several generations, and who, while close and careful in all their ways, enemies to everything in the least like extravagance, were yet fully of the opinion that respectability as well as happiness depended upon an unassailable foundation of fixed income; having always lived in this atmosphere, and possessing small talent for remarking anything outside of her own narrow little world, it was impossible for Rosalie Bogardus to grasp at once a plan of life which differed so widely from the only one she knew. She could not conceive the idea at first of a person like Lucian living on with contented enjoyment, day after day, without any fortune, any hope of inheriting one, or any effort towards obtaining one. She knew people, of course, who had no fortunes; but if young, as he was, they were all engaged in either planning for them, waiting for them, or working for them, with more or less eagerness and energy. Lucian appeared to be neither waiting nor working, and the only plan he had with regard to such matters was to go back to the office of the company that employed him (because he must), when his summer should be ended; so long as he was earning his mere living from year to year (not a difficult task, as he had no very extravagant tastes, and only himself to provide for), he seemed to think that he was doing sufficiently well as regarded material things – always to him subordinate: a state of mind which Rosalie's relatives, if they had known it, would have deemed either a negligence that was almost criminal, or downright idiocy, one or the other. Rosalie herself, not conceiving such an unambitious creed in a nature so rich, idealized what she did not understand. She dressed up this lack of energetic acquisitiveness, and made of it fortitude; in her long reveries she grew at last to think of it in unspoken words which, if written down, would have been almost poetry.

But though she thus idealized his bravery, she did not have to idealize his kindness; that had been real. He had not cared about her money, she had divined that; what he did had been done for herself alone. When, therefore, they met again, as they did in the winter, the acquaintance continued to grow because she fostered it; she had had time to think everything over, to realize what it would be to live without it, during the four months that had passed since they parted. Lucian, responsive and delightful as ever, and never so conceited (this is what he would have called it) as to bring that pretentious thing, conscience, into such a simple matter as this, lent himself, as it were, to her liking for the time being, whenever he happened to see her. With him it was a temporary and even a local interest, and he supposed it to be the same on her side; when he thought of the part of the city in which she lived, he thought of her: "Second Avenue – oh yes, Miss Bogardus;" but he did not think of it or of her for days together, he was a man who had a thousand interests, who roamed in many and widely differing fields. Meanwhile Miss Bogardus thought of him without ceasing; she lived upon his visits, going over in her own mind the last one, and all that he had said, or failed to say, upon that occasion, until he had come again; she dwelt upon every look and gesture, and made the woman's usual mistake of giving a significance to little acts and phrases which they were very far from having. Lucian did not in the least realize that he was the subject of so much reverie; nor did he in the least realize the absorbed, concentrated nature with which he had to do. His life moved on with its usual evenness; for three-quarters of the day he occupied himself in a third-story office, then he sallied forth to see what the remaining hours held for him in the way of entertainment. It is but just to say that generally they held an abundance; other people liked him besides Rosalie Bogardus, he was a man who, from first to last, was dear to very many. About once in so often he went to see his friend of the summer; he no longer thought of her as a person who needed his help especially; but he knew that a visit pleased her, and, when other things were not over-amusing, he would go for a while and give her that trifling pleasure. He never dreamed that it was a great one.

Long afterwards the character of Lucian Spenser was summed up as follows by a man of his own age who had a taste for collecting and classifying characteristics; he even ventured to think such collections almost as interesting as old china. "He was the most delightful and lovable fellow I have ever known; and a great many persons thought so besides myself. But he never was hampered with, he never took, a grain of responsibility in his whole life. This not from selfishness, or any particular plan for evading it; he simply never thought about that at all."

This was true. Even in the case of so serious a thing as his marriage, the responsibility was all assumed by Rosalie.

How she came to have the idea that he loved her, she herself alone could have told. Probably she was deceived by his manner, which was often intangibly lover-like simply through the genius for kindness that possessed him; or by the tones which his voice fell into now and then when he was with any woman he liked, even in a small degree. All this was general, for women in general; but poor concentrated Rosalie, who seldom saw him with other women, thought that it was for one. However her belief had been obtained, it was a sincere one; and she accounted for his silence by saying to herself that he would not speak on account of her fortune. Here again she completely misjudged him; southerner as he was, Lucian's thoughts did not dwell upon money; southerner as he was, too, twenty fortunes would not have kept him from the woman he loved. But, once convinced in her own heart, Rosalie no longer fought against her love for him – why should she? It was the one bright spot of her life. It was possible, after all, then, for life to be happy!

She worshipped every glance of his eye, every word that he spoke; it was pathetic to see the adoration which that repressed nature was lavishing upon a nature so different from its own. But no one saw the adoration save Lucian, she concealed it from all the world besides. For a long time even he did not see it – he was so accustomed to being liked. When suddenly he did become aware of it (long after the evil was done), he left her and left New York. There had never been a word of explanation between them.

Rosalie did not yield; she knew her own heart, she knew that she loved him, she believed that he loved her; she trusted to time. And meanwhile she kept up the acquaintance.

Here, again, Lucian's invincible habit of kindness kept him from telling her the truth, his invincible habit of not taking responsibility made him avoid the responsibility of telling her. He, too, trusted to time.

And there was time enough, certainly; that is, it would have been enough for any one but Rosalie Bogardus. Five years passed, five years of all the torture intermixed with delight which a woman who loves goes through. Now and then they met, and she always wrote to him; she tried to write lightly, as she knew he liked that; she anathematized herself for taking everything in such a ponderous way. She composed long letters about books, about Spanish and Italian, both of which she was studying, about music, and about pictures; she went to see every picture she could hear of, because he painted, not realizing, poor soul, that those who paint themselves, especially those who paint "a little," do not as a general rule care much for pictures, or at least care only for those of a few of their immediate contemporaries, that interest being principally curiosity. Who fill the great galleries of Europe day after day? Who are the people that go again and again? Almost without exception the people who do not paint; for the people who do, it is noticed that one or two visits amply suffice.

But nature will out – at least some natures will. At the end of these five years of a fictitious existence Rosalie Bogardus fell seriously ill; her life was threatened. Then she wrote three trembling lines to Lucian, at Gracias-á-Dios. Her one wish now was to marry him, in order to be able to leave him her fortune; she did not allude to this, but she said that she was probably dying, and hoped to see him soon. Lucian, kind as always, hurried north to Washington, where she was staying with some friends – much more independent now, as regarded her relatives, than she had been before the growth of her love. He married her; it was as well that he had been perfectly sincere, when he did so, in not thinking about her money, because her money did not come to him; she did not die, but improved rapidly; in two months she was well.

Mrs. Lucian Spenser, as has been said, was not a quick or a clever woman, but she had the clairvoyance of love. A year had not passed since her marriage; but it does not take a year for a wife to discover that her husband is not, and never has been, in love with her, and this wife had no longer any illusions on that subject. Lucian's manner towards her was invariably gentle, his temper was always sweet; she could say to herself, miserably enough, but truthfully too, that he did not in the least dislike her. If she had known it, this was something, as things stood. But she did not know it; how should she, without a grain of experience, and with her passionate nature, comprehend and endure the necessity, as well as the great wisdom, of holding on simply to the fact that she was his wife, and that no one on earth could rout her from that position, and that in time his heart might come round to her? She did know, however, she had learned, that such love as their marriage was to have at present must be supplied principally by herself, and she had accustomed her mind to accept this idea; if she was ever discontented, she had only to recall the dreary void of her life before she knew him, and she was reconciled. But while she was still arranging her existence upon these foundations, a new element rose; her jealousy was excited, and it was the strongest passion she had. She discovered that Lucian was very apt to be more or less in love with every attractive woman, every lovely young girl, he happened to meet. True, it was only a temporary absorption; but it was real enough while it lasted. To this the jealous wife could not accustom herself, this she found herself unable to take "lightly." All the moodiness came back to her eyes, she grew suspicious and sharp; such good looks as she had were obscured, in her unhappiness she seemed larger and more round-shouldered than ever.

She was too proud to appeal to her husband, to tell him that he was torturing her. So they lived on. He was wholly unconscious of the extent of her sufferings, though he knew that she had a jealous nature; he felt that he was a good husband, he had really married her more to please her than to please himself; she had not so much as one unkind word, one unkind look, with which to reproach him. He never neglected her, she could not say that he did. She did not say it; her only wish was that he would neglect some other persons. She preferred this condition of things, however, racked though she often was, to any open discussions between them, any explanations; her instinct warned her that explanations might be worse than the reality. A woman who loves is capable of any cowardice; or is it – any courage?

Margaret's little conversational cushion had brought to Mrs. Spenser's mind the thought that she had perhaps been speaking acrimoniously. She did not mean to be acrimonious; but she was not a southerner, as Lucian was, by birth at least, and he was making a great deal of this southern origin of his whenever he was with Garda Thorne. He was with her every day; true, his wife was present, and other persons; and Garda herself was engaged to Mrs. Rutherford's nephew, Evert Winthrop, who had gone north for three weeks or so on business just before they came. But there might be fifty wives and five hundred other persons present, poor Rosalie thought, Lucian would look at that beautiful girl and talk to that beautiful girl, engaged or not engaged, whenever he pleased. She accused him in her heart of not having told her that there was any such person in Gracias. But the truth was (and she knew it) that, as she had never been able to respond with sympathy to allusions on his part to such acquaintances, much less to any recitals concerning them, he had learned (as he had not a grain of malice) not to make them. As for Gracias, she herself had proposed their coming there; she had not cared to spend the winter in New York or Washington, and see her husband cajoled by society; she had never loved society, and now she hated it; Lucian's content was not in the least dependent upon it, fortunately. He had described this little Florida town to her with a good deal of amusing decoration, she had thought that she should like to see it for herself; in her painstaking, devoted way she had studied the sketches he had made while there until she was much better acquainted with them than he was himself. There had been no sketch of Garda Thorne, no sketch in words or water-colors; but perhaps if her jealousies had been less evident, there might have been. She knew that her jealousies were a weakness. That did not make them any the less hard to bear; it was, each separate time, as if Lucian and the person he was for the moment admiring were engaged in stabbing her to the heart; only, in some miraculous way, she lived on.

On the present occasion she said no more about southern patriotism, but gazed in silence at the near shores as the skiffs glided round the next bend. They were in a wide salt-marsh, a flat reedy sea; the horizon line, unbroken by so much as a bush, formed an even circle round them. It was high tide, the myriad little channels were full, the whole marsh was afloat; the breeze fanning their faces had a strong salty odor, the sedges along shore were stiff with brine. Tall herons waded about, or, poised on one leg among the reeds, gazed at them, as they passed, with high-shouldered indifference; now and then a gray bird rose from the green as they approached, and with a whir of wings sped away before them, sounding his peculiar wild cry. The blue seemed to come down and rest on the edge of the marsh all round them, like the top of a tent; it was like sailing through a picture of which they could always see (though they never reached it) the frame.

The stream they were following was not one of the marsh channels; it was a tide-water creek which penetrated several miles into Patricio, and after a while they came to the solid land.

"The odor of Florida – I perceive it," said Lucian; "the odor of a pitch-pine fire! And I don't know any odor I like better." The stream wound on, the banks grew higher, palmettoes began to appear; they all leaned forward a little in the golden air, they formed the most graceful groups of curiosity. At length as the skiffs turned the last bend, a house came into sight. It was a ruin.

But the pitch-pine fire was there, all the same; it had been made on the ground behind a small out-building. This out-building had preserved three of its sides and the framework of its roof; the roof had been completed by a thatch of palmetto, the vanished façade had been gayly replaced by a couple of red calico counterpanes suspended from the thatch. Here lived a family of "poor whites" – father, mother, and six children; their drawing-room was the green space before the kitchen; their bedchambers were behind the calico façade; their kitchen was an iron pot, at this moment suspended over the fragrant fire. The father had just come home in his roughly made cart, drawn by the most wizened of ponies, with a bear which he had killed in a neighboring swamp; the elder boys were bringing up fish from their dug-out in the creek; the mother, her baby on her arm, lifted her bed-quilt wall to smile hospitably upon the visitors. They did not own the land, these people; they were not even tenants; they were squatters, and mere temporary squatters at that. They had nothing in the world beyond the few poor possessions their cart could hold; they were all brown and well, and apparently perfectly happy.

"They look contented," said Margaret, as, after accepting the hospitalities of the place, which the family hastened to offer – the best in their power – a clean gourd with water from the mansion's old well, a look at the bear, the baby, and the pet alligator of tender years confined in a pen near by, they took their way along an old road leading down the island towards the south.

"They are contented," said Lucian. "For one thing, they are never cold; poor people can stand a great deal when winter is taken out of their lives. Here, too, they can almost get their food for the asking – certainly for the hunting and fishing. Yes, yes: if I had to be very poor – if we had to be very poor, Rosalie – I should say, with all my heart, let it be in Florida!"

These sallies of Lucian's fancy were always rather hard for his wife; she admired them, of course – she admired everything Lucian said; but she could not see any reasonable connection between their life, under any emergencies that could come to it, and the life of people who lived behind a façade of counterpane, who caught bears, and ate them from an iron pot. However, there must be one, since Lucian saw it; she smiled assent, therefore, and did her best to answer warmly, "Oh yes, in Florida!"

"But I suppose they have very little chance to improve here – to rise," began Margaret.

"I don't want them to rise," said Lucian, in his light way; "too much 'rising,' in my opinion, is the bane of our American life. The ladder's free to all, or rather the elevator; and we spend our lives, the whole American nation, in elevators."

Rosalie fully agreed with her husband here. This was a subject upon which she had definite opinions. She thought that every one should be as charitable as possible, and she herself lived up to this belief by giving away a generous sum in charity every year. Her ideas were liberal; she thought that "the poor" should have plenty of soup and blankets in the winter, as well as coals (somehow, in charity, it seemed more natural to say "coals"); there should be a Christmas-tree for every Sunday-school, with a useful present for each child; she would have liked, had it been possible, to reintroduce May-poles on May-day; May-day would come at the North about the last of June. She had a dislike for the free-school system; she thought school-girls should not have heels to their shoes; she thought there should be a property qualification attached to the suffrage. She looked at Torres, who was by her side, wondering if he would understand these ideas if she should explain them; and she thought that perhaps he might. She was doing her best, as Lucian's wife – she had been doing it ever since she arrived in Gracias – to discover the "gold mine" which he saw in this young man; so far (as she had but little sense of humor) she had not succeeded. Once she asked Lucian what it was that he found so amusing in the Cuban.

"Oh, well, he has so many fixed ideas, you know," Lucian answered.

His wife said nothing, she, too, had fixed ideas; she could not see, though she tried to, humbly enough, how any one could help having them. Torres could now speak a little English; but as Rosalie could talk in Spanish in a slow, measured sort of way, their conversations, which were never lively, were carried on in the last-named language; it was understood in Gracias that they were "great friends."

Torres had been brought from his retirement by Lucian. Lucian, who told everybody that he delighted in him, had gone down to the Giron plantation to find him on the very day of his arrival in Gracias; and Torres, yielding to his friend's entreaties, had consented to appear again in "society."

In his own estimation, the Cuban had never swerved from his original posture, of waiting. He had not believed one word of his aunt's story of Garda's engagement; women were credulous where betrothals were concerned; they were, indeed, congenitally weak in all such matters. Manuel – a masculine mind though unregulated – was still absent, engaged in seeing the world (at Key West); but he had been able to obtain a good deal of consolation from the society of the Señor Ruiz, who had not credited the ridiculous tale any more than he himself had.

He had first heard of the señor's disbelief through Madam Giron; he immediately went over to Patricio to pay his respects to him. Since then he had paid his respects regularly on Wednesdays and Fridays, just before sundown. The two never alluded to the story when they were together, they would have considered it ill-bred to speak familiarly of such private matters. True, the Señor Ruiz, having been confined for a long time to his arm-chair, had grown a little lax in the strict practice of etiquette, and it may have been that he would have enjoyed just a trifle of conversation upon the rumor in question. But Torres was firm, Torres kept him up to the mark; the subject had never once been put into actual words, though the Señor Ruiz skirted all round it, talking now about Winthrop, now about East Angels, now about the detention of the northern party all summer, owing to the long illness of Mrs. Rutherford, "that majestic and distinguished lady."

The Señor Ruiz had had time to skirt round every subject, he knew, Torres having paid his biweekly respects regularly now for eight long months. Torres said that there was much "hidden congeniality" between them; on the Señor Ruiz's side the congeniality was extremely well hidden, so much so, indeed, that he had never been able to discover it. But on Torres' side it was veritable, he had found that he could think of Garda with especial comfort over there on quiet Patricio, in the presence of a masculine mind so much resembling his own; and think of her he did by the hour, answering with a bow and brief word or two now and then the long despairing monologues of the Señor Ruiz, who, impelled by his Spanish politeness to keep up the conversation, was often driven into frenzy (concealed) by the length of time during which his visitor remained seated opposite to him, stiff as a wooden statue, and almost equally silent.

Because the poor señor could not move his legs very easily, Torres (on much the same principle which induces people to elevate their voices when speaking to a foreigner, as though he were deaf) always sat very near him, so that their knees were not more than two inches apart. This also enraged the Señor Ruiz, and on more than one occasion, when fingering the cane which always stood beside him, he had come near to bringing it down with violence upon the offending joints; the unconscious Adolfo little knew how near he had come to a bone-breaking occurrence of that sort.

"Two years," Torres was in the habit of saying to himself during these Patricio meditations; "they were safe enough in putting off the verification of their impossible gossip until then." The matter stood arranged in his mind as follows: Mr. Wintup was an old man, he was older than they knew; he was probably nearly forty. It was a pastime for him, at that dull age, to amuse himself for a while with the rôle of father. And he filled it well, Torres had no fault to find with him here; to the Cuban, Winthrop's manner fully took its place in the class "parental;" it was at once too familiar and too devoid of ardor to answer in the least to his idea of what the manner of "a suitor" should be. The most rigid and distant respect covering every word and look, as the winter snow covers Vesuvius; but underneath, all the same, the gleam of the raging hidden fires below – that was his idea of the "manner." Owing to the strange lack of discrimination sometimes to be observed in Fate, Garda had had a northern mother (an estimable woman in herself, of course); on account of this accident, she had been intrusted for a while to these strangers. But this would come to an end; these northerners would go away; they would return to their remote homes and Gracias would know them no more. Garda, of course, would never consent to go with them; it was but reasonable to suppose, therefore (they being amiable people), that they would be pleased to see her make a fit Alliance before their departure; and there was but one that could be called fit. It was not improbable, indeed, that the whole had been planned as a test of his own qualities; they wished to see whether he had equanimity, endurance. One had to forgive them their ignorance – the doubting whether or not he possessed these qualities – as one had to forgive them many other things; they should see, at any rate, how triumphantly he should issue from their trial.