Was It Right to Forgive? A Domestic Romance

By this time it was growing dusk, and the three men were seen coming together towards the house. They were walking slowly and talking earnestly, and Yanna said:

“I wonder what subject interests them so much?”

“Politics or religion, I suppose; but whichever it is, they will utter nonsense as soon as we are within hearing. Here comes Harry with a laugh and a platitude!”

“Pardon us, Miss Van Hoosen; we quite forgot that time moved. Have you been very impatient, Rose?”

“We have both felt hurt. If you had been talking to Yanna and me, you would have been worrying about the horses, and about the steep roads, and the night miasma, and lots of other things; in fact, you would have had a bad, bad cough, by this time, Harry.”

“I know it, Rose; and I beg you a thousand pardons. You must blame my hosts. I never enjoyed talking so much before.” Then he gave his hand to Antony with a frankness that had something very confiding in it. “Shall I call for you to-morrow?” he asked. “We can get a good boat at the river side.”

“Thank you,” answered Antony, “I will go.”

“Cannot we go also?” enquired Rose.

Then Harry hesitated. He wanted Yanna to say something, and she said nothing. That decided the question. “It is quite impossible, Rose,” he answered. “We are going on the river to fish – a little dirty boat, and the blazing sun beating on the river – what pleasure could you have?”

“What pleasure can you have? I do not believe you are going a-fishing at all. You are going a-talking, and we could help you;” then, turning to Yanna, she asked: “When are you coming to Filmer again? Not for a week? That will never do. I shall go against your brother if he parts us for so long.”

The last words were lost in the clatter of the horse’s hoofs; and then there was a sudden silence. For the mere idea of departing stops the gayest conversation, makes the quietest person fidgety, the slowest, in a hurry; and introduces something of melancholy, whether we will or not. Perhaps, indeed, there is in every parting some dim foreshadowing of the Great Parting, and the involuntary sigh, with which we turn inward from a departing guest, is a sign from that language below the threshold we so seldom try to understand.

The acquaintance thus pleasantly begun grew rapidly to something more personal and familiar. Harry and Antony were constantly together; and the young man from the west exercised that peculiar influence over the city-bred man that a radical change in circumstances might have done. Antony was a new kind of experience. Out on the river, or wandering over the hills together, they had such confidences as drew them closer than brothers. And this intimacy 48 naturally strengthened those tenderer intimacies from which, indeed, their own friendship received its charm and crown.

For Harry soon fell into the habit of calling at Peter Van Hoosen’s house for Antony; and in such visits he saw Adriana constantly, under the most charming and variable household aspects. It was early morning, and she was training the vines, or dusting the room, or creaming butter for a cake; but he thought her in every occupation more beautiful than in the last one. Or the young men were returning at night-fall from a day’s outing, weary and hungry; and she made them tea, and cut their bread and butter and cold beef; and such occasions – no matter how frequently they occurred – were all separate and distinct in Harry’s memory.

This familiarity also on her father’s hearth invested Adriana with an atmosphere that a wrong or a trifling thought could not enter. Walking with her in the moonshine on the Filmer piazzas, he had ventured to say, and to look more love than was possible in the sanctity of her home and in the presence of her adoring father and brother. In fact, confidence in his own position left him; he began to have all the despondencies, and doubts, and sweet uncertainties, that lovers must endure, if they would not miss the complementary joys of dawning hopes, of looks and half-understood words, and of that happy “perhaps” that lifts a man from despairing into the seventh heaven of love’s possible blessedness. This, indeed, is the best heart education a man can possibly receive. In it, if he be a man, he gets that straightness of soul in which he loses “I” and then finds it again in that other one for whom his soul longs.

Unconsciously as a tree grows, Harry grew in the school of love; and Adriana was also much benefited by this change of base in Harry’s wooing. She had been learning too fast. It takes but a moment to drop the flower-seed into the ground; and it takes but a glance of the eye for love’s wondrous prepossession to be accomplished; but seed and passion alike, if they would reach a noble fruition, must germinate; must put forth the tender little leaves that lie asleep at the root and the heart; must spread upward to the sunshine, before they blossom like the rose in beauty and in perfume. And for these processes time is absolutely necessary.

An experience similar in kind was in progress between Antony and Rose, but the elements were more diverse. Rose had had many admirers; and she had permitted herself a sentimental affection for Dick Duval, the most unworthy of them all. She knew that she was morally weak, and that the only way to prevent herself from committing imprudences was to keep to the roadway of conventional proprieties; and in the main she was wise enough to follow this course. Her feelings about Antony were conflicting; she did not consider him a conventionally proper lover. He was the son of a working man; he lived a life beyond social restraints; she supposed him to be rather poor than rich; he did not dress as the men she knew dressed; his conversation was provocative of discussion, it compelled a person to think, or to answer like a fool – a startling vulgarity in itself – and he was so obtrusively truthful.

In a lover, as yet unaccepted, she felt this last quality to be embarrassing. It made him incapable of comprehending those fine shades of flirtation by which 50 a clever woman indicates “she will, and she will not,” by which she hesitates a liking, and provokes the admiration she can either refuse or accept. If she looked at Antony, with a sweet, long gaze, and then sighed, and cast her eyes down, Antony was moved to the depths of his soul, and he would frankly tell her so; which at that stage of proceedings was very inconvenient. If she permitted him to hold her hand, and walk with her in silent bliss under the stars, she was compelled at their next meeting to set him back with a cruel determination he could neither gainsay nor complain of. He was happy, and he was wretched. Often he determined to return westward forever, and then in some of the occult ways known to womanhood, Rose tied him to her side by another knot, more invisible and more invincible than the rest.

She loved him. She was resolved to marry him – sometime. “But I want one more season in society,” she said to herself, one day, as she reviewed the position in her luxurious solitude – “though for the matter of that, it is the young married women now who have all the beaux, and all the fun. And if I were married, I should be safe from Dick; and I am afraid of Dick. Dick isn’t good; on the contrary, he is very bad. I like good men. I like Antony Van Hoosen. I will let him propose to me. If I were engaged, or supposed to be engaged, all the young men would immediately fancy I was the only girl in the universe – but I never can find another lover like Antony Van Hoosen! The man would die for me.”

She talked of him continually to Adriana, and hoped that Adriana would say to Antony the things she did not herself wish to say. She gave Adriana hopes that Adriana might give them to Antony. And then 51 Adriana was so provokingly honorable as to regard the confidence as inviolable. And, indeed, Antony was that kind of a lover who thinks it a kind of sacrilege to babble about his mistress, or to speculate concerning her feelings, even with his sister. His love, with all of joy and sorrow it caused him, was a subject sacred as his own soul to him.

Of course, Mrs. Filmer was not blind to events so closely within her observation; she was far too shrewdly alive to all of life’s possibilities to ignore them. But she did not fear her own daughter. She made allowances for her youth, and therefore for her sentimentalities, which she thought were as much a part of it as her flexible figure or her fine complexion. “This primitive gentleman from the plains has had it all his own way,” she thought. “If we had more company, he would have been less remarkable. But company would have interfered with Henry’s great work, and it has been hard enough to keep the necessary quiet for his writing, as it is. However, we shall go to New York soon; and then adieu! Mr. Van Hoosen. He sings a song about the ‘Maids of California.’ I shall tell him it will be proper at his age to make a selection very soon from them.”

Under circumstances like these, the summer and the autumn passed away like a vivid dream. Adriana was much at Filmer Hall; and Rose very frequently spent the day with Adriana in her home. Mrs. Filmer was too wise to oppose the constant companionship. She regarded it merely as a contingent of country life; and she quieted any irritable thoughts by the reflection that her daughter would marry early, and have other interests, and then put away her girlish, immature predilections of every kind. And in the meantime, 52 she was rather glad that Rose should have an “interest,” for Rose could make herself very tiresome if she was without one.

At length the chrysanthemums were beginning to bloom, and Mrs. Filmer spoke decidedly of a return to the city. Mr. Filmer had written a whole chapter of his book, and felt the need of change and mental rest; and Mrs. Filmer reminded Rose that her costumes for the coming season were all to buy; and the house was not yet put in order for the winter’s entertaining. Harry said they were leaving the country just when it was most charming; but even Harry was not averse to an entire reconstruction of his life. He was still deeply in love with Adriana, and strongly attached to Antony, but he was a little tired of walking, and driving, and boating. The idea of his club, of the opera, and the theatres, of dinners and dances, came pleasantly into his imagination.

Then arrived the time of displaced furniture, and of days sad with the unrest of packing and the uncertainties of parting. Harry began to think; and Antony thought more positively than he had ever before done. Adriana was silent and full of vague regrets; she had dreamed such a happy dream all summer; would the winter days carry it away? Rose was also quiet and a little mournful; but her regrets were flashed with hopes. She was looking forward to new conquests; and yet she was strangely averse to resign the one great heart that had been her worshipper through the happy summer months.

All alike were waiting for an opportunity. And the days went by, and it did not come, because it was watched for. But suddenly Mrs. Filmer resolved to give a “Good-bye Ball,” and then, when everybody’s 53 thoughts were on the trivialities of flowers and ribbons, destiny, one morning, called them to account for the love she had given. She wanted to know what harvest of joy or sorrow had been grown upon the slopes of the sunny summer days, and whether the love that had brightened them was to be homed forever in faithful hearts; or cast out wounded and forlorn, to perish and be forgotten on the hard highways of selfish and mercenary life!

CHAPTER III

It was the morning before “the Ball,” and Mrs. Filmer was busy about the packing of some valuable bric-a-brac, which was to be taken with them to the city. She went into Harry’s room, to see if the pieces adorning it had been attended to properly; and, glancing carefully around, her eyes fell upon a book of expensive illustrations. She determined to lock it away, and lifted it for that purpose. A letter fell from its pages, and she read it. As she did so, her eyes flashed, and her face grew passionately sombre.

“The idea!” she muttered. “The very idea of such a thing!”

She did not replace the letter, but taking it in her hand, went in search of Harry; and as she could not find him, she proceeded to Mr. Filmer’s study. He looked up with fidgety annoyance, and she said crossly:

“Henry, I am sorry to disturb you; but I suppose your son is of more importance than your book.”

“Is there anything amiss with Harry?”

“Harry is on the point of making a dreadful mésalliance.”

“With whom?”

“That Van Hoosen girl.”

“How do you know?”

“I found a letter in his room – a perfectly dreadful letter.”

“Dreadful!”

“You know what I mean – a letter asking her to be his wife.”

“It might be worse than that. If Harry loves her, I am glad he loves her honorably.”

“Honorably! Such a marriage is impossible; and for once, you must take Harry in hand, and tell him so.”

“Harry is of age. He is independent of me, in so far that he makes his own living, and has his own income. I can advise, but if you have your usual wisdom, Emma, you will not attempt to coerce him. I am sure the furnace needs attending to. This room is cold, and you know, when I am writing, I always do have cold feet.” He was turning the leaves of his book with impatience, and a total withdrawal of interest from the subject of conversation. Mrs. Filmer left him with a look of contempt.

“The man has lost all natural feeling,” she sighed. “He gets his very passions out of a bookcase. There is no use in expecting help from him.”

She put the letter in her pocket, and tried to go on with the domestic affairs interesting her; but she found the effort impossible. A fierce jealousy of her son swallowed up every smaller feeling; she had a nausea when she thought he might at that very moment be “making an irredeemable fool of himself.” But she took into consideration what Mr. Filmer had said, and acknowledged that, careless as he seemed about the matter, he had touched its vital point at once. Harry would not bear coercion. Her tactics would have to be straightforward and persuasive.

She sat motionless, with eyes cast down, considering them; and schooling herself into such control of her passion as would compel Harry to respect her objections. She resolved also to say nothing of her plans to 56 Rose. Rose had a romantic fancy for the girl’s brother; and she was quite capable of justifying her own penchant behind Harry’s. As she pondered these things, she heard the carpenters from the village preparing the ball-room. They were tacking up bunting and wreaths of autumn leaves, but though the designs were her own, and she had been much interested in them, everything about the entertainment had suddenly become a weariness. She felt that until she had an understanding with Harry, she could do nothing; no, nor even care for what others were doing.

Fortunately, as she stood at the window, gloomily looking into a future her own sick fancy conjured, she saw Harry coming slowly up the avenue. He had the air of a man in suspense or anxiety, and she whispered, “There! I know he has done something awful! He looks like it. It is a shame that a strange girl should come into my home and make so much trouble. It is, really!”

Her intense recognition of Harry caused him to look up, and she made a motion which he hastened to answer. For here it must be admitted that Harry had a certain fear of his mother – a fear all compact of love – a fear of wounding or offending her – a fear of seeing her weeping or troubled – a tender fear, which was partly the habit of years, and very much the result of a generous estimate of her many excellences, and of his own indebtedness to them. And from the beginning of time, men have desired to worship a woman; some men take naturally to the worship of the Blessed Virgin; others turn their religion of woman to motherhood, and find that among the millions of earth-mothers, there is no mother like the mother that bore them. Harry was one of these disciples.

He had been insensible so long to the charms of maidenhood, because he gave all the tenderness of his nature to his mother; and even his love for Rose was not so much on the ground that she was his sister as that she was his mother’s daughter. And undoubtedly, this mother love had been hitherto the salt of his life. It had preserved him from all excesses that would grieve her, it had sanctified the idea of home in his heart; and if it had in a measure narrowed his nature, it had kept him from those gross vices men do not go from a mother’s side to practice.

He came into the room with a conscious alertness, blaming himself for not taking more interest in the coming entertainment. Yet he had felt it hard to do so; in the first place, Yanna would not be present, her father having positive convictions about the folly – perhaps the sin – of dancing. In the second place, he had really written to Yanna; the letter in the possession of Mrs. Filmer being a mild draft of the one actually sent; so that the air of anxiety was a very natural one. He perceived at once that his mother was much annoyed, and his face was instantly sympathetic.

“I knew this thing was going to be too much for you, dear mother,” he said, with an air of reproach. “I am so sorry you undertook it. It will be a bore altogether.”

“Harry, it is not the ball – it is you! Oh, Harry! Harry! Look at this letter. I found it in your room. Naturally, I read it; and, of course, having done so, I think it honorable to talk with you about it.”

Harry was fingering the letter his mother handed him, as she spoke, and when she ceased, he folded the paper and put it in his pocket. “Well, mother,” he said, “you have discovered what I intended to tell you 58 as soon as this miserable ball was over. I love Yanna. I intend to marry her – if she will marry me.”

“No fear of that. The girl has been doing her best to secure you all summer long.”

“You are mistaken, mother.”

“Oh, Harry, such a marriage is impossible! You know how I adore you! You are my life! I cannot give you up to this strange girl. Besides, dear Harry, you have taught me to rely upon you, to trust to you, in all my cares and troubles. You have been my right hand, ever since you were a little lad. You have enabled Rose to take her proper place in society. Without you, everything must go to destruction.”

“Dear mother, I do not see any reason for such calamity. You give me too much credit.”

“I do not give you enough. Look at your father. He is wonderfully clever, but has he ever been of any use in business? You have had everything to attend to. If I had had the remotest idea you would marry, I should never have permitted the building of this house. We have sunk a deal of money in it. Without your income, we shall be quite unable to keep it up. Then just imagine how we shall be laughed at by the Giffords and all our set! It makes me shivering sick.”

“You knew, mother, that I would be likely to marry sometime.”

“Oh, yes! but not just at this time. You could not have chosen a more cruel time. How am I to manage with two houses on my hands, and no one to help me? Then, there is your little sister Rose! I hoped to give her a fair chance this season, to let her entertain, to let her realize her ideas in dress. She has been promised these pleasures; how can I tell her you are going to leave us to fight the world alone! You know, Harry – yes, 59 you do know – that Rose gets a great many invitations for your sake. If your engagement becomes known – and such things sift through the air – farewell to the Lennox dinners and dances! farewell to the Manns, and the Storeys, and the Wolseys, and a great many others! In fact, there is no use in opening the New York house at all. We had better stay here. Thank goodness! we can make your father’s book the excuse.”

Mrs. Filmer’s eyes were brim full of tears, but she bravely held them back; and this bit of self-restraint touched Harry far more than if she had flown to pieces in hysteria. He looked much troubled, and sitting down at her side, he took her hand and said:

“Do you think I will desert you if I marry, mother? You have been the best half of my life. I could not live without you.”

“You think so, Harry. But I know better. When a man gets a wife, he leaves father and mother for her. But do not leave me just yet, Harry! Do not leave me, dear boy, while I have so much to do, and to worry about! If I deserve any love or gratitude from you, do not leave me just yet! Oh, Harry! Harry!”

“I will not, mother. If Yanna loves me, she will wait for me.”

“If she loves you, she will be glad to wait for you.”

“You do not object to Yanna herself, do you, mother? Love her, for my sake, dear mother! Let me tell her you will. Is she not all you could wish for me? Is she not good and lovely, beyond comparison?”

“Indeed, I think she is very unworthy of you. I cannot love her yet, Harry. If you were thinking of May Hervey, or Sarah Holles, I could bear the loss of you better. Either of these girls would marry you for 60 a word. May is worth all of a million and a half, and Sarah nearly a million. In these days, matrimony ought to mean money. My dear son, do not leave your mother just yet! And if you must engage yourself to a girl so unworthy your position, at any rate keep it a profound secret. Even Rose must not be told. Rose is subject to sentimental confidences, and she is a little conceited, and will not believe me, if I tell her she is asked out for your sake, and not for her own. Harry, I love you so much! Will you help me a little longer, my dear?”

She was trembling with emotion, she was weeping very quietly; but Harry could see the tears dropping upon her clasped hands. But she did not for a moment let her feelings overstep her faculties; she knew right well that a woman ever so little beyond herself is a fool. She knew also that the modern gentleman is wounded in his self-esteem by a scene, and is not to be tenderly moved by any signs of mere pathological distress.

Her self-restraint inspired Harry with respect; and he felt it impossible to throw off the habit of consideration for “mother above all others.” It had the growth of nearly thirty years; while his affection for Yanna was comparatively a thing of yesterday. He promised not to marry while his marriage would be injurious to his family; and he promised to keep his engagement a secret, if Yanna accepted him. Nor did he anticipate any difficulty in fulfilling these promises; while he told himself that, after all, it was only a little bit of self-denial, which would be amply repaid by his mother’s and sister’s happiness and welfare.

He did not think of Yanna, nor of how a secret engagement and a delayed marriage might affect her; 61 but he was annoyed because these conditions had not been alluded to in his letter to her. Yanna might suppose that he had purposely ignored them until her consent was gained; and such a supposition would not place him in a very honorable light.

The interview terminated in a decided victory for Mrs. Filmer, and there was something very like a tear in Harry’s eyes when he left his mother with a straight assurance of his continued help and sympathy. At the door he turned back and kissed her again; and then she went with him as far as the room which was being prepared for dancing. But she did not ask him to stay with her; she knew better than to push an advantage too far, and was wise enough to know that when necessary words have been spoken and accepted further exhortation is a kind of affront.

At lunch time the subject was totally ignored. Mr. Filmer came out of his study, apparently for the very purpose of being excessively pleasant to Harry, and of giving his wife anxious warnings about exhausting herself, and overdoing hospitality, “which, by-the-by,” he added, “is as bad a thing as underdoing it. Two days hence, you will not be able to forgive Emma Filmer for the trouble she has taken,” he said.

“I hope we have not annoyed you much, Henry.”

“I have calmly borne the upset, because I know this entertainment will be the first and the last of the series.”

He spoke to hearts already conscious; and Rose said petulantly, “The ball will, of course, be a failure; we have bespoken failure by anticipating it.”

“I never really wanted it, Rose,” said Harry.

“That is understandable,” she retorted. “Yanna does not dance; neither does she approve of dancing. 62 But all the sensible people are not Puritans, thank heaven! What are such ideas doing in an enlightened age? They ought to be buried with all other fossils of dead thought; and – ”