Belford's Magazine, Volume II, No. 8, January, 1889

When this became intolerable, the fairy-like apparition in tulle, wrestling with the situation, on a war footing with her own feelings, lifted from a glowing face those lapis lazuli eyes of hers – pure stones liquified by soul action – to his face and dropped them. In one swift turn of those eyes she had taken in as much of that stern, cold, accusing face as she could well bear. But there was nothing on it she had not expected to see. She knew the unrelenting disdain of that proud nature for what is stained, unworthy, unwomanly, as well as she knew its strength to esteem, its gift to exalt, its power to bless.

And to look into a once loving face now grown cold, and to find there no longer an indulgent smile nor approving aspect, is not an experience to be coveted, even by the happiest.

“You are enjoying it, I hope,” said at length a low mocking voice.

“Enjoying it!” retorted plucky Mell, “of course I am enjoying it! Why shouldn’t I? I am probably enjoying it as much as you are!”

“More, I hope. I, for one, never did enjoy being miserable.”

“Oh, miserable!” exclaimed Mell, in a lively tone. His misery appeared to put her in the highest spirits. “Going to marry a rich girl and feeling miserable over it, how is that? You ought to be as happy, almost, as I am!”

“The happiness which needs to be so extolled,” replied Jerome, with a sardonic laugh, “rests on a slim foundation. Mine is of a different stamp. It leads me to envy the very worms as they crawl under my feet. Even a worm is free to go where his wishes lead him – even a worm is free to find an easy death and quick, when life becomes insupportable.”

Mell pressed her hand upon her heart, beating so fast – that pent-up heart in a troubled breast, which rose and fell as a storm-tossed vessel amid tempestuous seas.

“You cannot blame me for it,” said she wildly. “You slighted me, you trifled with me, you goaded me to it! I would do it again; if need be!”

“Once has been enough,” Jerome told her, in sadness. Speech was an effort to him; when a man regards some treasure, once his own now lost to him, he thinks much, but he has little to say. That little, nine times out of ten, would better be left unsaid. Jerome felt it so; for a long time he said nothing more – he only continued to look at the woman he had lost.

She continued to contemplate the floor, until those polished boards, waxed in readiness for gay dancers’ feet, became to her a sorry sight indeed, and a source of nervous irritation. When their glances encountered again, hers was full of passionate entreaty, his of inflamed regret.

“I have a question to put to you,” he broke forth, harshly. “What right have you to marry Rube Rutland, loving me?”

“The same right that you have to marry Clara Rutland, loving me!”

This turned the tables. Now Jerome’s glance was riveted upon those polished boards, and she looked at him. She had not had so good a look at him in a long time, and her two eyes had never been eyes enough to take in as much of him as her heart craved.

“At least,” said Jerome, regaining his composure and holding up his head, “this much may be said for me. My contract with her was made in good faith. I liked her well enough – I loved no one else – it was all right until I met you. My soul is as a pure white dove in this matter, compared to yours! And these bonds of mine, they hang but by a single thread. Our future would have been assured but for your broken faith.”

“Mine? It is all your fault, not mine! Had you trusted me, as a man ought to trust the woman he loves, all might have been well with us.”

“All would have been well with us had you trusted me, as a woman should trust the man she loves. Did I not ask you so to trust me? Great God! Mellville, could I conceive that you would stake your future happiness – our future happiness, on the paltry issues of a foot-race? That whole day my mind was full of projects for bringing about a happy termination to all our troubles. I could have done it! I would have done it! But now!”

Lashed into fury by a vivid conception of his own wrongs, brought about, as he chose to consider, through her treachery alone, Jerome turned upon her angrily:

“Let me tell you one thing! You shall not marry Rube Rutland!”

“Shall I not?”

Mell laughed – not one of her musical laughs. Now that she was fairly in for it, she rather enjoyed this fencing match with Jerome. Hitherto, she had always by stress of circumstances, acted upon the defensive with him; now she could assert her mastery.

“Shall I not? How will you prevent it?”

“I will open his eyes. I will tell him you do not care a rap for him.”

“You will tell him that? Very well. I will swear to him that I do. Whom will he believe? Not you!”

Her words, her manner, were exasperating, and they were intended to be exasperating. That cool and systematic self-control which characterized Jerome, had more than aroused a feeling of rebellious protest in the girl’s impetuous nature. If she could break him up a little —

“I say you shall not marry him!” The words were not loudly spoken, but they were the utterances of a man much in earnest. “Rather than see you his wife I would gladly see you dead!”

“Oh, no doubt! But let me tell you, sir, I do not propose to die to please you! I propose to please myself by becoming the wife of Rube Rutland!”

This was too much, even for Jerome.

“You heartless, cruel, wicked woman!”

With a single stride he reached her side; he shook his finger rudely in her face; nay, in a frenzy of mad passion he did worse than that – he took hold of the wayward creature herself and shook her with such violence that those heavy coils of hair, upon which she had expended so much time and pains, loosened and fell about her in a reckless loveliness beyond the reach of art.

“Woman, do you know what you are doing? Do you know that you are playing with dangerous implements? toying with men’s passions? dallying with men’s souls?”

It is safe to say, Mell had never had such a shaking up, however frequent the occasions when she had deserved it.

This unconventional usage on the part of Jerome, a man who wore self-possession and correct manners as an every day coat of mail, not only surprised Mell, but terrified and subdued her. In undertaking to “break up” Jerome by stirring up the green-eyed monster, Mell had neglected to take into account the well-established fact, that no jealous man stands long upon ceremony. Panting for breath, she awoke unpleasantly to a full comprehension of a madman’s possibilities, and ignoring all those impassioned inquiries with which he had interlarded the severer measures of corporeal punishment, she remarked in a spirit of meekness and a very faint voice:

“Jerome, let me go, please; you are hurting me.”

“But how much more you are hurting me,” said Jerome, harshly.

He released her, however, and felt ashamed. No man with real manliness in him, but does feel ashamed after he has hurt a woman. She may have deserved it, and yet he feels ashamed.

One would think that now after this ungentlemanly conduct on Jerome’s part, Mell the high spirited will not only be full of a tremendous indignation, but be willing, and more than willing, to give him up for good and all.

How little you know a woman, you who think that! A harmless man never does anywhere so little harm as in a woman’s affections. The rod of empire sways the world and a woman’s mind – all women, to a great or less degree; all women are sisters.

In other words, it is very necessary for a man to be capable of shaking up a woman for past offences, and present naughtiness, when she needs it, or else he must make up his mind to take a back seat and give up the supremacy. Some of the fair sex never come to terms without a shaking – there may be one or two, here and there among them, who never come to terms, even with a shaking!

Mell did not belong to this small minority; she was completely subdued. Contrite, and submissive, she now approached her audacious antagonist; approached him timidly, where he stood a little apart, and with his back turned to her, feeling, as we have said, quite ashamed of himself, and said gently:

“Jerome, I will break with Rube if you will break with Clara.”

“An honorable man cannot leave a woman in the lurch,” answered he, in a manner indicative of a strong protest under the existing law.

“And how about an honorable woman?” interrogated Mell.

“She can lie, and lie, and still be honorable,” he informed her with fierce irony.

“Then you expect me to – ”

“I do! I confidently expect you to do it, and at once. Break with him, and have a little patience with me, until Clara gets the Honorable Archibald taut on the line, and awakens to the fact that she loves me still – but only as a brother! It is coming – it is sure to come, and before long.”

“In the meantime,” remarked Mell, with a peculiar expression, “what’s the use of hurting Rube’s feelings?”

“Gods and angels, listen!” exclaimed her companion, in overwhelming indignation. “The question then has narrowed down to the getting of a husband without regard to any body’s feelings – save Rube. His are not to be hurt until you can hurt them with impunity! You are bound to hold on to him until you secure me, beyond a peradventure! That is your little game, Mell, is it? Out upon you! Oh, unfortunate man that I am, to have fallen into the hands of a woman who is particular as to the fit of her ball dress, but has no preference when it comes to a husband; who has the aspect of a goddess, but the easy principles of a Delilah; who is, in fact, not a genuine woman at all, with a heart and a soul in her, but a man-eating monster, seeking prey – a shark in woman’s clothing, ready to take into the matrimonial clutch, and swallow at a single gulp, me, if you can get me; if not me, Rube; if not Rube, any other eligible creature in man’s guise, whether descended from a molecule in the coral, or a tadpole in the spawn: whether a swine of Epicurus, or an ape just from Barbary! Shame upon you, woman! Shame! Shame!”

Restive under these severe strictures, Mell had made several ineffectual attempts to put a stop to them, but her appealing gestures implored in vain. Finding he would not desist, she bit her lips in great agitation, and crimsoned violently.

“You are the most impertinent man in existence!” she informed him petulantly, when he had done.

“That’s right, Mell,” he answered. “Turn red – turn red to the tips of your eyelashes! It is the most hopeful sign I have yet seen. Mellville, look at me.”

She raised to him wonderingly her wondrously beautiful eyes.

“I have been asking myself how I could love you so well, a woman who could condescend to sail under false colors; who knows how to stoop from her high estate, and trick, and juggle, and blind; who has set a trap to catch a mouse, and victimizes her prey; who has spread her toils to obtain a husband under false pretences. I have asked myself many times, ‘how can you love that woman?’ I have wished that I loved you less – that I loved you not at all! And I would crush it out – this unspeakable tenderness, which shields and defends your image in my heart – crush it out, beat it down, tear it into tatters, grind it into dust under the heel of an inexorable resolve, but that I believe, but that I know, Mell, that there is something within you deeper, better, worthier! ‘Truth is God,’ and the woman who is true in all things is a part of Divinity. But what of the woman who is false where she ought to be true? Let her hide her head in the presence of devils! Be true, then, Mell, be earnest! This frivolous trifling with life’s most serious concerns shows so small in a being born to a noble heritage! It is only excusable in a natural niais, or a woman unendowed with a soul.”

Jerome here paused. After a moment spent in thought, he approached his companion very near, and in a voice of passionate tenderness resumed:

“My darling! you can never know what hours of torment, what days of suffering, this conduct of yours has cost me. But I believe you have erred more through thoughtlessness, and a pardonable feeling of resentment – more through love turned into madness, than any settled determination to do wrong. But now let it go no further. Hasten to set yourself right with Rube. No matter whether you and I are destined to be happy in each other’s love or not; at all hazards be true to the immortal within you. Promise me to undo the mischief you have done; promise me to be a good, true, useful woman, thinking more of duty than your own interest and pleasure. The world is overstocked with butterflies, but it needs good women, and I want you to be one of them – the best! My darling, you will promise me?”

Mell was much affected; she hung her head and her bosom heaved.

“Do you hesitate?” cried Jerome, mistaking her silence. “Promise me, Mell, I implore, I beseech you!”

“Theatricals?” asked a voice in the doorway.

It was Rube.

“Rehearsing your parts?” he again inquired, coming in.

“Yes,” replied Jerome. “For are we not all players upon a stage?”

“And what play have they decided upon?” next questioned the unsuspecting Rube, who, carrying no concealed weapons himself, was never on the lookout for concealed weapons on others.

“I don’t recall the name,” said Jerome. “Do you, Miss Creecy? It is ‘Lover’s Quarrel,’ or some such twaddle, I think.”

Mell thought it was something of that kind, but she furthermore expressed the opinion that it would be well-nigh impossible to get it up in time for the delectation of the Honorable Archibald.

“Which is no great pity,” declared the off-hand Rube; “I wish he’d take himself elsewhere to be delectated.”

There was no doubt as to Rube’s preferences for a brother-in-law; which, however, did not take away from the awkwardness of this remark. Not suspicious, neither was Rube obtuse; he noted a singular contraction on Jerome’s brow, he noted a strange confusion in Mell’s manner, and he put it all down to his own blundering tongue, which was always placing his best friend either in a false or in an annoying position before Mell. Out of these considerations he made haste to subjoin:

“Ah, Mellville, you should have seen Devonhough how splendidly he acquitted himself in our class plays at college!”

This was a pure offering from friendship’s store. Honest Rube, with his fine open countenance all aglow with enthusiasm for his friend and joy in the presence of the woman he loved, looked the archetype of hopeful young manhood, untouched, as yet, by sorrow or mistrust. Regarded from an architectural standpoint, he had the sublime simplicity and dignity of the Doric, which was just wherein he differed from Jerome, who was a Corinthian column, delicately chiselled, ornately moulded.

Mell remarked, in reply to this expression of lively admiration from Rube, that she wished she could have seen Mr. Devonhough – or something. Mr. Devonhough, with the expression of a man whose self-respect will not admit of his bearing much more, said with an impatient “Pshaw,” that she needn’t wish to have seen him, that this good acting of his was all in Rube’s eye, and nowhere else; that he hated an actor, and that he never would act another part himself, as long as he lived, not to oblige anybody, and so help him God!

After which, shadowed by clouds, beleaguered with dark thoughts, with sombre fires of jealousy smoldering in his eye, and war-hounds of anxiety gnawing at his vitals, he abruptly turned and left the room – not with his usual deliberation.

And still Rube saw nothing.

“He’s real cut up,” said the sympathetic Rube, looking commiseratingly after the friend of his bosom. “And all for what? Because a woman never seems certain of her own mind. When judgment overtakes you women what is to become of you all, anyhow – eh, Mell?”

Mell could hardly say; and Rube, dismissing Jerome from his mind for the present, found other occupation. He had never seen Mell before in full dress. He addressed himself con amore, and exclusively, for a time, to the study of structural feminity and those marvels of nature presented to the eye of the earnest investigator, in the shape of a well-formed woman on the outside of a ball dress.

During this process Rube’s sensations were indefinable.

Mell, preoccupied in thoughts of her own, hears, at length, his voice dreamily, as a sound from afar, and looks up irritably to see, for the hundredth time, how coarse of fibre Rube is compared to Jerome.

She resents the unpalatable fact. She resents something else, and makes a very vigorous but unavailing effort to gain her freedom.

“I cannot understand,” playfully remonstrated Rube, and with arms immovable, “why so simple a matter disturbs you so much. You are as white as a sheet, you are quivering like a leaf, your hands are icy cold, and what is it all about?”

“I told you never, never to do that!” cried out Mell, in an agony of passionate protest.

Even the most cold-blooded among mortals finds the caress of a person not dear to them offensive; but take the woman of emotional nature, exquisitely sensitive in all matters of feeling, and to such the touch of unloved lips is worse than a plague spot.

“Don’t you hear me? I cannot bear it! I am not used to it!”

There was something more than maidenly coyness in her tone; there was mental anguish, and a downright shade of anger. We wonder Rube did not detect it. But you know, gentle reader, how it is. There are so many things all around and about us which we do not hear and see, because we are intent upon other matters, and are not looking for them. With such feelings, in that dreadful moment Mell would rather have submitted to a dozen stripes from Jerome, than one single caress from Rube – her future husband, bear you in mind! the being by whose side she expected to pass the rest of her days. Poor Mell! If getting up in the world requires self-torture, self-immolation such as this, wouldn’t it be better, think you, not to get up? Wouldn’t it be better, in the long run, for every woman, situated as you are, to use a dagger, and thereby not only settle her future, but get clean out of a world where such sufferings are necessary? There can’t be any other world much worse, judged by your present sensations.

But Rube, as we have said, did not hear that piteous wail of a woman coercing her flesh and blood, the frame of her mind, the bent of her soul. She was his own, and no words could tell, how he loved her. If a man cannot lawfully kiss his own wife, or one so near to being his own wife, it is a hard case, truly. That one little slip “’twixt the cup and the lip,” which has played such havoc in men’s expectations, from the first beginnings of time to the present moment, did not enter into Rube’s calculations, or his thoughts.

He was in a playful and a loving mood. He tightened his clasp upon her, he chucked her under the chin, he pinched her cheek, he patted those sunny locks of hers and smiled down into that fair face, faire les yeux doux, and babbled to her in lover-language, not unlike the “pitty, pitty ittle shing” upon which we linguistically feed helpless infancy, as little witting the possible sufferings of the child under such an infliction, as Rube did Mell’s.

“Now truly, Mell,” asked Rube, “did you never let any other fellow kiss you – never? not once?”

“No!” said Mell, emphatic and indignant. “Never! And you shouldn’t now, if I could help myself! Do go away! I tell you I’m not used to such as this!”

She was almost ready to cry.

The whole thing was immensely amusing and entertaining to Rube, and while he laughed, he could also understand how it might come hard on a girl, at first, to feel the bloom despoiled on her chaste lips.

“But you will get used to it after awhile,” he assured her, with a quiet smile. “My word for it, you will! I will see to it that you do. There now, my pretty one (just what Jerome called her) sweet, frightened bird, why ruffle your beautiful plumage against these bars? They are made of adamant; but only be quiet and take to them kindly and they will not derange a single feather. You are exquisitely lovely to-night! You will intoxicate all beholders! And have you been thinking of that blissful time when we are going to get married?”

She had, of course; but what made him so impatient? Couldn’t he wait until she got back home? Rube could, certainly; but only on conditions, and those conditions would come very hard on a girl not used to a lover’s kiss, and who objected to a lover’s fondling, unless she managed well.

Fortunately, Mell could manage well. She could have managed the diversified attractions of a dime museum if necessary.

“And before he shall desecrate my lips again,” Mell vowed to herself, under her breath, “I will perish by my own hands!”

Ah! Mell, Mell, you should have thought of that before you sold yourself!

At daylight she crawled upstairs and into bed. The ball had been a great success and she its reigning belle. Women like her, with such a form, with such a face, with such glory of hair and wealth of high spirits and physical exuberance, work like a spell in a ball-room. There was something bewildering in the gleam of her eye; something intoxicating in the turn of her neck, the flow of her garments.

She had danced, to please Rube, more than once with Jerome. It was while the two were floating together in that delirious rapture of conscious nearness, to which the conventional waltz gives pretext and the stamp of propriety, and while their senses swayed to the rhythmic measure of the sweetest music they had ever heard, that Mell looked up meltingly into her partner’s face – a face absorbed, excited, yet darkly set with a certain sternness which Mell fully understood – looked up and said to him: “Only wait until I get back home.” Simple words indeed, and holding little meaning for those who heard; but they gave a new lease of life to Jerome. He answered back in a whisper, certain words. And now it only remained for Clara Rutland to accept the Honorable Archibald Pendergast and the happiness of two loving hearts would be assured.

The ball is over, gone, past, never to come back again, with its waltz melody, its ravishing rhyme without reason, its sweet smelling flowers, its foam-crested wine, its outlying joy, its underlying pathos, its hidden sweetness, and its secret pain. For, there never was a ball yet which had its lights and not its shadows; which did not have some heavy foot among its light fantastic toes; some heavy heart among its gallant men and beautiful women.

Mell lives it over in the pale dawn. It made her blood curdle and her flesh creep to think of those two men. What was she going to do with them – Rube and Jerome? How was it all to end?

Horrible it would be to break off with Rube, more horrible still not to do so. Fearful it would be to tell him the truth – the whole truth. But that was what Jerome expected her to do, what she ought to do.

Those words of his were burned into her memory with fire. He wanted her to become a good, true, useful woman, and be no longer a butterfly.

He had called her ‘my darling.’ He had called her so twice. He loved her just as much as ever. In fact, he loved her more; for the man is not living who does not love a woman more when he finds out somebody else loves her as well as he.

She was quite decided, and Jerome was undeniably right; there was but one honorable course for her to follow. Even if Jerome married Clara, and she herself never had another offer of marriage (she never would have another such as Rube) how sweet it would be, even in a life of loneliness, to be free, to be able to maintain the dignity and the probity of her womanhood, to be able to throw aside the despicable part of a double-dealer and a deceiver, to be able to feel that she had been worthy of Jerome though never his.

Thus Mell felt when she stretched her weary limbs on that silken couch of ease in the dim morning light, and turned her face to the wall, and closed her eyes, and thought of that exquisite moment, when from Jerome’s shoulder, conventionally used, she had proffered to him the olive branch of peace and had caught the heavenly beams of that smile which restored her to his favor. With the bewitchment of this smile reflected upon the fair lineaments of her own face, Mell fell into that sweet rest, which remains even for the people who flirt.