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

“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.

But how different everything always seems the day after the ball!

It must be the gas-light in the ball-room, it must be the sunlight in the day-time, which makes all the difference. Sunlight is the effulgence of a God, and lights up Reality; gas-light is a ray kindled by the feeble hand of man to brighten the unreal – a delusion and a snare.

The absurd fancies of a ball-room hide their fantastic fumes in the broad daylight.

Coming down to a six o’clock dinner – finding Rube at the bottom of the stairs to attend upon her – finding the assembled company, including the Honorable Archibald, half-famished and yet kept waiting for their dinner, until the future mistress of the Bigge House put in an appearance, Mell began more clearly to estimate her own importance – her own, but through Rube. Her beauty, her wit, they were her own; but they had availed her little before her betrothment to Rube. Especially was she impressed with this aspect of the case, when, hanging upon his arm, she entered the brilliant drawing-room to become immediately the bright particular star of the social heavens, the cynosure of all eyes; to be immediately surrounded by flattering sycophants; to be pelted with well-bred raillery for her tardiness and sleepy-headedness; to be bowed down to and reverenced and waited upon and courted and admired by these high-born people – she, old Jacob Creecy’s daughter, but the future wife of the young master of this lordly domain.

And Jerome expected her to give all this up – did he? And to give it up whether he gave up Clara, or not? Jerome was simply crazy – and she would be a good deal crazier herself before he caught her doing it! Mell still has an eye to the main chance. Mell still “tuck arter her ole daddy!”

The summer wanes. The ripened grain is harvested and the chaff falling from the sheaves on the threshing floor; the patient teams sniff the first cool breeze and put their shoulders to the wheel; the wagons are heaped in corn; the fields grow white for the picking. In the windings of green valleys yellow leaves and red play fast and loose amid the green, and go fluttering to the ground; the deer stalks abroad; glad hunters blow their horns, and the unleashed hounds are joyful at the scent of noble prey.

Twice has the moon changed, and Mell is still at the Bigge House, showing up amid its polished refinements, as a choice bit of Corian faïence contrasted with cut-glass. Every day she spoke of going, but every day there was some reason why she should not go and should stay. Mrs. Rutland wanted her to stay; and Mell herself, whatever her misgivings, whatever her struggles, whatever her trials, wanted, too, on the whole, to stay. Here was a congenial atmosphere of style and fashion, congenial occupation – or the congenial want of any, endless variety of amusement, the hourly excitement of spirited contact with kindred minds, and no vulgar father and mother to mortify her tender sensibilities. Here, too, she was in the presence of the one being on earth she most loved, and even to see him under cold restraint, was better than not to see him at all. Sometimes it happened they sat near each other for a few blissful seconds; sometimes it was a stolen look into each other’s eyes; sometimes an accidental touch of the hand when Jerome was initiating the ladies into the ingenious methods of a fore-overhand stroke or a back-underhand stroke, or the effective results of skillful volleying – such casual trifles as these, unnoticed by others, but more precious to them than “the golden wedge of Ophir.”

So the days passed on; rainy days, dry days, clear days, cloudy days, bright days, dark days, every kind of day, and every one of them a day’s march nearer the imperishable day.

“There’s a messenger outside, Miss Mellville, to say that your father is sick and wishes you to come home.”

Jerome, it was, who spoke.

“Father sick!” exclaimed Mell. “I will go at once.”

“How provoking!” broke in Mrs. Rutland. “I wanted you particularly to-day. Rube, too. Don’t you remember he wants you to go to Pudney?”

“Yes, yes,” interrupted Mell hastily. She did not wish Mrs. Rutland to say before Jerome what Rube wanted her to go there for. It was to have her picture taken. “I am very sorry, but if father is really sick I ought to go.”

“Rhesus is under saddle,” said Jerome. “Shall I ride over and find out just how he is? I can do so in a very few minutes.”

“No!” said Mell, with quick speech and restrained emphasis. Whom would he see there? What would he hear? Her mother in an old cotton frock, talking bad grammar. And Jerome was so delicate in his tastes, so fastidious and æsthetic.

“No,” said Mell, decidedly. “I’m much obliged, but – ”

“Yes,” interposed Mrs. Rutland, “I wish you would go, for Rube is not here and I’ve no notion of letting Mell go unless it is necessary.”

“Did you say I must not?” inquired Jerome, addressing Mell and not moving.

“Go, if Mrs. Rutland wishes it,” stammered Mell, furiously angry with herself that she could not utter such commonplace words to him without getting all in a tremor. They were all blind, these people, or they must have seen, long ago, how it stood with Jerome and herself.

He was back in an incredibly short space of time.

“I saw your mother,” Jerome reported. (Great heavens! in her poke-berry homespun, without a doubt!) “Your father is quite sick, but not dangerously so. He only fancied seeing you, but can wait until to-morrow.”

While the old man waited, Mell had her pretty face photographed for Rube.

He drove her home in the buggy the next morning. Coming in sight of the quiet and shade of the old farm-house and recalling, as a forgotten dream, its honest industry, its homely manners, its sweet simplicity, Mell marvelled at her own sensations. Could it be gladness, this feeling that swept over her at sight of the old home? Yes, it was gladness. Perplexed in mind, heavy at heart, and fretted to the lowest depths of her soul by this struggle within her, which seemed to be never ending, Mell was glad to get back into the quietude of the old farm house after the continuous strain and excitement of the past few weeks. The flowers in the little garden stirred gently in the breeze; there was a gleam of blue sky above the low roof; birds chirped softly in the euonymus hedge under the window of her own little room, and the tranquillity and serenity and staidness of the spot soothed her feverish mind and calmed her feverish spirit. It was lonely, desolate, mean, and poor, but none the less a refuge from the storms of a higher region; from the weariness of pleasure and the burden of empty enjoyment; from the tiresomeness of being amused, and the troublesomeness of seeming to be amused without being; from an ecstasy of suffering and an agony of transport; in short, a hoped-for refuge from herself and Jerome.

“Hurry up, Mell! Hurry up! He’s mos’ gone!”

“What, mother! You don’t mean – ?”

“Yes, I does, Mell. He was tuck wuss in the night. He won’t know ye, I’m ’fraid.”

But he did, and opening his eyes he smiled faintly, as she hung over his ugly face – uglier now, after the ravages of disease, than ever before; dried up by scorching fevers to a semblance of those parched-up things we see in archæological museums; deeply lined and seamed and furrowed, as if old Time had never had any other occupation since he was a boy but to make marks upon it; uglier than ever, but with an expression upon it which had never been there before – that solemn dignity which Death gives to the homeliest features.

“Father! father!” sobbed Mell, “don’t die! Don’t leave your little Mell! Don’t leave me now, when I’ve just begun to love you as I ought!”

Ha, Mell! Just begun! He has reached a good old age, and you are a woman grown, and you have just begun to love your father! It is too late, Mell. He does not need your love now. He is trying to tell you that, or something else. Put your ear a little closer.

“What did you say, father! Try to tell me again.”

And he did; she heard every word:

“Good-bye, little Mell! I ain’t gwine ter morteefy ye no mo’!”

CHAPTER VIA DEAL IN FUTURES

“Why do you fret so much about it?” asked Rube, sitting beside his promised wife about a week after the old man was laid to rest. “You loved your father, of course, but – ”

“There’s the point!” exclaimed Mell. “I did not love him – not as a child ought to love a parent. What did it matter that his looks were common and his speech rude? His thoughts were true, his motives good, his actions honest, and now I mourn the blindness which made me value him, not for what he was, but what he looked to be. In self-forgetfulness and sacrificing devotion to me he was sublime. He went in rags that I might dress above my station; he ate coarse food that I might be served with dainties; he worked as a slave that I might hold my hands in idleness; and how did I requite him? I was ashamed of him; I held him in contempt. Oh, oh! My, my!”

“Come, now,” remonstrated Rube, trying to stem the torrent of this lachrymatory deluge, and wondering what had become of all the comforting phrases in the English language, that he could not put his tongue upon one of them. “Do try to calm yourself, dearest. I know you are exaggerating the true state of the case, as we are all prone to do in moments of self-upbraiding. I never saw you lacking in respect to him.”

“There’s a great many bad things in me you never saw,” blubbered Mell, breaking out afresh.

“Dear, dear!” said Rube, “I never saw such grief as this!”

“You – are – disgusted, I know?”

“Not a bit of it!” declared Rube; “just the contrary! I fairly dote on the prospect of a wife who is going to cry hard and cut up dreadful when anything happens to a fellow. It kind of makes dying seem sort of easy. But, come, now; you’ve cried enough. Let me comfort you.”

“No, no!” cried Mell, shrinking away from him. “If you only knew, you would not want to comfort me. I do not deserve a single kind word from you. I am unworthy your regard. I am a weak woman, and a wicked one. Oh, Rube! I have not treated you right. That day at the picnic I was angry with some one else; I was piqued; I did not feel as I made you think I felt. I – that is – ”

Here Mell broke down completely in her disjointed arraignment of self, thoroughly disconcerted by the young man’s change of countenance. His breath came quick, a dark cloud overspread his features, and he lost somewhat of his ruddy color.

“Do you mean, then, to say I was but a tool, and the whole thing a lie and a cheat?”

Rube’s thoughts sped as directly to their mark, as the well-aimed arrow from the bent bow.

“Don’t be so angry with me,” prayed Mell, “please don’t! You don’t know how much I have suffered over it. I say, at that time I thought I cared for some one else, and so I ought not, in all fairness, to have encouraged you; but, it is only since father died, that I have been able to see things in their true light. I have had a false standard of character, a false measure of worth, a false conception of human aims and human achievement. Out of the wretchedness of sleepless hours I have heard the under-tones of truth: Knowledge is great, but how much greater is goodness without knowledge than knowledge without goodness!”

Rube made no reply. He left her side, and, crossing the room, folded his arms and looked moodily out of the window. He was very simple in nature, somewhat slow, sometimes stupid; but loyal and true – true in great things, and no less true in small ones, and as open as the day.

Mell dried her eyes, and glanced at him anxiously. The worst part of her duty was now over. She began already to feel relieved; she began already to know just how she was going to feel in a few minutes more, the possessor of a conscience, void of offence before God and man. There’s nothing like it – a good conscience.

“This beats all!” soliloquized Rube, at the window; “I’ll be hanged if there’s enough solid space in a woman’s mind to peg a man’s hat on! Now, just as things have panned out all right for Devonhough, here’s a tombstone in my own graveyard!”

“Ha!” thought Mell, hearing, considering.

“Just as things have panned out all right for Devonhough.”

What did that mean? Her throbbing, panting, bursting heart knew only too well. Clara had come to a decision – she would marry Jerome, and not the Honorable Archibald.

Rube had scarcely ceased to speak when Mell raised her head.

“Rube!”

Very soft that call!

Unheeding, Rube still looked out of the window and into the past. That day at the picnic – that beautiful day, that day of days; a pure, white, luminous spot in memory’s galaxy of fair and heavenly things – that day she had not felt as she had made him think she felt; hence, he had been a cat’s-paw, a puppet; and she – oh, it could not be that Mell was a dissembler, a hypocrite, a serpent!

“Rube!”

A little louder was this call.

He turned, he obeyed – no more able to resist the beckoning hand, the dulcet voice, the luring glance, than you or I the spells of our own individual Sirens and Circes.

He came back to her, but stood in gloomy waiting, his brow so dark, his expression so hard and cold and stern, that the girl on the sofa felt herself wilting and withering before him, as a frail flower in a deadly blast.

She did not say a word.

She only used two eyes of blue, and two big tears which rolled out of them, and down upon her velvet cheek, and splash upon her little white hand, with crushing effect – not upon the hand, but the beholder.

“Mell,” said he, hoarsely, “what is all this? What is the meaning of it? I do not see your drift, exactly. Do you wish to be free?”

“I thought that would be your wish,” floundered Mell, “perhaps, when you heard of that other – other fancy – you know, Rube; if I had not told you anything about it, and it had come afterwards to your knowledge, you would have thought I had not acted squarely towards you.”

“So much, then, I understand; but what are your leanings now? Don’t beat about the bush; speak out your wishes plainly. I am not a brute. I would release a woman at the very altar, if her inclinations leaned in another direction. Do you imagine I would care to marry a woman, however much I might love her, whose heart was occupied by another? Where would be the sanctity of such a marriage? I would be the worse defrauded man of the two. So, Melville, if there is any one you like better than you do me, speak it now. Tell me plainly, do you care for me – or some one else?”

Now, Mell, here’s your chance; hasten to redeem your past. He has put the whole thing before you in a nutshell. You know just how he thinks and how he feels. After this, you dare not further betray a heart so noble, so forbearing, so true! Tell him, Mell; tell him, for your own sake; tell him, for his sake; tell him, for God’s sake! Come, Mell, speak – speak quick! Don’t wait a second, a single second! A second is a very little bit of time, the sixtieth part of one little minute; but, short as it is, if you hesitate, it will be long enough for you to remember that you may live to be a very old woman, and pass all your life in this old farm-house, utterly monotonous and wearisome; that you will be very lonely; that you will be very poor; that you will be very unhappy; that you will miss Rube’s jewels and Rube’s sugar plums and Rube’s hourly devotions, to which you have now become so well accustomed; – short, but long enough to remember all this. So speak, Mell, quick! quick! The second is gone before Mell speaks.

It was a long second for Rube.

“O Mell, Mell! can it be that you care for him and not for me? At least, let me hear it – let me hear the truth! I can bear anything better than this uncertainty.”

Even this bitter cry brought forth no response. The dumbness of Dieffenbachia lay upon Mell’s tongue.

“I see how it is,” said Rube, turning to go.

“No, you don’t!” exclaimed Mell, pulling him back. She was now desperate. Her tear-stained face broke into April sunshine. “I do not care for that other. How could you think so? Once I thought so myself; it was a delusion. A woman cannot love a selfish, tyrannical, overbearing creature like that! – not really, though she may think so for a time; but you, Rube, you are the quintessence of goodness! you are worth a dozen such men as he!”

“So it’s me!” ejaculated Rube. “I am the lucky dog! I am the quintessence of goodness!”

He drew a long breath; he sank comfortably back into the old seat and into the old sense of security, and addressed himself with a joyous air and renewed enthusiasm to the old rôle of love-making.

Just like a man – the very man who thinks he has such a deep insight into dark matters, who thinks he knows so much about everything in the wide world, especially women!

“You are the most conscientious creature alive!” declared Rube, happier than ever, over a nearly lost treasure. “The whole amount of your offence seems to be that you once thought you cared – ”

“Yes – that’s it! I once thought so.”

“But I once thought that I cared for another girl. You would not, for that reason, wish to send me adrift, would you?”

“No. Only I wish you hadn’t!”

“Just the way I feel about it.”

He laughed uncontrollably.

“Pretty one! Soul of honor! What other girl would have opened her lips about such a trifle? And now I will not be put off another moment. Name the day which is to make me the happiest of men.”

The day was named, and Mell really felt more composure of mind and less disquietude of spirit than she had known for many a day. She had eased, to some extent, her guilty conscience. She had shed many bitter, if unavailing, tears over Rube and her dead father; and now, convinced that she could not help herself, and determined to make the best of it, her mind drifted complacently over the long stretch of prosperous years before her, wherein she would be neither lonely, nor poor, nor unhappy, nor unloved; with sugar plums to her taste and jewels in quantity – for there are just two things in this world every young woman is sure to love – tinsel and taffy.

A healing balm now poured itself, so to speak, into her life and future prospects.

Of Jerome she saw no more. He had gone home before her father’s funeral. He had seemingly passed out of her life forever. She never so much as mentioned his name, even to Rube, and she even thought of him less frequently than of yore. How could she be expected to think of him with the wedding trousseau demanding all her thoughts and time?

But one day Rube came to the farm-house, worried, and told Mell, of his own accord, that it was about Jerome and Clara. There had been a row between them.

The Honorable Archibald Pendergast, as she well knew, was no ordinary man – neither, it seemed, was he an ordinary lover. Notwithstanding his late rejection, he had been paying Clara such marked attentions in Washington that a society journal had publicly announced their engagement; whereupon Jerome had delivered his ultimatum – she would marry him at once or else they were quits.

“And I don’t blame him,” declared Rube, “not one bit! He stood as much at her hands, and stood it as long, as a man can stand. I never could have taken the same from you.”

Ah, Rube, we little know, any of us, just what we are taking at any hour in the day and at the hands of our own friends!

It is well for us that we do not.

“And now,” inquired Mell, scarcely able to articulate, so great was her agitation, “what is Clara going to do?”

“She is going to marry the Honorable Archibald,” replied Rube, adding, with the breezy disgust of a sunny temper: “It’s a confounded shame! He’s old enough for her father, and I don’t believe she cares that about him! But he’s a great statesman, and there’s a good prospect of his getting into the White House some of these days; and some women love social eminence better than they do their own souls! I am glad you are not one of that kind, Mell – you will be content with your planter husband, won’t you, Mell?”