A Romantic Young Lady

"Deserving charity or college! That from the lips of my own daughter! I have wanted to interrupt you a dozen times to tell you how foolish and senseless is the rubbish you were talking. And now that I have heard you to the end, I am speechless. You are crazy! I repeat it, crazy! You are fit only for a convent or a lunatic asylum. I had better find another heir."

He covered his face with his hands, and I could see his whole form tremble.

"Father," I cried, "if I were only sure that you are not mistaken!"

We sat without another word being spoken for many minutes. At last he lay back in his chair with the weary air intensified which I had noticed when I told him of Mr. Spence's offer, and said in a tone in harmony with that, —

"You have been brought up, Virginia, like all American girls, to have your own way. I have given you every indulgence and liberty. Your smallest wish has been regarded. If I could wipe out the past and begin anew, I feel that I should act very differently. I should wield a rod of iron, and teach my own flesh and blood to obey by saying, 'Do this!' and 'You shall not do that!' The result could be no worse than it has been under the other system. Is the judgment of the new generation so infallible," he continued, "that it can afford to dispense with obedience and filial respect altogether? You have had one lesson already, Virginia, but you have failed to profit by it. When that fortune-hunting, idle dandy was whispering his pretty speeches in your ear, was it your own good sense that saved you from a miserable alliance? No; if I had not for once in my life stepped in and said, 'You do this thing at your own peril,' and proved to you the paltry soul of the fellow, what would you be to-day? Broken-hearted and old before your time. But that was when you were almost a child, and without experience. I was made very unhappy, but I said to myself, 'She will grow wiser as she grows older.' And I thought you had. In the multitude of my business cares I have merely had time to observe you in a general way. But I supposed the serious and absorbed air which your face has worn came from the interest of your studies, and that those studies were fitting you for the work I had planned for you. I wish now that you had never touched a book in your life. Better in my opinion to be the careless butterfly of society than the fanatic. I never expected to live to see my only child so blind to common-sense as to wish to follow such a monstrous theory as you have described. Money! Why, it is the power and possibility of the world. But what good are words? If you cannot see the folly and unsoundness of it at a glance, it is useless for me to talk. Go your own ways. Marry whom you like. Not a dollar of my money – "

He stopped as he realized the futility of his threat, and covered his face again with his hands.

Looking back over many years, it seems to me at times incredible that I should have held out so long against such entreaty and distress; but it is to be said on the other hand that my whole future happiness was involved in the decision of the question. My natural obstinacy had deepened as I listened to his words, and had tended to counteract the affection and pity I felt for him.

"If I were only sure that you are right!" I repeated. "What you say about my education is perfectly true. I have been brought up to have my own way, but also, father, to have no counsel but my own. If so much freedom has been given me, was it not with the idea of teaching me to make up my own mind about things? And if I have made up my mind, and I feel my conscience urge me to take a step which involves my happiness for the rest of my life, why is it unfilial of me to follow my own judgment? I have been alone, and thrown upon my own responsibility, ever since I was a child. I am not complaining. I have had no mother; you have been busy down-town, and my aunts never agree in their advice. I have tried to think for myself. I have chosen an interest in life to which I am ready to devote my best energies, and in order to do so more completely should, if you did not forbid, marry a man who is in every way my superior, and whom I thoroughly respect. I am willing to give this all up to please you. But I do not mean, father, that I think you are in the right. I am no longer the child I was when I wished to disobey you before. Then I refused to yield, until you convinced me that I was wrong. To-day I am prepared to sacrifice my own wishes for your sake, but I remain unconvinced. I will write to Mr. Spence to-night, and tell him that I cannot be his wife. I will resign my position as secretary of his Society, and give up what you call fads and isms. Only I shall expect for the future, father, that you will tell me precisely what you wish me to do, and let me do it. You must not deprive me of my liberty of choice, and then treat me just as if I were free. Do with me what you will. Marry me to whom you please. I will obey, – implicitly, unhesitatingly. Only take away from me the responsibility once and for all. I am weary of it."

I had spoken with anger and excitement. My nerves were all unstrung by the events of the past two days; and as I finished, my tears burst forth. I wept with passionate sobs. My father made no effort to comfort me. He sat with his chin resting on his breast, weary and sad.

"I did not mean to be disrespectful," I murmured at last. "I am willing to do all that you desire."

"You have said that you do not love this man, Virginia."

"I love him as much as I shall ever love any one else," I answered.

"I accept your sacrifice, my child. Some day you will thank me. But write to-night. I shall sleep better if I feel that it is done. Promise me," he added, looking at me with a strange eagerness that was pathetic, and made the tears return to my eyes, but this time out of tenderness, – "promise me that whatever happens, you will accept the trust I am going to leave you."

I ran to his side, and kneeling, raised my eyes to his, – "Forgive me, father! I promise faithfully."

Only a few words more need to be said concerning this phase of my life. That night I wrote to Mr. Spence. Gratitude and friendship will not make up for the absence of love, but whatever there can be of consolation in these substitutes I sent to him. Why was it that as I penned the lines which were to disappoint his hopes, I was vaguely conscious that my interest in his theories was already less? So difficult is it in life to determine precisely how far our beliefs are decided by our associations! But it is not to be supposed that because I admit this after the lapse of years, the consciousness of which I speak was at that time more than a secret one, which I shrank from confessing even to myself. Genuine were the tears I shed in private for many days. My life seemed to me a blank, and I had lost the motive of action. For allowing my father to be right, and the principles advocated by Mr. Spence to be monstrous and absurd, I had been too intimately connected with the system not to feel a great void in my existence at severing my relations with it. What was to take its place?

I had to undergo, moreover, one or two disagreeable interviews with my Aunt Agnes before the matter was finally settled. In the intensity of his disappointment, Mr. Spence applied to her and asked her to endeavor to alter my resolution. She sent for me, and though she did not disguise her surprise that her favorite should wish to marry at all, she was unequivocal in the expression of her opinion that I should never get such another chance. As I remained obdurate, she accused me of a deliberate attempt to trifle with his affections. I had already ruined the life of one man of genius, she said, who though a wanderer from the right path might reasonably have become a noble worker but for my influence; and now I was about to blight the happiness of one whose equal was to be found only a few times in a century. She even went to my father, and represented to him the folly I would commit in refusing such an offer. I was not present at the interview; but Aunt Agnes, as she came out of the library into the room where I was sitting, looked angry and severe.

"Money, money, money! That is all your father thinks of from morning until night. It is wearing on him too. It is killing him by inches."

"You are right, Aunt Agnes; he needs rest; he looks tired out," I said, ignoring the first part of her speech.

"It is his own fault. And now he wants to educate you in the same school. Lucretia Kingsley is correct, – oil and water are more fit to be mated than you and Mr. Spence. You have broken her heart, too, by your wanton conduct, Virginia. Her sympathy for Mr. Spence is very affecting."

"Pooh!" I answered, angered by her indifference regarding my father; "she is crazy to marry him herself. That is all the matter with her."

This was the last effort Aunt Agnes made to alter my resolution, but she saw fit to tell Aunt Helen of my escapade at Mr. Barr's studio, who came to me in horror. Her predictions were about to be realized, she said. Notwithstanding all her warnings, my name was associated with a vulgar adventurer. "A handsome wretch as I remember him," she added, "but – even on your aunt's admission, who is none too nice in her estimate of people – unprincipled, and with low agrarian tastes."

A fortnight after my dismissal of Mr. Spence, a misfortune befell me that banished all thoughts save those of grief. My father was seized with a sudden illness, and died within a few hours. The doctors said the cause of his death was disease of the heart, and that he had been aware of the existence of the disorder for some time. It was many days before I thought again of what I was told after the funeral, – that I was left by my father's will sole heiress to four million dollars.

BOOK III.

(UN)COMMON SENSE

I

My first impulse was to become a woman of business, and assume the entire control of my inheritance. Excepting a few charitable bequests and some trifling legacies, everything was left to me. I was even made executrix; but my father had indicated in a separate paper that in regard to matters out of my knowledge I could safely consult his own legal adviser, Horatio Chelm.

Mr. Chelm was the conventional idea of a successful lawyer, – withered, non-committal, and a little fusty; but technicalities had failed to harden his heart or obscure his good sense. He had a sunny smile, which refreshed my sad spirit when I called upon him shortly after the funeral to inform him of my purpose, and made me feel that I could confide in him.

"What, my dear young lady! take entire charge of four million dollars? I admire your business ambition, but I must tell you that such a task is impossible, if you wish to have leisure for anything else. No, no! your father could not have meant that. I knew him well, and he was the last man to have wished to make you a slave to your good fortune. With an income of nearly two hundred thousand dollars you can afford to leave to some one else the anxiety and drudgery attendant on the care of your property. Your father wished you to enjoy his money and use it well. He has told me so himself. He was very fond and very proud of you, Miss Harlan."

"But he was very anxious to have me understand business matters, Mr. Chelm," I replied.

"And he was quite right, too. Don't think for a moment I am dissuading you from undertaking a general supervision of your property and trying to know all about it. It is your duty under the circumstances, I fully agree. But it would never do to have you spending the best years of your life cooped up in an office cutting off coupons and worrying over investments. Not, to be sure, that there is much to be done at present, for I never saw a cleaner list of securities than yours; but you have no idea of the amount of watchfulness required to keep an estate like this unimpaired. A family of children are nothing to it, ha! ha! No, Miss Harlan, I tell you what we will do; you shall have a little office adjoining mine, where you can spend one day in every week transacting what is necessary in regard to your property. Everything shall be in your name, and nothing done without your full understanding and consent. I will be at hand to be plied with questions, and you shall become as wise in finance as Necker himself. But I pray you to devote the six remaining days to other things, and leave to us dry, matter-of-fact lawyers the details of your business. I have a great many millions under my control, and the percentage which I should derive from the care of yours is a matter of indifference to me; but I am very much concerned that you should not make the fatal mistake of becoming a mere feminine trustee."

I yielded to persuasion; and in accordance with his promise a little room adjoining his own private office was allotted to me, and every Monday morning I drove down-town and spent the day in poring over the ledgers and deeds and reports, and in taking a general scrutiny of my affairs. At first it was all very confusing, but by degrees order was reduced out of chaos to my understanding, and I learned to take a keen interest in the points submitted to me for my decision. At first I felt some humiliation in perceiving that my opinion was consulted merely from form and courtesy, – or, more roughly, because the law required it. I was forced to laugh and shake my head and acknowledge that I was not capable of judging. I had hoped that I knew enough to be of service sometimes, and the consciousness of my ignorance spurred me to determined exertions to overcome the deficiency. Contrary to our compact, I read and studied at home books relating to financial and economical matters; I concealed railway reports in my muff, and tried various artifices to acquire knowledge unbeknown to Mr. Chelm. But it was chiefly to his kindness and unwearying attention that I owed the proficiency I gradually acquired; and I think it was as genuine a pleasure to him as to me, when at last I was able, with a moderate degree of confidence, to choose for myself between two lines of conduct. I often asked myself what I should have done had I attempted to act alone from the start.

But it was not long before another interest incident to and growing out of this began to occupy my thoughts and time. The bulk of my daily mail was increased by subscription lists and circulars soliciting my assistance to every kind of charity and enterprise. People whom I had never seen, came to the house to ask aid for struggling talent. I was importuned with begging letters from victims to all sorts of distress. Zealous philanthropists wrote that they had taken the liberty of putting down my name as a member of their societies, and that the annual assessment was now due and payable. Here again I had recourse to the counsel of Mr. Chelm, whose experience, as I have hinted, radiated beyond the limits of his lucrative practice, and who was not only liberal toward the poor, but familiar with their needs. From him I obtained a variety of hints and suggestions that enabled me to give my money and time intelligently, and also to refuse them without remorse. I was very glad of this new duty, which easily became a great pleasure despite my occasional disgust at the impertinence of some applicants when it was discovered that I was ready to subscribe freely. I was not however satisfied with the easy work of giving, but soon passed from the passive act of signing cheques to active work among the needy. I studied the theories of tenement houses and hygiene, and became a leading spirit in several charitable organizations.

I renewed also my old habit of reading, and no longer confined myself to the philosophic and dry subjects pursued under Mr. Fleisch. But I was conscious that the zest which I felt in renewing a wider range of study was due to the fact of my having acquired from his instruction a degree of industry and a power to appreciate that I had not previously possessed. At the suggestion of Mr. Chelm, whom I allured to chat with me regarding outside subjects when my business was finished, I read with regularity the leading newspapers and magazines. A familiarity with the former he declared to be indispensable to a knowledge of current affairs, and also that much of the freshest and most valuable thought of the day was first made public through the medium of periodicals. This practice received likewise the approval of Aunt Helen, who assured me that she always felt lost for the day if she had not looked at the Deaths and Marriages.

One of my first steps had been to ask Aunt Helen to come and live with me; to which she finally consented, though the consequent necessity of disestablishing her cosey little parlor, upon the embellishment of which she had spent the overflow of her income for years, cost her many a pang. But she was a far-seeing woman, and had I dare say, while accepting my offer, a delightful vision of helping me to live up to the duties of my position. I can only say that she soon began to impress the importance of this upon me by hints more or less palpable; and it was not long before she was to all intents and purposes the real house-keeper. It was still, to be sure, I that ordered the dinners and engaged the servants, but even in these minor details I was alive to her suggestions; while in the matter of the general direction of what went on, her wishes were supreme. At first I was too sad to be other than indifferent; and later it was a relief to me to have taken off my shoulders the bother of many things which I felt instinctively ought to be done. I could trust Aunt Helen's taste; and so she had my tacit permission to follow out her own inclinations in the way of change and improvements. Under her supervision the house was almost entirely refurnished and adorned with the most exquisite specimens of upholstery and bric-à-brac obtainable. So too, as time went on, she increased the number and raised the standard of the domestics, and persuaded me to buy a variety of horses and equipages. It was she who kept the grooms up to the mark regarding the proper degree of polish for the harnesses, and she spent many days in the selection of an artistic design for the crest to be emblazoned upon them. So far as was possible she represented that all these things were done at my desire and out of her sheer good nature. When I drove with her from shop to shop, as I often did to save myself from depressing thoughts, she invariably made me pass a formal approval upon whatever charmed her eye. If this innocent self-deceit gave her pleasure, it did not seem to me worth while to protest.

And so by the time I left off my mourning, there was little left to be done to make my establishment one of the most elegant in the city. Aunt Helen now turned her attention to my clothes. The costumes which I suffered her to select were marvels of Parisian art and New York adaptiveness. She sought too, by frequent allusions to my increased personal beauty, to arouse my vanity and induce me to throw off the pall of soberness that had settled upon my spirit. When this failed, she had recourse to an opposite policy, and repeated to me the remarks she overheard in coming out of church and elsewhere concerning me. Many of my acquaintances, she said, were of the opinion that I was eccentric and partial to "advanced" ideas. Another story current was that I had been compelled by my father on his death-bed, on pain of disinheritance, to dismiss a young artist to whom I was passionately attached. There was the same grain of truth to a bushel of error in the remaining conjectures; but Aunt Helen assured me that every one agreed I was peculiar, and deemed it unfortunate that a young lady possessed of such signal advantages should be different from all the rest of the world. Even I, unobservant as I was at this time, was made aware by the curious glances directed at me as I descended from my carriage, that to a certain extent an heiress belongs to the public.

Continual dropping, however, will wear away the hardest stone, and Aunt Helen was not one to weary in what she considered well-doing. When nearly three years had elapsed after my father's death, I yielded to her urgency and consented to inaugurate my return to society by giving a large ball. The idea came to me one night when I was feeling depressed and discouraged over my failure to obtain more than a passive sort of happiness in my present occupations. There were so many philanthropists, I thought. I had even begun to feel that the poor were extremely well provided for, and that in some respects they were really rather better off than I was. For despite my studies and my hours with Mr. Chelm, and the society meetings which I attended, I was conscious at heart of being lonely. My ideas too had received certain impressions regarding the people who composed society that were quite foreign to those which had given me an aversion to it. Since my accession to an enormous fortune my attention had naturally been directed to the conduct of people situated similarly to myself. At first I was shocked and made morbid by the whirl of selfish pleasure and dissipation that seemed to characterize the lives of this class. But when I came to look a little deeper, I was surprised to find how many people among the rich whom I had judged to be simply frivolous and indifferent were in reality earnest workers in the various fields of philanthropy, science, or art, for the most part carrying on their investigations unobserved. Among them were a number of my old acquaintances with whom at the charitable and other gatherings where we met I had resumed the associations of four years ago; and I was struck by the serious spirit that now seemed to determine their actions. It was clear to me that earnest-minded people existed among the very wealthy no less than among those less fortunately circumstanced; and as this grew more apparent, I began to catch a glimpse of what my father had meant in speaking of wealth as the power and possibility of the world. Was it not essential to leisure; and leisure to refinement and culture? And where necessity ceased to control action, ought there not to be a greater chance for excellence and progress?

These growing impressions served to temper the almost morbid tendency of my thoughts to the extent that I have indicated. We gave a grand ball, and under the stimulus of the cordial welcome given me I became the gayest of the gay, and surprised not only my old acquaintances but myself by the vivacity and desire to please of which I proved capable. Without undue confidence, I can say that I achieved a triumph, and put to rout the various uncomplimentary conjectures that the world had hazarded in regard to me. Society opened its arms to me as a returning prodigal, and my revulsion of feeling was all the more spontaneous from the fact, that, if some of my former acquaintances were as frivolous as ever, they had learned to conceal their emptiness by an adaptability which made them agreeable companions. There was a keen satisfaction, too, in the consciousness which became mine, as I went from house to house during the following weeks, that I excelled the most of them in the power to make myself agreeable. The reading and study of the past few years enabled me to shine as a conversationalist, and in my present regenerated mood I had, on the other hand, no temptation to play the pedant or moralist. I tried to be amusing and to appear clever; and I was pleased to read a favorable verdict upon my effort in the attentions of men as a rule unsusceptible, and in the amazed countenance of Aunt Helen.

Her satisfaction at the course of events was not disguised; but she was diplomatic enough, in her conversations with me, not to take to herself the glory of the evolution. She contented herself by way of recrimination in such expressions as – "To think, Virginia, how near you came to throwing yourself away!" and, "It takes a great load off my mind to see you yourself once again." But after the first few entertainments at which we were present together, I often caught her looking at me with a sort of wonder, as though she could scarcely believe that the brilliant young person whose reappearance in the social world was the sensation of a successful season could really be her niece.

One evening as we were sitting after our return from an especially pleasant dinner-party, Aunt Helen surveyed me contentedly through her eye-glass, and said: —

"I have never seen you look or appear better in your life than you did to-night, my dear. Your dress set to perfection, and you were very agreeable."