The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864

"You should not have been here at all, Sir!"

"There shall be thanks in all the churches, next Sunday, that I was."

"At least, Sir, I can spare further aid."

"Play Undine and the Knight on the island? It wouldn't be at all safe,—it wouldn't be proper, you know," said Mr. St. George, raising his eyebrows. "The dam that shuts up the irrigating waters broke an hour ago," added he, in the tone of another person. "I sent servants to find you, in every direction, and happened this way myself."

Éloise was a little sobered.

"I am much obliged to you, Sir," she said.

"So it seems," he replied, dryly. "I shall be forced to offend you again," he continued, "as further delay will render the stream entirely impassable."

And before she could utter a syllable of deprecation, she had swung a brief moment in the air, and was upon the other side, up which Mr. St. George, in his high seven-league boots, clambered so soon as he had set her down. Instead of venturing any new display of indignation, as St. George expected, Éloise walked on with him quietly a moment, and then, looking up, said,—

"You are very kind, and I am very ungracious."

Mr. St. George did not deny her assertion, only he glanced down at her from his height a second with an inexplicable expression, and immediately after the house became visible bowed low and left her.

"There's been such a tantrum, Miss," said the quadroon Hazel, combing out Éloise's hair that night, "and Massa St. George's horse waited two mortal hours to take him to Blue Bluffs. You ought to have heard him swear! He galloped off at last like mad."

And as Éloise gave no response, unless the cloud on her face spoke for her in the glass, the familiar girl added,—

"Not at you, Miss, not swearing at you,—oh, no, indeed!—but at all of us, to think we'd let you go alone."

"Mr. St. George is too solicitous. That will do, Hazel. Have you spoken to your master about buying Vane?"

"Laws, Miss, I never feels as if he was any master of mine, leastwise excep' one can't help minding him. 'S different from ole Massa,—we minded ole Massa for lub,—but I dunno if it's the music, when Massa St. George speaks, that makes you do what he says, when you just don't mean to,—as if you couldn't help it, and didn't want to help it?" suggested Hazel.

"Mr. St. George," said Éloise, "is very good to his people; they ought to wish to obey him."

"Yes, Miss. On'y he a'n't no business here."

"Don't let me hear you speak so again, Hazel," said Éloise, facing the suddenly cringing girl. "Now you can go."

But Hazel lingered still, over one and another odd trifle, and at length glancing up from where she stooped, with a scarlet on her young tawny cheek, she added, in a low voice,—

"You'll speak to Massa St. George now for me, won't you, Miss?"

"What? About Vane? You would do better yourself. Yes."

Two or three days passed away after this little promise to Hazel, before Éloise, at first forgetting it, and then dreading it, could gather courage to proceed in the negotiations for the handmaiden's suit. She was vaguely aware that she was the last person in the world whose past conduct harmonized with the asking of favors, and she silently offered slight propitiatory sacrifices. Yet she did this so haughtily, in order still not to compromise her own dignity, that they would quite as well have answered the purpose of belligerent signals.

It was one afternoon that Éloise sat at the drawing-room window, having recently finished her day's work, and letting herself linger now in a place which she very rarely so much as passed through. She sat erect, just then,—her head thrown far back, and the eyelids cast down along the pale face. Mr. St. George came into the room noiselessly, and laid down his riding-whip and gloves. Then he paused, struck by her appearance, and admired her motionless attitude for several minutes.

"One sits for Mnemosyne," he said then.

Éloise lifted her eyes, and a ghost of color flitted along her cheek. Here was a fortunate moment; the deity of it unbent and smiled. Her heart beat in her throat between the words of her thought; yet she recalled, for support, all the romances she had read, and their eloquent portraitures of love, and, remembering that just as Rebecca loved Ivanhoe, as Paolo loved Francesca, so Hazel and Vane loved each other, "I must! I must!" she kept saying chokingly to herself. Mr. St. George had taken up a book. How should she dare disturb him? At last a hesitating voice came sliding towards him,—

"Mr. St. George"–

"I beg your pardon,—did you speak?" he asked, closing his book.

"Mr. St. George, I want to ask you a favor," replied Éloise.

She rose, and unconsciously with such an air that he saw her effort, then came and sat on a lower seat directly before him.

"When papa, when my dear father was living," said she, "I had a maid, who was always mine, who grew up with me, being only a little younger, and I became attached to her"–

And before Éloise knew it she was lightly playing with Mr. St. George's riding-whip,—that being one of her warm traits just out of Nature, the appropriation of everything about her.

"And you have her no longer? That shall be attended to."

"Oh, yes, Sir, she waits on me still; that isn't it. She is only seventeen, she has been an atom wayward,—just, you know, as I might have been"–

Mr. St. George smiled so perceptibly that Éloise added, throwing back her head again,—

"Just as I am, Sir! But she has behaved very nicely for several–Why, this is Mrs. Arles's whip! the one her husband gave her. I knew it by the ivory vine-stem twining the ebony; and there are her initials in the lovely gold chasing. I used to want it to play with, when I was a little girl,—and she wouldn't let me have it, of course. Pretty initials!"

"Yes," said Mr. St. George, coldly.

Éloise put it down. And then she stared at him forgetfully, and, unthinkingly, with great disappointed eyes. Thereat Mr. St. George laughed.

"Don't Russian women present the knout to their bridegrooms?" asked Éloise then, mischievously.

But before he could have replied, she resumed,—

"Well, Sir, Hazel is very pretty"–

"It is Hazel, then? Would you like her to be made more distinctly yours, Miss Éloise?"

"Oh, dear, no, Sir, thank you. That isn't it at all. Hazel is in love."

"Indeed!"

"She is in love with Vane, a boy of Mr. Marlboro's: you may have seen him; he is here a good deal,—by stealth: and they want to be married. But Mr. Marlboro' is their terror, he may put an end to everything, and they are afraid, and—and—could you buy Vane, Mr. St. George?"

"I could, Miss Changarnier."

"And you will, then?" cried Éloise, springing up.

"If Mr. Marlboro' will sell him."

"Won't he?"

"It is a pride of the Marlboro's that there never was a hand sold off the place."

"Oh, I had forgotten. They would tell too shocking stories."

"Not here. Not unless they were sold off the Cuban plantation, where the vicious ones are transported."

"But perhaps he would give him to you."

"Miss Éloise, he would give him to you."

"Me? I have never seen him."

"That is of no consequence. He has seen you."

"I wonder where. Do you really suppose that Mr. Marlboro' would give Vane to me?"

"Miss Éloise, I will see what I can do about it first."

"How kind you are! Thank you!"

And Éloise was about to go.

"One moment, if you please," said the other.

And Mr. St. George remained in meditation. When he spoke, it was not in too assured a tone.

"I am quite aware," said he, "that you consider me in the light of an enemy. Perhaps it is a magnanimity that would be pleasant to you, should you in turn grant that enemy a favor."

"I should like to be able to serve you, Sir."

"Well, then,—I spoke very unwisely a few moments since,—promise me now, that, if Hazel and Vane do not marry till Doomsday, you will not ask Marlboro' for the gift. It places you, an unprotected girl, too much under the weather with such a man as Marlboro'. You promise me?"

And he rose opposite her, smiling and gazing.

"A whole promise is rash," said Éloise, laughing. "Half a one I give you."

"It is for yourself," said Mr. St. George, grimly; and he turned abruptly away, because he knew he lied, and was afraid lest she would know it too.

It was two or three weeks after this, that Mr. St. George, returning one chilly night from some journey, found Mrs. Arles asleep in her chair, a fire upon the hearth, and Éloise sitting on the floor before it with her box and brushes, essaying to catch the shifting play of color opposite her, and paint there one of the great cloven tongues of fire that went soaring up the chimney.

"In pursuit of an ignis-fatuus?" asked he, stooping over her an instant, and suddenly snatching himself erect, as she looked up with a certain sweetness in her smile, and pushed back the drooping tress, that, streaming along the temple and lying in one large curve upon the cheek, sometimes fell too low for order, though never for grace.

"And all in vain," she said, laughingly. "I've worked an hour, I can get the violet edges, I can get the changing bend,—but there 'a no lustre, no flicker,—I can't find out the secret of painting flame."

"It is a secret you found out long ago!" muttered Mr. St. George, unintelligibly, and strode out, banging the door behind him.

And Éloise, astonished and dismayed, abruptly put up her pencils, and went to bed.

So that, when Mr. St. George returned a half-hour afterward for a cheerful fireside-season over nuts and wine, there was nobody there but Mrs. Arles, who picked herself up out of her nap, and went placidly on with her tatting and contrivances.

Two stragglers on the ice-fields of the polar seas would have met each other with less frozen chill than St. George and Éloise did on the succeeding morning. And in that chill a long period elapsed, during which Mr. St. George attended to his affairs, and Éloise silently cast up her accounts.

One morning in the spring, after the last of the soft and balmy winter, Mr. St. George said to Mrs. Arles, at breakfast,—

"A dozen rooms, or more, can be ready by Wednesday? There will be guests at noon, for several weeks. That is the list. I rely on Miss Changarnier's assistance." And he handed her a paper, and went out.

"It will be useless for you to keep your room now," said Mrs. Arles to Éloise, on Wednesday morning. "It isn't like Mr. St. George's bachelor parties with Marlboro' and Montgomery and Mavoisie, when I like to see you keep to yourself as you do. These are all old friends."

"I shall still have my work to do," said Éloise; and she went into the cabinet and sharpened her pens with a vim.

It would doubtless have relieved Mr. St. George of much annoyance and perplexity, if Éloise would have assumed her old place in welcoming the guests; but that was not set down in her part, and Éloise rightly felt that it would be a preposterous thing for her to do. And though, when she heard their voices in the hall, she longed just to open the door and give one glance at Laura Murray sweeping by, or draw Lottie Humphreys in through the crack and indulge in one quick squeeze, she heroically bent herself upon the debit and credit beneath her eye, and tried to forget all about it,—succeeding only in remembering who had lived and who had died since the last time that hall had rung with their voices.

It was past noon when Éloise, having finished her task, and having remained for a long time with her arms upon the desk and her hands upon her eyes, suddenly glanced up and saw a gentleman entering the cabinet, where no gentleman but one was ever allowed to enter. He was in search of a book; and scanning the shelves, his eye fell on her.

He hesitated for a single atom of time, then stepped rapidly forward, and said,—

"Miss Changarnier, I am quite sure."

"Allow me," said quickly another voice at his shoulder, "to present to Miss Changarnier Mr. Marlboro'." For Mr. St. George had entered just in time.

Mr. Marlboro' was a slight man, hardly to be called tall. He wore black, of course, the coat fastened on the breast and letting out just a glimpse of ruffled linen and glancing jewel below, while the lofty brow, set in its fair curling hair, and the peaked beard curling and waving about the throat, gave him the appearance of a Vandyck stepped from the frame. He had the further peculiarity of eyes, dark hazel eyes, that would have glowed like fever, if they were not perpetually wrapped in dream. There was a certain air of careful breeding about him, different from Earl St. George Erne's high-bred bearing, inasmuch as he insisted upon his pedigree and St. George forgot his. Too fiery a Southerner to seek the advantages of Northern colleges, he had educated himself in England, and had contracted while at Oxford the habit of eating opium. Returning home at his majority, and remaining long enough to establish his own ideas, which were peculiarly despotic, upon his property,—through many subsequent travels, tasting in each an experience of all the folly and madness the great capitals of the world afford, through all his life, indeed, this habit was the only thing Marlboro' had not mastered. One other thing, albeit, there was, of which Marlboro' was the slave, and that was the Marlboro' temper.

Éloise returned his salutation cordially, and with a certain naughty pleasure, since Mr. St. George was looking on, and since that person, constituting himself her grim guardian, had in a manner warned her of the other. Then she displayed her pretty little ink-stained hands, and ran away.

Mr. Marlboro' looked after her, and then turned to survey St. George.

"Who would not be the Abélard to such an Éloise?" he said.

There was no answer. St. George was filling a pipe, and whistling the while a melancholy old tune.

"I'll tell you what, St. George"–

Here he paused, and thrummed on the book in time to the tune.

"You were about to impart some information?"

"Has your little nun taken the black veil?"

"It is no nun of my shriving."

"Are you King Ahasuerus himself, to have lived so long in the house with Miss Changarnier, may I ask, and to have thrown no handkerchief?"

"There is some confusion in your rhetoric. But it is not I who am tyrant,—it is she who stands for that;—I am only Mordecai the Jew sitting in the king's gate. As so many Jews do to-day," muttered St. George,—"ay, and on their thrones, too. I am afraid we are neither of us very well up in our Biblical history. She is the Grand Unapproachable."

"Tant mieux. My way is all the clearer."

"Your way to what?"

"To the altar!"

"Yes, you should have married long ago, Marlboro'," said Mr. St. George, the pipe being lighted, the face looming out of azure wreaths, and the heels taking an altitude.

"I came home," said Marlboro', "to marry Éloise Changarnier."

"That is exactly what I intend to do myself."

"You!"

Mr. Marlboro's eyes glistened like a topaz in the sun; but just then a new guest arriving demanded Mr. St. George's attention.

Meantime Éloise had found a feminine conclave assembled in her room, all having prepared their own toilets, and ready to inspect the preparation of hers; and as the work proceeded, Lottie Humphreys added herself to the group, in grand tenue, and pushed Hazel aside, that she might bind up Éloise's already braided hair, and indulge herself in the interim with sundry fervent ejaculations.

"Isn't he splendid?" whispered Lottie, while Laura compared bracelets with Emma Houghton. "Oh, there, isn't he splendid? It's like the king coming down from his throne, when he speaks to you; it puts my heart in a flutter. How do you dare ask him to pass the butter? Now just tell me. Are you engaged to him? Tell me truly, only shake your head, yes or no. No? I don't believe a word you say. Mean to be? Then, I declare–Suppose now, only just suppose, suppose he'd look at me?"

"Oh, what a silly little goose you are, Lottie Humphreys! And you've put geraniums in my hair, when I meant to wear those beautiful blue poison-bells!"

"I never saw any one so dark as you are wear so much blue."

"But it's becoming to me, isn't it?" said Éloise, turning with her smile, as radiant for Lottie as for Marlboro'.

"St. George," said Marlboro', with a beaming face bent over his shoulder, as he took Éloise out to dinner, "my intention was the earlier; it will succeed!"

"As being the eldest born and heir to the succession. Does the good general expose his campaign?"

"There we are quits. It is precisely as a good general that I exposed it."

"But did the Levites unveil the sacred ark?" said Mr. St. George, severely.

"We are talking freemasonry, Miss Changarnier," said Marlboro', and they moved on.

Whether she would or not, Éloise found herself in exactly the same position in the house as before her adopted father's death,—partly because almost all the company, being old friends, recognized no difference, partly because Mr. St. George silently chose it should be so. She soon forgot herself entirely in the pleasure of it, and was unconsciously, even towards Mr. St. George, so sweet and genial, so blithe and bewitching, that his scanning glance would suddenly have to fall, since an expression, he felt, entered it that he dared not have her see. There was always a certain disarray about the costume of Éloise; one tress of her hair was always drooping too low, or one thrust back behind the beautiful temple and tiny ear, or a bracelet was half undone, or a mantle dropping off,—trifles that only gave one the desire to help her; she constantly wore, too, a scarf or shawl, or something of the kind, and the drapery lent her a kind of tender womanliness, which only such things do; then, too, she garnished her hair with flowers always half falling away, somewhat faded with the warmth, and emitting strong, rich fragrances in dying. When she laughed, and the brilliant little teeth sparkled a contrast with the dark smooth skin, when she thought, and her eyes glowed like tear-washed stars, Mr. St. George was wont to turn abruptly away from the vision, unwilling to be so controlled. But of that Éloise never dreamed.

As for Marlboro', on the other hand, he was the moth in the candle. Of Mr. Marlboro's devotion Éloise was quite aware,—and whereas, playing with it the least bit in the world, she had at first enjoyed it, it grew to irk her sadly; she used to beg her friends, in all manner of pretty ways, to take him off her hands, and would resort from her own rooms to theirs, assisting at their awful rites, and endeavoring to get them up as charmingly as possible, that they might lure away her trouble. It was in vain that Marlboro' tried to reopen the subject of their mute warfare with St. George. St. George would not condescend, neither would he sully Éloise's name by bandying it about with another lover. If Marlboro' begged him to toss up for chances, St. George answered that he never threw up a chance; when he went further and offered to stake success or loss, St. George told him he had cast his last die; when he would have spoken her name to him directly, St. George withered him with flamy eyes, and let his manner become too rigid for one to dare more with him. But the ladies had already caught the spirit of the thing, and made little situations of it among themselves. Then when St. George became impregnable to his attacks, Marlboro' pulled his blonde moustache savagely, and grew sullen, and fortunately Éloise did not try to dispel the cloud. Nevertheless, Marlboro' fancied that he perceived victory hovering nearer to St. George than himself, and a rivalry begun in good-humor was likely to take a different cast. In his pique, Marlboro' bade his host farewell, and returned to Blue Bluffs; but it was idle riding, for every day found him again at The Rim, like the old riddle,—

"All saddled, all bridled, all fit for a fight,"

and constant as the magnet to its poles.

It was still the steps of Éloise that Marlboro' haunted. Yesterday, he brought songs to teach her, and among them the chant to which long ago they had once listened together in the old Norman cathedral; to-morrow, he would show her a singular deposit on the beach, of rare silvery shells underflushed with rose, kept there over a tide for her eyes; to-day, he treated her to politics condensed into a single phrase whose essence told all his philosophy:—"The great error in government," he said, "is also inversely the great want in marriage: in government, individuality should be supreme; in marriage, lost. In government, this error is a triple-headed monster: centralization, consolidation, union."

Mr. St. George heard him, and paused a moment before them, one evening, as Marlboro' thus harangued Éloise.

"Consolidation? Centralization?" said he. "The very things we all oppose."

"Nullification is a good solvent."

"A ghost that is laid. There's a redder phantom than that on the horizon, man!"

"What are you talking about, politics or marriage?"

"God forbid that I should soil a lady's ears with the first!" said Mr. St. George, bowing to Éloise; "and as to the last,—I'll none of it!"

And after Mr. Marlboro' had gone that night, as Éloise was about to ascend to her own rooms, Mr. St. George came along again, and, lightly taking the candle, held up the tiny flame before her face.

"What has that contrabandista been saying to you?" demanded Mr. St. George.

Éloise looked ignorantly up.

"Gilding hell? Do not believe him! Never believe anything any one says, when you know he is in love with you! Slavery is a curse! a curse that we inherit for the sins of those drunken Cavaliers, our forefathers! Let us make the best of it!"

"Ah, Mr. St. George," said she, gayly, "this from you, for whom the disciples claim Calhoun's mantle? For what, then, do you contend?"

"For the right of being a free man myself! for the right of enduring the dictation of no man in Maine or Louisiana! for the right to do as I have the mind!" exclaimed Mr. St. George, in a ponderous and suppressed under-voice that rang through her head half-way up-stairs.

Long before, Mr. St. George had very courteously begged Éloise to take a vacation during the stay of their friends, but she had so peremptorily and utterly refused to do so that it ended by his spending the long morning with her in the cabinet, either over certain neglected arrears, or while she wrote letters under his royal dictation, and Hazel sewed a laborious seam between them, as always. Here, at length, after sufficient tantalization by its means, Marlboro' venturously intruded himself every day. Too familiar for interruption, he took another seat, and watched her swift hand's graceful progress. If her pen delayed, she found another awaiting her,—her posture wearied, a footstool was rolled towards her feet,—her side cramped, behold, a cushion,—she looked for fresh paper, it fell before her: all somewhat slavish service, and which Hazel could have rendered as well. Used to slaves, would she have preferred a master? Whether Miss Changarnier relished these abject kindnesses better than Mr. St. George's imperious exactions was precisely the thing that puzzled the two gentlemen.

Meanwhile, during all this gay season, if Éloise had thought of once looking about her, which she never did, she would have seen, that, in whatever group she was, there, too, was Mr. St. George,—that, if they rode three abreast down the great park-avenues, though she laughed with Evan Murray, it was to Mr. St. George's horse that her bridle was secured,—and that, when she sang, it was St. George who jested and smiled and lightly talked the while,—not that her music was not sweet, but that its spell was too strong for him to endure beneath his mask. Yet Éloise drew no deductions; if at first she noticed that it was he who laid the shawl on her shoulders, if she remembered, that, when he fastened her dropping bracelet, biting his lip and looking down, he held the wrist an instant with a clasp that left its whitened pressure there, she remembered, too, that he never spoke to her, were it avoidable, that he failed in small politenesses of the footstool or the fan, and that, if once he had looked at her in an instant's intentness of singular expression, and let a smile well up and flood his eyes and lips and face, in a heart-beat it had faded, and he was standing with folded arms and looking sternly away beyond her, while she caught herself still sitting there and bending forward and smiling up at him like a flower beneath the sun;—to atone for her remissness, she was frowning and cool and curt to Earl St. George for days.