Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860. No. XXXVI. - Various
Mr. Richard Venner, in the pursuit of his interesting project, arose
and lighted a lamp. He wrapped himself in a dressing-gown and thrust
his feet into a pair of cloth slippers. He stole carefully down the
stair, and arrived safely at the door of Elsie's room. The young lady
had taken the natural precaution to leave it fastened, carrying the
key with her, no doubt,--unless, indeed, she had got out by the
window, which was not far from the ground. Dick could get in at this
window easily enough, but he did not like the idea of leaving his
footprints in the flower-bed just under it. He returned to his own
chamber, and held a council of war with himself.
He put his head out of his own window and looked at that beneath. It
was open. He then went to one of his trunks, wich he unlocked, and
began carefully removing its contents. What these were we need not
stop to mention,--only remarking that there were dresses of various
patterns, which might afford an agreeable series of changes, and in
certain contingencies prove eminently useful. After removing a few of
these, he thrust his hand to the very bottom of the remaining pile and
drew out a coiled strip of leather many yards in length, ending in a
noose,--a tough, well-seasoned _lasso_, looking as if it had seen
service and was none the worse for it. He uncoiled a few yards of this
and fastened it to the knob of a door. Then he threw the loose end out
of the window so that it should hang by the open casement of Elsie's
room. By this he let himself down opposite her window, and with a
slight effort swung himself inside the room. He lighted a match, found
a candle, and, having lighted that, looked curiously about him, as
Clodius might have done when he smuggled himself in among the Vestals.
Elsie's room was almost as peculiar as her dress and ornaments. It was
a kind of museum of objects, such as the woods are full of to those
who have eyes to see them, but many of them such as only few could
hope to reach, even if they knew where to look for them. Crows' nests,
which are never found but in the tall trees, commonly enough in the
forks of ancient hemlocks, eggs of rare birds, which must have taken a
quick eye and hard climb to find and get hold of, mosses and ferns of
unusual aspect, and quaint monstrosities of vegetable growth, such as
Nature delights in, showed that Elsie had her tastes and fancies like
any naturalist or poet.
Nature, when left to her own freaks in the forest, is grotesque and
fanciful to the verge of license, and beyond it. The foliage of trees
does not always require clipping to make it look like an image of
life. From those windows at Canoe Meadow, among the mountains, we
could see all summer long a lion rampant, a Shanghai chicken, and
General Jackson on horse-back, done by Nature in green leaves, each
with a single tree. But to Nature's tricks with boughs and roots and
smaller vegetable growths there is no end. Her fancy is infinite, and
her humor not always refined. There is a perpetual reminiscence of
animal life in her rude caricatures, which sometimes actually reach
the point of imitating the complete human figure, as in that
extraordinary specimen which nobody will believe to be genuine, except
the men of science, and of which the discreet reader may have a
glimpse by application in the proper quarter.
Elsie had gathered so many of these sculpture-like monstrosities, that
one might have thought she had robbed old Sophy's grandfather of his
fetishes. They helped to give her room a kind of enchanted look, as if
a witch had her home in it. Over the fireplace was a long, staff-like
branch, strangled in the spiral coils of one of those vines which
strain the smaller trees in their clinging embraces, sinking into the
bark until the parasite becomes almost identified with its support.
With these sylvan curiosities were blended objects of art, some of
them not less singular, but others showing a love for the beautiful in
form and color, such as a girl of fine organization and nice culture
might naturally be expected to feel and to indulge, in adorning her
apartment.
All these objects, pictures, bronzes, vases, and the rest, did not
detain Mr. Richard Venner very long, whatever may have been his
sensibilities to art. He was more curious about books and papers. A
copy of Keats lay on the table. He opened it and read the name of
_Bernard C. Langdon_ on the blank leaf. An envelope was on the table
with Elsie's name written in a similar hand; but the envelope was
empty, and he could not find the note it contained. Her desk was
locked, and it would not be safe to tamper with it. He had seen
enough; the girl received books and notes from this fellow up at the
school,--this usher, this Yankee quill-driver;--_he_ was aspiring to
become the lord of the Dudley domain, then, was he?
Elsie had been reasonably careful. She had locked up her papers,
whatever they might be. There was little else that promised to reward
his curiosity, but he cast his eye on everything. There was a
clasp-Bible among her books. Dick wondered if she ever unclasped it.
There was a book of hymns; it had her name in it, and looked as if it
might have been often read;--what the _diablo_ had Elsie to do with
hymns?
Mr. Richard Venner was in an observing and analytical state of mind,
it will be noticed, or he might perhaps have been touched with the
innocent betrayals of the poor girl's chamber. Had she, after all,
some human tenderness in her heart? That was not the way he put the
question,--but whether she would take seriously to this schoolmaster,
and if she did, what would be the neatest and surest and quickest way
of putting a stop to all that nonsense. All this, however, he could
think over more safely in his own quarters. So he stole softly to the
window, and, catching the end of the leathern thong, regained his own
chamber and drew in the lasso.
It needs only a little jealousy to set a man on who is doubtful in
love or wooing, or to make him take hold of his courting in earnest.
As soon as Dick had satisfied himself that the young schoolmaster was
his rival in Elsie's good graces, his whole thoughts concentrated
themselves more than ever on accomplishing his great design of
securing her for himself. There was no time to be lost. He must come
into closer relations with her, so as to withdraw her thoughts from
this fellow, and to find out more exactly what was the state of her
affections, if she had any. So he began to court her company again, to
propose riding with her, to sing to her, to join her whenever she was
strolling about the grounds, to make himself agreeable, according to
the ordinary understanding of that phrase, in every way which seemed
to promise a chance for succeeding in that amiable effort.
The girl treated him more capriciously than ever. She would be sullen
and silent, or she would draw back fiercely at some harmless word or
gesture, or she would look at him with her eyes narrowed in such a
strange way and with such a wicked light in them that Dick swore to
himself they were too much for him, and would leave her for the
moment. Yet she tolerated him, almost as a matter of necessity, and
sometimes seemed to take a kind of pleasure in trying her power upon
him. This he soon found out, and humored her in the fancy that she
could exercise a kind of fascination over him,--though there were
times in which he actually felt an influence he could not understand,
an effect of some peculiar expression about her, perhaps, but still
centring in those diamond eyes of hers which it made one feel so
curiously to look into.
Whether Elsie saw into his object or not was more than he could tell.
His idea was, after having conciliated the good-will of all about her
as far as possible, to make himself first a habit and then a necessity
with the girl,--not to spring any trap of a declaration upon her until
tolerance had grown into such a degree of inclination as her nature
was like to admit. He had succeeded in the first part of his plan. He
was at liberty to prolong his visit at his own pleasure. This was not
strange; these three persons, Dudley Venner, his daughter, and his
nephew, represented all that remained of an old and honorable family.
Had Elsie been like other girls, her father might have been less
willing to entertain a young fellow like Dick as an inmate; but he had
long outgrown all the slighter apprehensions which he might have had
in common with all parents, and followed rather than led the imperious
instincts of his daughter. It was not a question of sentiment, but of
life and death, or more than that,--some dark ending, perhaps, which
would close the history of his race with disaster and evil report upon
the lips of all coming generations.
As to the thought of his nephew's making love to his daughter, it had
almost passed from his mind. He had been so long in the habit of
looking at Elsie as outside of all common influences and exceptional
in the law of her nature, that it was difficult for him to think of
her as a girl to be fallen in love with. Many persons are surprised,
when others court their female relatives; they know them as good young
or old women enough,--aunts, sisters, nieces, daughters, whatever they
may be,--but never think of anybody's falling in love with them, any
more than of their being struck by lightning.
But in this case there were special reasons, in addition to the common
family delusion,--reasons which seemed to make it impossible that she
should attract a suitor. Who would _dare_ to marry Elsie? No, let her
have the pleasure, if it was one, at any rate the wholesome
excitement, of companionship; it might save her from lapsing into
melancholy or a worse form of madness. Dudley Venner had a kind of
superstition, too, that, if Elsie could only outlive three
septenaries, twenty-one years, so that, according to the prevalent
idea, her whole frame would have been thrice made over, counting from
her birth, she would revert to the natural standard of health of mind
and feelings from which she had been so long perverted. The thought of
any other motive than love being sufficient to induce Richard to
become her suitor had not occurred to him. He had married early, at
that happy period when interested motives are least apt to influence
the choice; and his single idea of marriage was, that it was the union
of persons naturally drawn towards each other by some mutual
attraction. Very simple, perhaps; but he had lived lonely for many
years since his wife's death, and judged the hearts of others, most of
all of his brother's son, by his own. He had often thought whether, in
case of Elsie's dying or being necessarily doomed to seclusion, he
might not adopt this nephew and make him his heir; but it had not
occurred to him that Richard might wish to become his son-in-law for
the sake of his property.
It is very easy to criticize other people's modes of dealing with
their children. Outside observers see results; parents see processes.
They notice the trivial movements and accents which betray the blood
of this or that ancestor; they can detect the irrepressible movement
of hereditary impulse in looks and acts which mean nothing to the
common observer. To be a parent is almost to be a fatalist. This boy
sits with legs crossed, just as his uncle used to whom he never saw;
his grandfathers both died before he was born, but he has the movement
of the eyebrows which we remember in one of them, and the gusty temper
of the other.
These are things parents can see, and which they must take account of
in education, but which few except parents can be expected to really
understand. Here and there a sagacious person, old, or of middle age,
who has _triangulated_ a race, that is, taken three or more
observations from the several standing-places of three different
generations, can tell pretty nearly the range of possibilities and the
limitations of a child, actual or potential, of a given stock,--errors
excepted always, because children of the same stock are not bred just
alike, because the traits of some less known ancestor are liable to
break out at any time, and because each human being has, after all, a
small fraction of individuality about him which gives him a flavor, so
that he is distinguishable from others by his friends or in a court of
justice, and which occasionally makes a genius or a saint or a
criminal of him. It is well that young persons cannot read these fatal
oracles of Nature. Blind impulse is her highest wisdom, after all. We
make our great jump, and then she takes the bandage off our eyes. That
is the way the broad sea-level of average is maintained, and the
physiological democracy is enabled to fight against the principle of
selection which would disinherit all the weaker children. The
magnificent constituency of mediocrities of which the world is made
up,--the people without biographies, whose lives have made a clear
solution in the fluid menstruum of time, instead of being precipitated
in the opaque sediment of history----
But this is a narrative, and not a disquisition.
CHAPTER XX.
FROM WITHOUT AND FROM WITHIN.
There were not wanting people who accused Dudley Venner of weakness
and bad judgment in his treatment of his daughter. Some were of
opinion that the great mistake was in not "breaking her will" when she
was a little child. There was nothing the matter with her, they said,
but that she had been spoiled by indulgence. If _they_ had had the
charge of her, they'd have brought her down. She'd got the upperhand
of her father now; but if he'd only taken hold of her in season! There
are people who think that everything may be done, if the doer, be he
educator or physician, be only called "in season." No doubt,--but _in
season_ would often be a hundred or two years before the child was
born; and people never send so early as that.
The father of Elsie Venner knew his duties and his difficulties too
well to trouble himself about anything others might think or say. So
soon as he found that he could not govern his child, he gave his life
up to following her and protecting her as far as he could. It was a
stern and terrible trial for a man of acute sensibility, and not
without force of intellect and will, and the manly ambition for
himself and his family-name which belonged to his endowments and his
position. Passive endurance is the hardest trial to persons of such a
nature.
What made it still more a long martyrdom was the necessity for bearing
his cross in utter loneliness. He could not tell his griefs. He could
not talk of them even with those who knew their secret spring. His
minister had the unsympathetic nature which is common in the meaner
sort of devotees,--persons who mistake spiritual selfishness for
sanctity, and grab at the infinite prize of the great Future and
Elsewhere with the egotism they excommunicate in its hardly more
odious forms of avarice and self-indulgence. How could he speak with
the old physician and the old black woman about a sorrow and a terror
which but to name was to strike dumb the lips of Consolation?
In the dawn of his manhood he had found that second consciousness for
which young men and young women go about looking into each other's
faces, with their sweet, artless aim playing in every feature, and
making them beautiful to each other, as to all of us. He had found his
other self early, before he had grown weary in the search and wasted
his freshness in vain longings: the lot of many, perhaps we may say of
most, who infringe the patent of our social order by intruding
themselves into a life already upon half-allowance of the necessary
luxuries of existence. The life he had led for a brief space was not
only beautiful in outward circumstance, as old Sophy had described it
to the Reverend Doctor. It was that delicious process of the tuning of
two souls to each other, string by string, not without little
half-pleasing discords now and then when some chord in one or the
other proves to be over-strained or over-lax, but always approaching
nearer and nearer to harmony, until they become at last as two
instruments with a single voice. Something more than a year of this
blissful doubled consciousness had passed over him when he found
himself once more alone,--alone, save for the little diamond-eyed
child lying in the old woman's arms, with the coral necklace round her
throat and the rattle in her hand.
He would not die by his own act. It was not the way in his family.
There may have been other, perhaps better reasons, but this was
enough; he did not come of suicidal stock. He must live for this
child's sake, at any rate; and yet,--oh, yet, who could tell with what
thoughts he looked upon her? Sometimes her little features would look
placid, and something like a smile would steal over them; then all his
tender feelings would rush up into his eyes, and he would put his arms
out to take her from the old woman,--but all at once her eyes would
narrow and she would throw her head back; and a shudder would seize
him as he stooped over his child,--he could not look upon her,--he
could not touch his lips to her cheek; nay, there would sometimes come
into his soul such frightful suggestions that he would hurry from the
room lest the hinted thought should become a momentary madness and he
should lift his hand against the helpless infant which owed him life.
In those miserable days he used to wander all over The Mountain in his
restless endeavor to seek some relief for inward suffering in outward
action. He had no thought of throwing himself from the summit of any
of the broken cliffs, but he clambered over them recklessly, as having
no particular care for his life. Sometimes he would go into the
accursed district where the venomous reptiles were always to be
dreaded, and court their worst haunts, and kill all he could come near
with a kind of blind fury that was strange in a person of his gentle
nature.
One overhanging cliff was a favorite haunt of his. It frowned upon his
home beneath in a very menacing way; he noticed slight seams and
fissures that looked ominous;--what would happen, if it broke off some
time or other and came crashing down on the fields and roofs below? He
thought of such a possible catastrophe with a singular indifference,
in fact with a feeling almost like pleasure. It would be such a swift
and thorough solution of this great problem of life he was working out
in ever-recurring daily anguish! The remote possibility of such a
catastrophe had frightened some timid dwellers beneath The Mountain to
other places of residence; here the danger was most imminent, and yet
he loved to dwell upon the chances of its occurrence. Danger is often
the best _counter-irritant_ in cases of mental suffering; he found a
solace in careless exposure of his life, and learned to endure the
trials of each day better by dwelling in imagination on the
possibility that it might be the last for him and the home that was
his.
Time, the great consoler, helped these influences, and he gradually
fell into more easy and less dangerous habits of life. He ceased from
his more perilous rambles. He thought less of the danger from the
great overhanging rocks and forests; they had hung there for
centuries; it was not very likely they would crash or slide in his
time. He became accustomed to all Elsie's strange looks and ways. Old
Sophy dressed her with ruffles round her neck, and hunted up the red
coral branch with silver bells which the little toothless Dudleys had
bitten upon for a hundred years. By an infinite effort, her father
forced himself to become the companion of this child, for whom he had
such a mingled feeling, but whose presence was always a trial to him
and often a terror.
At a cost which no human being could estimate, he had done his duty,
and in some degree reaped his reward. Elsie grew up with a kind of
filial feeling for him, such as her nature was capable of. She never
would obey him; that was not to be looked for. Commands, threats,
punishments, were out of the question with her; the mere physical
effects of crossing her will betrayed themselves in such changes of
expression and color that it would have been senseless to attempt to
govern her in any such way. Leaving her mainly to herself, she could
be to some extent indirectly influenced,--not otherwise. She called
her father "Dudley," as if he had been her brother. She ordered
everybody and would be ordered by none.
Who could know all these things, except the few people of the
household? What wonder, therefore, that ignorant and shallow persons
laid the blame on her father of those peculiarities which were freely
talked about,--of those darker tendencies which were hinted of in
whispers? To all this talk, so far as it reached him, he was supremely
indifferent, not only with the indifference which all gentlemen feel
to the gossip of their inferiors, but with a charitable calmness which
did not wonder or blame. He knew that his position was not simply a
difficult, but an impossible one, and schooled himself to bear his
destiny as well as he might and report himself only at Headquarters.
He had grown gentle under this discipline. His hair was just beginning
to be touched with silver, and his expression was that of habitual
sadness and anxiety. He had no counsellor, as we have seen, to turn
to, who did not know either too much or too little. He had no heart to
rest upon and into which he might unburden himself of the secrets and
the sorrows that were aching in his own breast. Yet he had not allowed
himself to run to waste in the long time since he was left alone to
his trials and fears. He had resisted the seductions which always
beset solitary men with restless brains overwrought by depressing
agencies. He disguised no misery to himself with the lying delusion of
wine. He sought no sleep from narcotics, though he lay with throbbing,
wide-open eyeballs through all the weary hours of the night.
It was understood between Dudley Venner and old Doctor Kittredge that
Elsie was a subject of occasional medical observation, on account of
certain mental peculiarities which might end in a permanent affection
of her reason. Beyond this nothing was said, whatever may have been in
the mind of either. But Dudley Venner had studied Elsie's case in the
light of all the books he could find which might do anything towards
explaining it. As in all cases where men meddle with medical science
for a special purpose, having no previous acquaintance with it, his
imagination found what it wanted in the books he read, and adjusted it
to the facts before him. So it was he came to cherish those two
fancies before alluded to: that the ominous birthmark she had carried
from infancy might fade and become obliterated, and that the age of
complete maturity might be signalized by an entire change in her
physical and mental state. He held these vague hopes as all of us
nurse our only half-believed illusions. Not for the world would he
have questioned his sagacious old medical friend as to the probability
or possibility of their being true. We are very shy of asking
questions of those who know enough to destroy with one word the hopes
we live on.
In this life of comparative seclusion to which the father had doomed
himself for the sake of his child, he had found time for large and
varied reading. The learned Judge Thornton confessed himself surprised
at the extent of Dudley Venner's information. Doctor Kittredge found
that he was in advance of him in the knowledge of recent physiological
discoveries. He had taken pains to become acquainted with agricultural
chemistry; and the neighboring farmers owed him some useful hints
about the management of their land. He renewed his old acquaintance
with the classic authors. He loved to warm his pulses with Homer and
calm them down with Horace. He received all manner of new books and
periodicals, and gradually gained an interest in the events of the
passing time. Yet he remained almost a hermit, not absolutely refusing
to see his neighbors, nor ever churlish towards them, but on the other
hand not cultivating any intimate relations with them.
He had retired from the world a young man, little more than a youth,
indeed, with sentiments and aspirations all of them suddenly
extinguished. The first had bequeathed him a single huge sorrow, the
second a single trying duty. In due time the anguish had lost
something of its poignancy, the light of earlier and happier memories
had begun to struggle with and to soften its thick darkness, and even
that duty which he had confronted with such an effort had become an
endurable habit.
At a period of life when many have been living on the capital of their
acquired knowledge and their youthful stock of sensibilities until
their intellects are really shallower and their hearts emptier than
they were at twenty, Dudley Venner was stronger in thought and
tenderer in soul than in the first freshness of his youth, when he
counted but half his present years. He was now on the verge of that
decade which marks the decline of men who have ceased growing in
knowledge and strength: from forty to fifty a man must move upward, or
the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly
downward. At the entrance of this decade his inward nature was richer
and deeper than in any earlier period of his life. If he could only be
summoned to action, he was capable of noble service. If his sympathies
could only find an outlet, he was never so capable of love as now; for
his natural affections had been gathering in the course of all these
years, and the traces of that ineffaceable calamity of his life were
softened and partially hidden by new growths of thought and feeling,
as the wreck left by a mountain-slide is covered over by the gentle
intrusion of the soft-stemmed herbs which will prepare it for the
stronger vegetation that will bring it once more into harmony with the
peaceful slopes around it.