A Face Illumined Part 44

"Well, well, Van, bear with me, for I'm in a devil of a sc.r.a.pe."

Even Miss Burton's efforts could not brighten the clouded faces that gathered at the supper-table. In truth, her attempts were brief and fitful, for she seemed absorbed in thought herself. She heard Mrs. Mayhew whisper to Stanton,

"If I were a perfect stranger she could not keep me at a greater distance. I can do nothing with her or for her."

To their surprise, Ida quietly walked in and took her place. Her face was very grave and very pale; the traces of her grief were still apparent, and they caused in Van Berg the severest compunction.

She was now dressed richly, but plainly and un.o.btrusively. Her manner was quiet and self-possessed, but there was an expression of desperate trouble in her eyes that soon filled Van Berg with a strong and increasing uneasiness. She returned his bow politely, but distantly. Poor Stanton scarcely dared to look towards her. At supper, on the previous evening, he had taken no pains to conceal his contempt and displeasure; now he was unable to hid his embarra.s.sment and fear. As in the parlor on the previous evening so now again, there was an element in Ida Mayhew's appearance or in herself that caused deep disquietude.

"I'm very glad, Ida, you've changed your mind and come down," began Mrs. Mayhew, volubly.

"I have not changed my mind," she replied, with such sad, stern emphasis that they all involuntarily looked at her for a moment.

Poor Mrs. Mayhew was so quenched and depressed that she did not venture to speak again.

Only Miss Burton was able to maintain her self-possession and tact, and she was intently but un.o.btrusively studying Miss Mayhew. Her college-life had made her acquainted with so many strange feminine problems that she had the nerve and experience of a veteran, but she could not penetrate the dark mystery in which Ida had now shrouded herself. Resolving, however, that she would not succ.u.mb to the chill and restraint that paralyzed the others, she persisted in conversing with her in simple, natural tones.

Ida replied in perfect courtesy and not with unnecessary brevity, but if her words were polished, they were also as cold and hard as ice. Nothing that Miss Burton said could bring the glimmer of a smile athwart her features that were growing so thin and transparent that even an approach to a pleasant thought would have lighted them up with a momentary gleam. Miss Burton found her task a difficult one.

"She affected me as strangely," she afterwards said to Van Berg, "as if a dead maiden were sitting at my side, who had still, by some horrible mystery, the power of speech."

As for Van Berg, he had hitherto supposed that his quiet, well-bred ease would be equal to every social emergency, but he now found himself tongue-tied and embarra.s.sed to the last degree. He could not speak to the woman whom he felt he had so deeply wronged in his thoughts and manner, and who was also well aware of the fact.

He felt that he had no right to speak to her until he had first asked and secured her forgiveness. This could not be done in public, and he greatly doubted whether she ever would pardon him.

As a chivalric man of honor, he was overwhelmed with a sense of the insult he had unwittingly offered to the maiden opposite him, who now appeared as if mortally wounded. Beyond a few forced remarks to Stanton and Miss Burton, he made a show of eating his supper in silence. But he longed to escape from his present ordeal, and resolved to leave the table as soon as appearances permitted.

One thing in Ida's manner perplexed him greatly. She now looked at him as if he were an object, scrupling not to meet his eye with her strange, unwavering gaze. There was nothing of the haughty indifference which she had manifested the evening before in her occasional glances. She rather looked as one who is trying to fix an object in his memory that he may carry an accurate picture of it away with him.

The thought crossed his mind more than once, "We have wakened our Undine's sleeping mind with a vengeance, but have jostled it so rudely that I fear the frail article is hopelessly shattered."

Miss Burton tried once more to make the conversation general, but her effort ended rather disastrously.

"Mr. Van Berg," she said, "I've been reading an essay this afternoon in which the writer tries to prove that science has done more for humanity than art and religion combined. Now I suppose you would be inclined to take the same ground in regard to art that I ought in respect to religion."

Van Berg was about to reply, when his attention was caught by a vivid gleam in the face of Ida, who looked up as if she wished to speak.

"I think Miss Mayhew has an opinion on this subject," he said, with a bow.

She looked steadily at him as she replied promptly, "I have a decided opinion, though I base it on such poor and narrow grounds as personal experience. I think art is by far the most potent.

It has accomplished for me much more than science or religion ever did, or could."

"What has it done for you, Miss Mayhew?" he asked, dreading the answer.

"It has filled me with despair," she replied with a glance and tone which he never afterwards forgot. Then, with the same cold, quiet manner in which she had come, she left the table.

Van Berg turned very pale, for he at once understood her reference to the emblematic rose-bud he had thrown away, and his remark, "Art can tolerate no such imperfection."

Her words and manner hopelessly perplexed the others, but Van Berg believed he had found light on the problem that had hitherto baffled him, but so far from being rea.s.sured, he had never been at such bitter odds with himself before.

He also soon after left the table, hoping to find an opportunity to express his regret that he had been so harsh by prejudice; but Miss Mayhew was not to be found.

"Can it be," he thought, as he strode off into the shrubbery, "that I have been blind to the very effects that I hoped to cause? Can it be that she has been made to feel her imperfection so keenly, and in such a way as to create only utter discouragement? She evidently understands the worm-eaten rose-bud I tossed away to be the emblem of herself. Oh, the curse of Phariseeism--the 'holier than thou' business, whatever form it takes. It has made an egregious fool of me."

"But her relations with Sibley, confound it all! I can't understand them. Why did she a.s.sociate with him so constantly, and then say, 'Congenial society, or none at all'? Seems to me she ought to have seen what he was before he showed his cloven feet so plainly.

Well, perhaps the most rational as well as charitable explanation is that her eyes were opened to see him in his true colors, as well as herself. Had t.i.tania's eyes been disenchanted when she was fondling the immortal Weaver, she might have perished with disgust; and it is scarcely strange that Miss Mayhew should be ill on finding that she was infatuated with a man who was both a.s.s and villain.

She evidently sees things now as they are, and since her vision has become so good, I am very sorry I do not appear to better advantage.

People who stalk along through life with elevated noses, are not pleasing or edifying spectacles."

His disquietude soon caused him to return to the hotel, in hopes of seeing the object of his thoughts.

He had hardly reached the piazza before Ida appeared, dressed in a plain walking suit. She hesitated a moment in the door-way as if undecided in her course. A party of gay young people were just starting on a stroll to a neighboring village. With apparent hesitancy, she said to one of the young girls:

"I have an errand to the village; may I walk with you for company?"

"Oh, certainly," replied the girl, but evidently not welcoming this addition to their party, and Ida went away with them, but not as one of them, isolated more, however, by her own manner than by the bearing of her companions.

The explanation of her action was this: on opening her drawer after returning to her room, she found, with a sense of dismay--as if a misfortune had occurred instead of an incident that gave a chance for better thought--that in taking the opiate the night before, she had replaced the cork in the phial insecurely, and that nearly all its contents had oozed away. Some might have regarded this incident as an omen or a providential interference; but Ida was neither superst.i.tious nor speculative in her nature; she was positive and willful, rather, and the current of her purposes always flowed strongly, though it might be in narrow channels.

"There is nothing left for me to do," she muttered, "but go to the village. I don't know whether Mr. Burleigh has laudanum, and my asking for it might excite suspicion."

It was terrible to see her fair young face grow hard like marble in her stern determination to carry out her awful design, and the impress of this remorseless purpose filled Van Berg with so great foreboding that he could not resist the impulse to follow the desperate girl. If harm should come to her through the harshness of others, and as he now feared, more especially his own, he would never forgive himself.

Mrs. Mayhew and Stanton did not see her departure--they were in anxious consultation in one of the small private parlors, and the artist, to disarm suspicion of his design, entered the hotel, and pa.s.sed out again by a side door, from which he took a short-cut across the field intending to watch Ida, without being himself observed.

Having found some dense copse-wood by the road-side, and near to the village, he sat down and waited. The gay, chattering party soon pa.s.sed, Ida walking by herself on the opposite side of the road, with head bowed as if wholly wrapped in her own thoughts. Her unhappy face appealed to his sympathy even more than her graceful carriage to his sense of beauty, and he longed to join her and make such amends as were possible.

He now followed at too great a distance for recognition in the deepening twilight, and saw the young people enter a confectionery shop, but observed, with increased uneasiness, that Miss Mayhew parted from them and went to an adjacent drug-store. She soon joined the party again, however, and they all apparently started homeward.

Van Berg at once determined to go to this drug-store and learn, if possible, if there were anything to confirm the horrible suspicion that crossed his mind. He remembered that despair and desperate deeds often went together, and the daily press had taught him how many people, with warped and ungoverned moral natures, place their troubles beyond remedy by the supreme folly of self-destruction.

By a considerable detour through a side street, he reached the store unperceived, and found the druggist rather disquieted himself.

"Are you staying at Burleigh's?" he asked.

"I am," Van Berg replied.

"Do you know a young lady boarding there with large dark eyes and auburn hair?"

"I do."

"Is there--is there anything wrong about her?"

"Why should there be? Why do you ask?"

"She has just been in here, and she looked sick and strangely, and all she wanted was a large phial of laudanum. Somehow her looks and purchase have made me uneasy. I never saw so white a face in my life, and she seemed weak and very tired. If she's sick, how comes it she's walking to the village? Besides, she seemed to have very little to do with the party she joined after leaving here."

Van Berg controlled himself only by a powerful effort, and was very glad that the brim of his soft hat concealed the pallor of his own face. He managed to say quietly:

"The young lady you describe has not been well, and has probably found the walk longer and more wearisome than she supposed. As for the laudanum, that's used in many ways. Some cigars, if you please--thank you. I'll join the lady and see that she reaches home safely," and he hastily left the store and walked swiftly away.