Jessamine Part 5

"I found this in the field on the other side of the mountain, to-day," he said, laying a piece of stone in Mr. Fordham's hand. "I think there's ore in it."

Roy inspected it closely.

"Miss Jessie"--he gave her no more familiar address in the hearing of common acquaintances--"is your father in his study?"

"I believe so," she replied, eyeing the intruder less amiably than her lover had done, in the antic.i.p.ation of the prolonged interruption.

"Mr. Kirke has an acid that will test this in a few minutes,"

continued Fordham to the boy. "Will you excuse me for a little while?" turning to Jessie with a smile loving for herself, and entreating her forbearance for his _protege_.

Her ill-humor vanished instantly under the benignant ray.

"Certainly!" she replied, nodding cordially to the bashful lad. "He is the n.o.blest man G.o.d ever made!" she said aloud, when she was alone.

She leaned back in her easy chair, her hands folded in blissful contentment, enjoying the breeze from the mountains, the sunset clouds, the incense from the flower-garden, and the hum of the mill-wheel, mentally recapitulating her hero's perfections, until her heart ached with happy sighs, and she saw the landscape through an iridescent haze.

"I am a baby!" was her indignant e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, as she cleared her eyes with an impatient brush of her hand. "I grow more ridiculous every day!"

As a means of growing wiser, she fell to watching her sister and Orrin Wyllys, who were busy tying up wandering rose-bushes in Eunice's pet labyrinth. Mr. Wyllys had his back to Jessie, when she first observed them. He was fastening back a branch which Miss Kirke held in its place, and their hands were very close together. It may have been this circ.u.mstance, it may have been the heat of the day, or the reflection of a bunch of pink moss-roses overhead--it could hardly have been anything which her companion was saying which brought the delicate roseate flush to the face usually pale and calm. His att.i.tude was far too dignified and respectful to hint the possibility of gallant badinage on his part. _Bona-fide_ love-making was, of course, out of the question, since they had not known each other ten days.

"Euna is handsome!" mused her sister in complacent affection.

"What a high-bred face and bearing she has! She looks the lady in her morning-gowns of print and dimity; but that lawn with the forget-me-not sprig becomes her rarely. I am glad I insisted upon her putting it on. But she wouldn't let me fasten the lilies-of-the-valley in her hair! Her only fault is a tendency to primness. She and Mr. Wyllys get on admirably together. He evidently admires her, and it is a treat to her to have the society of a cultivated gentleman. I know," smiling and blushing anew, "it is a salvo to my conscience to see them satisfied with each other's company, needing Roy and myself as little as we need them. I should else blame myself for our seeming selfishness."

Rambling on discursively, she struck upon an idea, too fraught with delightsome mischief not to urge her to immediate action. Eunice had turned her head away, and Orrin was concealed by a tall shrub. The gra.s.sy alley leading from the porch to where they were standing would not give back the sound of footsteps. How frightened and amazed the careful elder sister would be, if she were to steal down the walk and present herself before her! How solemnly Orrin would look on while she submitted to be lectured for her imprudence, and how she, in the end would triumph over her custodians, Roy included (who, by the way, was staying away an unconscionable time), when she should demonstrate that she knew better than they what she could do and bear; that she was none the worse for the escapade that had wrought their consternation. She only regretted that she must lose the sight of Roy's horrified visage when he should return to discover her flight.

Her eyes gleaming with mirth, she arose cautiously, favoring the unused joint, and stepped off the low piazza. Even when she felt the cool, delicious turf under foot, she steadied herself by grasping the nearest objects that offered a support. First it was a clump of box, then the stout p.r.i.c.kly branches of a j.a.pan apple-tree, then a fan-shaped trellis, which would by and by be covered with Cyprus vines. She would do nothing rashly--would come to her own by degrees. But when another step would bring her within arms' length of the florists, she trod firmly upon both feet, and feeling neither pain nor weakness, laughed aloud in wicked glee, and took that step.

She saw Eunice start and grow white; saw Orrin's grave yet courtly surprise as he advanced to offer his arm. Ere he could reach her, the treacherous ankle gave way with a wrench that drove breath and sense in one quick shuddering breath from her body.

As they left her, she heard, like a strain of far-off music, a voice say in her ear, "My poor child!" had a dizzy thought that strong arms--stronger than Eunice's--received her.

Then, all was a blank until she awoke upon her lounge, hair and face dripping with wet; the scent of _sal volatile_ tingling in her nostrils, and a cl.u.s.ter of anxious faces about her. Eunice's was the first she knew, Roy's next. He was on his knees by her, chafing her hands. She pulled them feebly from his hold, and clasped them about his neck, hiding her eyes upon his bosom.

"O, Roy! I was very wrong! very foolish! Don't scold me."

"Hush! hush!" he said, soothingly. "n.o.body thinks of scolding you!

If you apologize to any one, it must be to this gentleman. He brought you into the house, and I suspect his arms want looking after more than your foot does."

He laughed, not quite steadily, in saying it, and Jessie felt his fingers tighten upon hers. She flushed up rosily--was herself again, as she looked around for Orrin. He was in the rear of the family party, as was seemly, but his eyes were bent upon her with a singular fixedness--the irids closing in upon a spark that flashed and pierced like steel. Involuntarily, she shut hers, for a second, as if blinded.

He came forward at that.

"Don't believe him!" said the same voice that had sent its echo through her swoon. "I am none the worse for the slight exertion. I consider myself very fortunate in having been near enough to help you, when you fainted--am very thankful that you are better. Come with me, Roy! Here is the doctor! If _he_ scolds you, Miss Jessie, please consider me your champion."

The doctor, being an old friend, did scold the "madcap," who had, he for a while averred, undone his and Nature's fortnight's work.

Relenting, finally, at Jessie's pretty show of penitence, he confessed that less harm had been done than he had expected, and contented himself with sentencing the delinquent to two days' strict confinement to the sofa, and "serious meditation upon what might have been the result of her imprudence--her reckless step."

"My misstep, you mean," said the incorrigible patient. "If I had not lain here so long already as to forget how to walk straightly and squarely, and to maintain the centre of gravity, this would not have happened."

Altogether, the evening was gayer than usual to all. Jessie's spirits were exuberant to a degree her sister feared was hysterical, and Orrin seconded her sallies with a quieter humor, that amused the rest and enchanted her.

"It was worth my while to faint!" she owned to him, _sotto voce_, when he came up to say "Good-night." "I wish I had done it before!"

Her cheeks were red with excitement; her eyes laughed up into his with arch meaning that was very bewitching and very indiscreet. His pupils contracted suddenly to the blue spark, and his left palm covered the little hand he held within his right.

"You are very kind!" was all he said with his lips.

"What treason are you two whispering there?" questioned Roy.

"Nothing that concerns you in the least!" answered Jessie, saucily.

"We will keep our own counsel--won't we?" to Orrin.

He was too sensible to lie awake thinking, at an hour when people with accommodating consciences and gutta-percha hearts are wont to sleep soundly. Nor had he ever contracted the unsafe and irrational habit of talking audibly to himself--one to which poor Jessie was addicted. Yet he had his thoughts as he put out the candle in his bedroom that night.

"She is either a born flirt, and over-anxious to practise her calling, or she is the most charming, because most novel compound of navete, cleverness, and feeling that has crossed my path for many a day. In either case, she is a study."

The best and the worst women were with him resolved into that--studies, all,--and when they had fed his vanity and ministered to his individual gratification, they were laid aside for other specimens. As the dissecter of men's bodies soon loses his reverence for whatever of divinity the common mind may discern in the human form; as the anemone and the nettle are to the botanist but different combinations of stamen, pistil, and petal,--so your professed student of character, your mortal searcher and tryer of souls, merges heart into head in the practice of his art. Sorrow has no sacredness; Love no warning purity; Pain no appeal to him.

Sensibilities are interesting only as they quiver and shrink beneath his touch; Affection is his plaything; blasted hopes, withered and wounded hearts, are the unconsidered _debris_ of the sacrificial honors done the ensanguined Moloch of his Self-love.

It is the fashion to call such ornaments of Society. A better, because truer, name, would be the Thugs of Civilization.

CHAPTER V.

Dr. Septimus Baxter was President of Marion College, situate in the beautiful town of Hamilton, lying two hundred miles to the northward, and in another state than the mountain-girded valley of which the Dundee Church and the surrounding village were the chief ornaments. Dr. Baxter was the nominal head of the faculty of professors, and Mrs. Septimus Baxter was virtual autocrat of his home.

He was a little man, physically, at his best, which was when he was in his own realm--the area enclosed by the walls of his lecture-room. There was, in popular phrase, "no fit" to his clothes.

His trousers bagged at the knees, and his coats hung in loose folds down from his shoulder-blades, on the very day they left the tailor's shop; were shabby within twenty-four hours. He had a trick of brushing the nap of his hat the wrong way in his abstracted moods, and of twisting his forefinger in one bow of his white cravat until he dragged it into a slovenly loop, two crumpled wisps depending from it. Another and his most inveterate habit was, to tie his handkerchief into a succession of tight knots while he lectured, preached, prayed, and talked. Each marked a step in ratiocination or a rise in interest in the matter that engaged his mind until the climax of proof or animation was reached, when he would begin to untie them, one after the other, timing the process so judiciously that "Amen!" or "_Quod erat demonstrandum!_" pa.s.sed his lips as the released cambric swept through his hand in a flourish prior to its restoration to his pocket. Nevertheless, he commanded respect from students and professors. His courage in grappling with crabbed or ponderous themes; the eagle eye that penetrated the vapors of mysticism, detected the insidious thread of sophistry, which, intertwined with legitimate argument, was gradually but fatally guiding the inquirer away from the truth; the bursts of real eloquence, pa.s.sages of beauty and pathos, that starred the didacticism of his discourses, electrifying his hearers as the musical ring from the desiccated tortoise-sh.e.l.l may have startled the G.o.d who tripped over it--these made him a hero to his cla.s.ses, a man to be consulted and reverenced by his co-laborers. Moreover, he had a great heart within his narrow chest, soft as a child's, generous to self-abnegation, and full of such holy and Christian graces as love the shade, while their unconscious aroma betrays their existence to all who pa.s.s.

Mrs. Baxter had been a belle, and she would hardly have cast a second glance upon the small and shabby divine, but for two weighty reasons. By some unaccountable freak of Cupid, or of Fortune, the popular Miss Lanneau had counted her thirtieth year without exchanging her celibate state for that which she languishingly avowed would be preferable to one of her dependent nature and seeking sensibilities. She laughed yet with her lips and executed arch manoeuvres with her speaking eyes, when unfeeling allusion was made in her presence to the "crooked stick" that awaits the over-nice f.a.got gatherer, and to the forlorn and aged virgin, also a wanderer in woodlands, who answered the owl's "To-who?" all the freezing night with the despairing--"Anybody!" But at heart she was growing restless, if not unhappy, when Dr. Baxter fell in her way.

She was a _litterateur_, as well as a beauty, and her reverend suitor was a man of note--a distinguished clergyman, a _savant_ and senior professor in a highly respectable inst.i.tution of learning.

She had longed for a "career" all her life--for a sphere of decided influence--social and literary. Would a more promising avenue to this ever be offered her? She overlooked the ill-fitting coat, the dragged cravat, the inevitable handkerchief. As she put it, she "set the subjective where it should always be placed--above the grosser objective." In direct English she married the doctor, and had for fifteen years made him an excellent wife. If his testimony were of importance in this case--and he was a st.u.r.dy truth-teller--he wanted no better.

I have said that he was a little man at his best. He was a pygmy on a certain evening in the November succeeding the Dundee Centennial summer. To begin with the most severe of the dwarfing processes to which he had been subjected. It was a reception night in the presidential mansion. Mrs. Baxter had given a party the previous week, and now sat in state, as was the Hamiltonian usage, to receive the calls demanded from those who had been the invitees on that occasion. The ceremony in its mildest form would have been purgatorial to her spouse, but she had aggravated the torture by personally superintending his toilette. This accomplished, she entreated him if he had one atom of regard for her, to leave necktie and handkerchief alone for that night; walked him into the parlor, and inducted him into an immense easy chair directly beneath a bracket-light; thrust an illuminated folio--one of her centre-table ornaments--between his fingers, and withdrew to her own chair a little way off, to examine the effect.

"You are really picturesque, my love!" she decided, in honeyed patronage. "If you can _only_ remember to sit upright instead of slipping down in the lap of your chair until your coat-collar shows above the back of your neck, you will make a fine study for a sketch of 'Learned Leisure,' or something of that kind."

The poor man smiled resignedly, and began to turn the leaves of his book. It was a sacred alb.u.m, the work of his wife's fair fingers, although he did not know this.

"I flatter myself you will find some choice bits there?" she said, modestly.

She was fond of talking about "bits," and "effects," and "tone," and "depth;" of "_chiaro-oscuro_," and "bas-reliefs," and "intaglios,"

and "antiques,"--useful cant that forms the stock-in-trade of many an art-critic, whose decrees pa.s.s current with a larger circle than the clique which eulogized Mrs. Baxter's talents. She was, in feature and coloring, a pretty woman still, in defiance of her forty-five or forty-six years. Her brown eyes were lively; the red of her complexion, if a trifle fixed and hard, seldom outspreading the distinctly defined round spots upon the cheek-bones, was hers honestly, as were the glossy curls that showed no frost-lines, and the pearly teeth she had trained her lips to reveal at every possible opportunity. Her hands were plump, white, and small, and would have been smaller had she exercised them less. Like the teeth, they were too obtrusive. She could not say "Good-day" to a pa.s.sing acquaintance without parting her lips in a wide smile over the milk-white treasures, tucking away their natural covering in an incredibly narrow fold above the ivory, and stretching it below into a straight line which lost itself in creases that had once been dimples. She had been renowned in her youth for her vivacity, and had cultivated it into what n.o.body was kind enough to tell her was frisky affectation. The extent to which the pliant fingers curved, and twined, and twinkled, and sprawled, in the course of a conversation of moderate length, was a thing of wonder forever to the uninitiated spectator of her gambols. She added to this gesticulation a way of plunging forward from her girdle upward, when she waxed very animated, that threatened to precipitate her into the lap of her fellow-colloquist, after which she would lay her hand upon her heaving bust, and swallow audibly, while awaiting a reply to her latest deliverance. To sum up description in one word--Mrs.

Baxter's speciality was Manner.

Her friends were correct in one laudation. She was amiable and kind-hearted in her way, as her husband was in his. If she trafficked upon this excellence, made the most of it, very much after the style in which she showed off her teeth and hands, it was rather because display was her controlling foible, than through any design upon the answering grat.i.tude of her beneficiaries. She was dressed in black silk, with a jaunty velvet basquine, a scarlet scarf of Canton crepe fastened upon the right shoulder with an antique cameo, and knotted under the left, the fringed ends falling low down upon her skirt.