The Complete Writings of Charles Dudley Warner Part 197

"I think the valley, Mr. Burnett, looks a little different already."

As they drove home along the murmuring river through the golden sunset, the party were mostly silent. Only Mrs. Mavick and Philip, who sat together, kept up a lively chatter, lively because Philip was elated with the event of the day, and because the nap under the beech-tree in the open air had brightened the wits of one of the cleverest women Philip had ever met.

If the valley did seem different to Evelyn, probably she did not think so far as to own to herself whether this was owing to the outline of the story, which ran in her mind, or to the presence of the young author.

Alice and Philip were set down at the farmhouse, and the company parted with mutual enthusiasm over the success of the excursion.

"She is a much more interesting girl than I thought," Alice admitted.

"Not a bit fashionable."

"And she likes you."

"Me?"

"Yes, your ears would have burned."

"Well, I am glad, for I think she is sincere."

"And I can tell you another thing. I had a long talk while you were taking your siesta. She takes an abstract view of things, judging the right and wrong of them, without reference to conventionalities or the practical obstacles to carrying out her ideas, as if she had been educated by reading and not by society. It is very interesting."

"Philip," and Alice laid her hand on his shoulder, "don't let it be too interesting."

XIII

When Philip said that Evelyn was educated in the world of literature and not in the conflicts of life he had hit the key-note of her condition at the moment she was coming into the world and would have to act for herself. The more he saw of her the more was he impressed with the fact that her discrimination, it might almost be called divination, and her judgment were based upon the best and most vital products of the human mind. A selection had evidently been made for her, until she had acquired the taste, or the habit rather, of choosing only the best for herself. Very little of the trash of literature, or the ign.o.ble--that is to say, the ign.o.ble view of life--had come into her mind. Consequently she judged the world as she came to know it by high standards. And her mind was singularly pure and free from vulgar images.

It might be supposed that this sort of education would have its disadvantages. The word is firmly fixed in the idea that both for its pleasure and profit it is necessary to know good and evil. Ignorance of the evil in the world is, however, not to be predicated of those who are familiar only with the great masterpieces of literature, for if they are masterpieces, little or great, they exhibit human nature in all its aspects. And, further than this, it ought to be demonstrable, a priori, that a mind fed on the best and not confused by the weak and diluted, or corrupted by images of the essentially vulgar and vile, would be morally healthy and best fitted to cope with the social problems of life. The Testaments reveal about everything that is known about human nature, but such is their clear, high spirit, and their quality, that no one ever traced mental degeneration or low taste in literature, or want of virility in judgment, to familiarity with them. On the contrary, the most vigorous intellects have acknowledged their supreme indebtedness to them.

It is not likely that Philip made any such elaborate a.n.a.lysis of the girl with whom he was in love, or attempted, except by a general reference to the method of her training, to account for the purity of her mind and her vigorous discernment. He was in love with her more subtle and hidden personality, with the girl just becoming a woman, with the mysterious s.e.x that is the inspiration of most of the poetry and a good part of the heroism in the world. And he would have been in love with her, let her education have been what it might. He was in love before he heard her speak. And whatever she would say was bound to have a quality of interest and attraction that could be exercised by no other lips. It might be argued--a priori again, for the world is bound to go on in its own way--that there would be fewer marriages if the illusion of the s.e.x did not suffice for the time to hide intellectual poverty, and, what is worse, ign.o.bleness of disposition.

It was doubtless fortunate for this particular lovemaking, though it did not seem so to Philip, that it was very much obstructed by lack of opportunities, and that it was not impaired in its l.u.s.tre by too much familiarity. In truth, Philip would have said that he saw very little of Evelyn, because he never saw her absolutely alone. To be sure he was much in her presence, a welcome member of the group that liked to idle on the veranda of the inn, and in the frequent excursions, in which Philip seemed to be the companion of Mrs. Mavick rather than of her daughter.

But she was never absent from his thought, his imagination was wholly captive to her image, and the pa.s.sion grew in these hours of absence until she became an indispensable a.s.sociate in all that he was or could ever hope to be. Alice, who discerned very clearly Mrs. Mavick and her ambition, was troubled by Philip's absorption and the cruel disappointment in store for him. To her he was still the little boy, and all her tenderness for him was stirred to shield him from the suffering she feared.

But what could she do? Philip liked to talk about Evelyn, to dwell upon her peculiarities and qualities, to hear her praised; to this extent he was confidential with his cousin, but never in regard to his own feeling.

That was a secret concerning which he was at once too humble and too confident to share with any other. None knew better than he the absurd presumption of aspiring to the hand of such a great heiress, and yet he nursed the vanity that no other man could ever appreciate and love her as he did.

Alice was still more distracted and in sympathy with Philip's evident aspirations by her own love for Evelyn and her growing admiration for the girl's character. It so happened that mutual sympathy--who can say how it was related to Philip?--had drawn them much together, and chance had given them many opportunities for knowing each other. Alice had so far come out of her sh.e.l.l, and broken the reserve of her life, as to make frequent visits at the inn, and Mrs. Mavick and Evelyn found it the most natural and agreeable stroll by the river-side to the farmhouse, where naturally, while the mother amused herself with the original eccentricities of Patience, her daughter grew into an intimacy with Alice.

As for the feelings of Evelyn in these days--her first experience of something like freedom in the world--the historian has only universal experience to guide him. In her heart was working the consciousness that she had been singled out as worthy to share the confidence of a man in his most secret ambitions and aspirations, in the dreams of youth which seemed to her so n.o.ble. For these aspirations and dreams concerned the world in which she had lived most and felt most.

If Philip had talked to her as he had to Celia about his plans for success in life she would have been less interested. But there was nothing to warn her personally in these unworldly confessions. Nor did Philip ever seem to ask anything of her except sympathy in his ideas.

And then there was the friendship of Alice, which could not but influence the girl. In the shelter of that the intercourse of the summer took on natural relations. For some natures there is no nurture of love like the security of family protection, under cover of which there is so little to excite the alarm of a timid maiden.

It was fortunate for Philip that Miss McDonald took a liking to him.

They were thrown much together. They were both good walkers, and liked to climb the hills and explore the wild mountain streams. Philip would have confessed that he was fond of nature, and fancied there was a sort of superiority in his att.i.tude towards it to that of his companion, who was merely interested in plants-just a botanist. This att.i.tude, which she perceived, amused Miss McDonald.

"If you American students," she said one day when they were seated on a fallen tree in the forest, and she was expatiating on a rare plant she had found, "paid no more attention to the cla.s.sics than to the world you live in, few of you would get a degree."

"Oh, some fellows go in for that sort of thing," Philip replied.

"But I have noticed that all English women have some sort of fad--plants, sh.e.l.ls, birds, something special."

"Fad!" exclaimed the Scotchwoman. "Yes, I suppose it is, if reading is a fad. It is one way of finding out about things. You admire what the Americans call scenery; we, since you provoke me to say it, love nature --I mean its individual, almost personal manifestations. Every plant has a distinct character of its own. I saw the other day an American landscape picture with a wild, uncultivated foreground. There was not a botanical thing in it. The man who painted it didn't know a sweetbrier from a thistle.

"Just a confused ma.s.s of rubbish. It was as if an animal painter should compose a group and you could not tell whether it was made up of sheep or rabbits or dogs or foxes or griffins."

"So you want things picked out like a photograph?"

"I beg your pardon, I want nature. You cannot give character to a bit of ground in a landscape unless you know the characters of its details. A man is no more fit to paint a landscape than a cage of monkeys, unless he knows the language of the nature he is dealing with down to the alphabet.

The j.a.panese know it so well that they are not bothered with minutia, but give you character."

"And you think that science is an aid to art?"

"Yes, if there is genius to transform it into art. You must know the intimate habits of anything you paint or write about. You cannot even caricature without that. They talk now about d.i.c.kens being just a caricaturist. He couldn't have been that if he hadn't known the things he caricatured. That is the reason there is so little good caricature."

"Isn't your idea of painting rather anatomical?" Philip ventured to ask.

"Do you think that if Raphael had known nothing of anatomy the world would have accepted his Sistine Madonna for the woman she is?" was the retort.

"I see it is interesting," said Philip, shifting his ground again, "but what is the real good of all these botanical names and cla.s.sifications?"

Miss McDonald gave a weary sigh. "Well, you must put things in order.

You studied philology in Germany? The chief end of that is to trace the development, migration, civilization of the human race. To trace the distribution of plants is another way to find out about the race. But let that go. Don't you think that I get more pleasure in looking at all the growing things we see, as we sit here, than you do in seeing them and knowing as little about them as you pretend to?"

Philip said that he could not a.n.a.lyze the degree of pleasure in such things, but he seemed to take his ignorance very lightly. What interested him in all this talk was that, in discovering the mind of the governess, he was getting nearer to the mind of her pupil. And finally he asked (and Miss McDonald smiled, for she knew what this conversation, like all others with him, must ultimately come to):

"Does the Mavick family also take to botany?"

"Oh yes. Mrs. Mavick is intimate with all the florists in New York. And Miss Evelyn, when I take home these specimens, will a.n.a.lyze them and tell all about them. She is very sharp about such things. You must have noticed that she likes to be accurate?"

"But she is fond of poetry."

"Yes, of poetry that she understands. She has not much of the emotional vagueness of many young girls."

All this was very delightful for Philip, and for a long time, on one pretext or another, he kept the conversation revolving about this point.

He fancied he was very deep in doing this. To his interlocutor he was, however, very transparent. And the young man would have been surprised and flattered if he had known how much her indulgence of him in this talk was due to her genuine liking for him.

When they returned to the inn, Mrs. Mavick began to rally Philip about his feminine taste in woodsy things. He would gladly have thrown botany or anything else overboard to win the good opinion of Evelyn's mother, but botany now had a real significance and a new meaning for him.

Therefore he put in a defense, by saying:

"Botany, in the hands of Miss McDonald, cannot be called very feminine; it is a good deal more difficult to understand and master than law."

"Maybe that's the reason," said Mrs. Mavick, "why so many more girls are eager to study law now than botany."

"Law?" cried Evelyn; "and to practice?"

"Certainly. Don't you think that a bright, clever woman, especially if she were pretty, would have an advantage with judge and jury?"