Vashti Part 57

"No, Dr. Grey; I must go at once. I take all the hazard."

"Then you will find on the mantelpiece in my room, a paper containing directions for the treatment of your arm, which demands care and attention. I am sorry you are so obstinate, and, if I possessed the authority, I would forbid your departure."

He could not endure the despairing expression of her eyes, which seemed supernaturally large and brilliant, and his own quailed, for the first time within his recollection. She knew that she was going away forever, to avoid the sight of his happiness with Mrs. Gerome; that, in comparison with that torture, all other trials, even separation, would be endurable, but the least evil was more severe than she had dreaded. Now, as she looked up at his n.o.ble face, overshadowed with anxiety and regret, and paler than she had ever seen it, the one prayer of her heart was, that, ere a wife's lips touched his, death might claim him for its prey.

"Salome, I am deeply pained by the course you persist in following, but I will not provoke and annoy you by renewed expression of a disapprobation that has proved so ineffectual in influencing your decision. G.o.d grant that the results may sanction your confidence in your own judgment,--your distrust of mine. I promised you once that I would pray for you, and I wish to a.s.sure you, that, while I live, I shall never lay my head upon my pillow without having first committed you to the mercy and loving care of that Guardian who never 'slumbers, nor sleeps.' May G.o.d bless and guide you, my dear young friend, and if not again in this world, grant that we may meet in the Everlasting City of Peace. Little sister, be sure to meet me in the Kingdom of Rest, where dear Janet waits for us both."

His calm eyes filled with tears, and his voice grew tremulous, as he took Salome's cold, pa.s.sive hand, and kissed it.

"Good-by, Dr. Grey; if I find my way to heaven, it will be because you are there. When I am gone, let my name and memory be like that of the dead."

She stood erect, with her fingers lying in his palm, and the ring of her voice was like the clashing of steel against steel.

He bent down, and, for the first time, pressed his lips to her forehead; then turned quickly and walked away. When he reached the head of the stairs, he looked back and saw her standing in the door, with the candle-light flaring over her face; and in after years, he could never recall, without a keen pang, that vision of a girlish form draped in mourning, and of fair, rigid features, which hope and happiness could never again soften and brighten.

Her splendid eyes followed him, as if the sole light of her life were pa.s.sing away forever; and, with a heavy sigh, he hurried down the steps, realizing all the mournful burden of that Portuguese sonnet,--

"Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore Alone upon the threshold of my door Of individual life, I shall command The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand Serenely in the sunshine as before, Without the sense of that which I forbore-- Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine, With pulses that beat double. What I do And what I dream include thee, as the wine Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue G.o.d for myself, He hears that name of thine, And sees within my eyes the tears of two."

CHAPTER XXVI.

"I hope nothing has gone wrong, Robert? You look unusually forlorn and doleful."

Dr. Grey stepped out of his buggy, and accosted the gardener, who was leaning idly on the gate, holding a trowel in his hand, and lazily puffing the smoke from his pipe.

"I thank you, sir; with us the world wags on pretty much the same, but when a man has been planting violets on his mother's grave he does not feel like whistling and making merry. Besides, to tell the truth,--which I do not like to shirk,--I am getting very tired of this dismal, unlucky place. If I had known as much before I bought it as I do now, all the locomotives in America could not have dragged me here. I was a stranger, and of course n.o.body thought it their special duty to warn me; so I was bitten badly enough by the agent who sold me this den of misfortune. Now, when it is too late, there is no lack of busy tongues to tell me the place is haunted, and has been for, lo! these many years."

"Nonsense, Robert! I gave you credit for too much good sense to listen to the gossip of silly old wives. Put all these ridiculous tales of ghosts and hobgoblins out of your mind, man, and do not make me laugh at you, as if you were a child who had been so frightened by stories of 'raw-head and b.l.o.o.d.y-bones,' that you were afraid to blow out your candle and creep into bed."

"I am neither a fool nor a coward, and I will fight anything that I can feel has bone and muscle; but I am satisfied that if all the water in Siloam were poured over this place, it would not wash out the curse that people tell me has always rested on it since the time the pirates first located here. I can't admit I believe in witches, but undoubtedly I do believe in Satan, who seems to have a fee-simple to the place. It is not enough that my poor mother is buried yonder, but my wheat and oats took the rust; the mildew spoiled my grape crop; the rains ruined my melons; the worms ate up every blade of my gra.s.s; the cows have got the black-tongue; the gale blew down my pigeon-house and mashed all my squabs; and my splendid carnations and fuchsias are devoured by red spider. Nothing thrives, and I am sick at heart."

The dogged discontent written so legibly on his countenance, did not encourage the visitor to enter into a discussion of the abstract causes of blight, gales, and black-tongue, and he merely answered,--

"The evils you have enumerated are not peculiar to any locality; and all the farmers in this neighborhood are echoing your complaints. How is Mrs. Gerome?"

"Neither better nor worse. You know what miserable weather we have had for a week. This morning she ordered the small carriage and horses brought to the door, and when I took the reins, she dismissed me and said she preferred driving herself. I told her the grays had not been used, and were badly pampered standing so long in their stalls, and that I was really afraid they would break her neck, as she was not strong enough to manage them; but she laughed, and answered that if they did, it would be the best day's work they had ever accomplished, and she would give them a chance. Down the beach they went like a flash, and when she came home their flanks smoked like a lime-kiln.

What is ever to be done with my mistress, I am sure I don't know. She makes the house so doleful, that n.o.body wants to stay here, and only yesterday Katie and Phoebe, the cook, gave notice that they wished to leave when the month was out. She has no idea what she will do, or where she will go. We have wanted a hot-house, and she ordered me to get the builder's estimate of the cost of two plans which she drew; but when I carried them to her, she pushed them aside, and said she would think of the matter, but thought she might leave this place, and therefore would not need the building. She is as notionate as a child; and no one but my poor mother could ever manage her. Hist! sir! Don't you hear her? You may be sure there is mischief brewing when she sings like that."

Dr. Grey walked towards the house, and paused on the portico to listen,--

"Quis est h.o.m.o, qui non fleret Christi matrem si videret, In tanto supplicio."

The voice was not so strong as when he had heard it in _Addio del Pa.s.sata_, but the solemn mournfulness of its cadences was better suited to the _Stabat Mater_, and indexed much that no other method of expression would have reached. After some moments she forsook Rossini, and began the _Agnus Dei_ from Haydn's Third Ma.s.s,--

"Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere."

Surely she could not render this grand strain if her soul was in fierce rebellion; and, with strained ears and hushed breath, Dr. Grey listened to the closing

"Dona n.o.bis pacem,--pacem,--pacem."

It was a pa.s.sionate, wailing prayer, and the only one that ever crossed her lips, yet his heart throbbed with pleasure, as he noted the tremor that seemed to shiver her voice into silvery fragments; and as she ended, he knew that tears were not far from her eyes.

When he entered the room, she had left the piano, and wheeled a sofa in front of the grate, where she sat gazing, vacantly into the fiery fretwork of glowing coals.

A copy of Turner's "Liber Studiorum," superbly bound in purple velvet, lay on her knee, and into a corner of the sofa she had tossed a square of canvas almost filled with silken Parmese violets.

"Good-evening, Mrs. Gerome; I hope I do not interrupt you."

Dr. Grey removed the embroidery to the table, and seated himself in the sofa corner.

"Good evening. Interruption argues occupation and absorbed attention, and the term is not applicable to me. I who live as vainly, as uselessly, as fruitlessly, as some fakir twirling his thumbs and staring at his beard, have little right to call anything an interruption. My existence here is as still, as stagnant, as some pool down yonder in the sedge which last week's waves left among the sand hillocks, and your visits are like pebbles thrown into it, creating transient ripples and circles."

"You have gone back to the G.o.d of your aesthetic idolatry," said he, touching the "Liber Studiorum."

"Yes, because 'Beauty pitches her tents before him,' and his pencil is more potent in conjuring visions that enchant my wearied mind, than Jemschid's goblet or Iskander's mirror."

"But why stand afar off, trusting to human and fallible interpreters, when it is your privilege to draw near and dwell in the essence of the only real and divine beauty?"

"Better reverence it behind a veil, than suffer like Semele. I know my needs, and satisfy them fully. Once my heart was as bare of adoration as Egypt's tawny sands of crystal rain-pools; but looking into the realm of nature and of art, I chose the religion of the beautiful, and said to my famished soul,

'From every channel thro' which Beauty runs, To fertilize the world with lovely things, I will draw freely, and be satisfied.'"

"This morbid sentimentality, this sickly gasping system of aesthetics, _soi-disant_ 'Religion of the Beautiful,' is the curse of the age,--is a vast, universal vampire sucking the life from humanity.

Like other idolatries it may arrogate the name of 'Religion,' but it is simply downright pagan materialism, and its votaries of the nineteenth century should look back two thousand years, and renew the _Panathenoea_. The ancient Greek worship of aesthetics was a proud and pardonable system, replete with sublime images; but the idols of your emasculated creed are yellow-haired women with straight noses,--are purple clouds and moon-silvered seas,--and physical beauty const.i.tutes their sole excellence. Lovely landscapes and perfect faces are certainly ent.i.tled to a liberal quota of earnest admiration; but a religion that contents itself with merely material beauty, differs in nothing but nomenclature from the pagan worship of Cybele, Venus, and Astarte."

A chill smile momentarily brightened Mrs. Gerome's features, and turning towards her visitor, she answered slowly,--

"Be thankful, sir, that even the worship of beauty lingers in this world of sin and hate; and instead of defiling and demolishing its altars, go to work zealously and erect new ones at every cross-roads.

Lessing spoke for me when he said, 'Only a misapprehended religion can remove us from the beautiful, and it is proof that a religion is true and rightly understood when it everywhere brings us back to the Beautiful.'"

"Pardon me. I accept Lessing's words, but cavil at your interpretation of them. His reverence for Beauty embraced not merely physical and material types, but that n.o.bler, grander beauty which centres in pure ethics and ontology; and a religion that seeks no higher forms than those of clay,--whether Himalayas or 'Greek Slave,'--whether emerald icebergs, flashing under polar auroras, or the myosotis that nods there on the mantelpiece,--a religion that subst.i.tutes beauty for duty, and Nature for Nature's G.o.d, is a shameful sham, and a curse to its devotees. There is a beauty worthy of all adoration, a beauty far above Antinous, or Gula or Greek aesthetics,--a beauty that is not the _disjecta membra_ that modern maudlin sentimentality has left it,--but that perfect and immortal 'Beauty of Holiness,' that outlives marble and silver, pigment, stylus, and pagan poems that deify dust."

He leaned towards her, watching eagerly for some symptom of interest in the face before him, and bent his head until he inhaled the fragrance of the violets which cl.u.s.tered on one side of the coil of hair.

"'Beauty of Holiness.' Show it to me, Dr. Grey. Is it at La Trappe, or the Hospice of St. Bernard? Where are its temples? Where are its worshippers? Who is its Hierophant?"

"Jesus Christ."

She closed her eyes for a moment, as if to shut out some painful vision evoked by his words.

"Sir, do you recollect the reply of Laplace, when Napoleon asked him why there was no mention of G.o.d in his '_Mecanique Celeste_?' '_Sire, je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothese._' I was not sufficiently insane to base my religion of beauty upon a holiness that was buried in the tomb supplied by Joseph of Arimathea,--that was long ago hunted out of the world it might have purified. Once I believed in, and revered what I supposed was its existence, but I was speedily disenchanted of my faith, for,--

'I have seen those that wore Heaven's armor, worsted: I have heard Truth lie: Seen Life, beside the founts for which it thirsted, Curse G.o.d and die.'