Malbone Part 11

All his career in life had been a solid progress, and his boldest speculations seemed securer than the legitimate business of less potent financiers. Beginning business life by peddling gingerbread on a railway train, he had developed such a genius for railway management as some men show for chess or for virtue; and his acc.u.mulating property had the momentum of a planet.

He had read a good deal at odd times, and had seen a great deal of men. His private morals were unstained, he was equable and amiable, had strong good sense, and never got beyond his depth. He had travelled in Europe and brought home many statistics, some new thoughts, and a few good pictures selected by his friends. He spent his money liberally for the things needful to his position, owned a yacht, bred trotting-horses, and had founded a theological school. He submitted to these and other social observances from a vague sense of duty as an American citizen; his real interest lay in business and in politics. Yet he conducted these two vocations on principles diametrically opposite. In business he was more honest than the average; in politics he had no conception of honesty, for he could see no difference between a politician and any other merchandise. He always succeeded in business, for he thoroughly understood its principles; in politics he always failed in the end, for he recognized no principles at all. In business he was active, resolute, and seldom deceived; in politics he was equally active, but was apt to be irresolute, and was deceived every day of his life. In both cases it was not so much from love of power that he labored, as from the excitement of the game. The larger the scale the better he liked it; a large railroad operation, a large tract of real estate, a big and noisy statesman,--these investments he found irresistible.

On which of his two sets of principles he would manage a wife remained to be proved. It is the misfortune of what are called self-made men in America, that, though early accustomed to the society of men of the world, they often remain utterly unacquainted with women of the world, until those charming perils are at last sprung upon them in full force, at New York or Was.h.i.+ngton. John Lambert at forty was as absolutely ignorant of the qualities and habits of a cultivated woman as of the details of her toilet. The plain domesticity of his departed wife he had understood and prized; he remembered her household ways as he did her black alpaca dress; indeed, except for that item of apparel, she was not so unlike himself. In later years he had seen the women of society; he had heard them talk; he had heard men talk about them, wittily or wickedly, at the clubs; he had perceived that a good many of them wished to marry him, and yet, after all, he knew no more of them than of the rearing of humming-birds or orchids,--dainty, tropical things which he allowed his gardener to raise, he keeping his hands off, and only paying the bills. Whether there was in existence a cla.s.s of women who were both useful and refined,--any intermediate type between the b.u.t.terfly and the drudge,--was a question which he had sometimes asked himself, without having the materials to construct a reply.

With imagination thus touched and heart unfilled, this man had been bewitched from the very first moment by Emilia. He kept it to himself, and heard in silence the criticisms made at the club-windows. To those perpetual jokes about marriage, which are showered with such graceful courtesy about the path of widowers, he had no reply; or at most would only admit that he needed some elegant woman to preside over his establishment, and that he had better take her young, as having habits less fixed. But in his secret soul he treasured every tone of this girl's voice, every glance of her eye, and would have kept in a casket of gold and diamonds the little fragrant glove she once let fall. He envied the penniless and brainless boys, who, with ready gallantry, pushed by him to escort her to her carriage; and he lay awake at night to form into words the answer he ought to have made, when she threw at him some careless phrase, and gave him the opportunity to blunder.

And she, meanwhile, unconscious of his pa.s.sion, went by him in her beauty, and caught him in the net she never threw. Emilia was always piquant, because she was indifferent; she had never made an effort in her life, and she had no respect for persons. She was capable of marrying for money, perhaps, but the sacrifice must all be completed in a single vow. She would not tutor nor control herself for the purpose.

Hand and heart must be duly transferred, she supposed, whenever the time was up; but till then she must be free.

This with her was not art, but necessity; yet the most accomplished art could have devised nothing so effectual to hold her lover. His strong sense had always protected him from the tricks of matchmaking mammas and their guileless maids. Had Emilia made one effort to please him, once concealed a dislike, once affected a preference, the spell might have been broken. Had she been his slave, he might have become a very unyielding or a very heedless despot. Making him her slave, she kept him at the very height of bliss. This king of railways and purchaser of statesmen, this man who made or wrecked the fortunes of others by his whim, was absolutely governed by a reckless, pa.s.sionate, inexperienced, ignorant girl.

And this pa.s.sion was made all the stronger by being a good deal confined to his own breast. Somehow it was very hard for him to talk sentiment to Emilia; he instinctively saw she disliked it, and indeed he liked her for not approving the stiff phrases which were all he could command. Nor could he find any relief of mind in talking with others about her. It enraged him to be clapped on the back and congratulated by his compeers; and he stopped their coa.r.s.e jokes, often rudely enough. As for the young men at the club, he could not bear to hear them mention his darling's name, however courteously. He knew well enough that for them the betrothal had neither dignity nor purity; that they held it to be as much a matter of bargain and sale as their worst amours. He would far rather have talked to the theological professors whose salaries he paid, for he saw that they had a sort of grave, formal tradition of the sacredness of marriage. And he had a right to claim that to him it was sacred, at least as yet; all the ideal side of his nature was suddenly developed; he walked in a dream; he even read Tennyson.

Sometimes he talked a little to his future brother-in-law, Harry,--a.s.suming, as lovers are wont, that brothers see sisters on their ideal side. This was quite true of Harry and Hope, but not at all true as regarded Emilia. She seemed to him simply a beautiful and ungoverned girl whom he could not respect, and whom he therefore found it very hard to idealize. Therefore he heard with a sort of sadness the outpourings of generous devotion from John Lambert.

"I don't know how it is, Henry," the merchant would gravely say, "I can't get rightly used to it, that I feel so strange. Honestly, now, I feel as if I was beginning life over again. It ain't a selfish feeling, so I know there's some good in it. I used to be selfish enough, but I ain't so to her. You may not think it, but if it would make her happy, I believe I could lie down and let her carriage roll over me. By -----, I would build her a palace to live in, and keep the lodge at the gate myself, just to see her pa.s.s by. That is, if she was to live in it alone by herself. I couldn't stand sharing her. It must be me or n.o.body."

Probably there was no male acquaintance of the parties, however hardened, to whom these fine flights would have seemed more utterly preposterous than to the immediate friend and prospective bridesmaid, Miss Blanche Ingleside. To that young lady, trained sedulously by a devoted mother, life was really a serious thing. It meant the full rigor of the marriage market, tempered only by dancing and new dresses. There was a stern sense of duty beneath all her robing and disrobing; she conscientiously did what was expected of her, and took her little amus.e.m.e.nts meanwhile. It was supposed that most of the purchasers in the market preferred slang and bare shoulders, and so she favored them with plenty of both. It was merely the law of supply and demand. Had John Lambert once hinted that he would accept her in decent black, she would have gone to the next ball as a Sister of Charity; but where was the need of it, when she and her mother both knew that, had she appeared as the Veiled Prophet of Khora.s.san, she would not have won him? So her only resource was a cheerful acquiescence in Emilia's luck, and a judicious propitiation of the accepted favorite.

"I wouldn't mind playing Virtue Rewarded myself, young woman," said Blanche, "at such a scale of prices. I would do it even to so slow an audience as old Lambert. But you see, it isn't my line. Don't forget your humble friends when you come into your property, that's all."

Then the tender coterie of innocents entered on some preliminary consideration of wedding-dresses.

When Emilia came home, she dismissed the whole matter lightly as a settled thing, evaded all talk with Aunt Jane, and coolly said to Kate that she had no objection to Mr. Lambert, and might as well marry him as anybody else.

"I am not like you and Hal, you know," said she. "I have no fancy for love in a cottage. I never look well in anything that is not costly. I have not a taste that does not imply a fortune. What is the use of love?

One marries for love, and is unhappy ever after. One marries for money, and perhaps gets love after all. I dare say Mr. Lambert loves me, though I do not see why he should."

"I fear he does," said Kate, almost severely.

"Fear?" said Emilia.

"Yes," said Kate. "It is an unequal bargain, where one side does all the loving."

"Don't be troubled," said Emilia. "I dare say he will not love me long.

n.o.body ever did!" And her eyes filled with tears which she dashed away angrily, as she ran up to her room.

It was harder yet for her to talk with Hope, but she did it, and that in a very serious mood. She had never been so open with her sister.

"Aunt Jane once told me," she said, "that my only safety was in marrying a good man. Now I am engaged to one."

"Do you love him, Emilia?" asked Hope, gravely.

"Not much," said Emilia, honestly. "But perhaps I shall, by and by."

"Emilia," cried Hope, "there is no such thing as happiness in a marriage without love."

"Mine is not without love," the girl answered. "He loves me. It frightens me to see how much he loves me. I can have the devotion of a lifetime, if I will. Perhaps it is hard to receive it in such a way, but I can have it. Do you blame me very much?"

Hope hesitated. "I cannot blame you so much, my child," she said, "as if I thought it were money for which you cared. It seems to me that there must be something beside that, and yet--"

"O Hope, how I thank you," interrupted Emilia. "It is not money. You know I do not care about money, except just to buy my clothes and things. At least, I do not care about so much as he has,--more than a million dollars, only think! Perhaps they said two million. Is it wrong for me to marry him, just because he has that?"

"Not if you love him."

"I do not exactly love him, but O Hope, I cannot tell you about it. I am not so frivolous as you think. I want to do my duty. I want to make you happy too: you have been so sweet to me."

"Did you think it would make me happy to have you married?" asked Hope, surprised, and kissing again and again the young, sad face. And the two girls went upstairs together, brought for the moment into more sisterly nearness by the very thing that had seemed likely to set them forever apart.

XIII. DREAMING DREAMS.

SO short was the period between Emilia's betrothal and her marriage, that Aunt Jane's sufferings over trousseau and visits did not last long.

Mr. Lambert's society was the worst thing to bear.

"He makes such long calls!" she said, despairingly. "He should bring an almanac with him to know when the days go by."

"But Harry and Philip are here all the time," said Kate, the accustomed soother.

"Harry is quiet, and Philip keeps out of the way lately," she answered.

"But I always thought lovers the most inconvenient thing about a house.

They are more troublesome than the mice, and all those people who live in the wainscot; for though the lovers make less noise, yet you have to see them."

"A necessary evil, dear," said Kate, with much philosophy.

"I am not sure," said the complainant. "They might be excluded in the deed of a house, or by the terms of the lease. The next house I take, I shall say to the owner, 'Have you a good well of water on the premises?

Are you troubled with rats or lovers?' That will settle it."

It was true, what Aunt Jane said about Malbone. He had changed his habits a good deal. While the girls were desperately busy about the dresses, he beguiled Harry to the club, and sat on the piazza, talking sentiment and sarcasm, regardless of hearers.

"When we are young," he would say, "we are all idealists in love. Every imaginative boy has such a pa.s.sion, while his intellect is crude and his senses indifferent. It is the height of bliss. All other pleasures are not worth its pains. With older men this ecstasy of the imagination is rare; it is the senses that clutch or reason which holds."

"Is that an improvement?" asked some juvenile listener.

"No!" said Philip, strongly. "Reason is cold and sensuality hateful; a man of any feeling must feed his imagination; there must be a woman of whom he can dream."

"That is," put in some more critical auditor, "whom he can love as a woman loves a man."

"For want of the experience of such a pa.s.sion," Malbone went on, unheeding, "n.o.body comprehends Petrarch. Philosophers and sensualists all refuse to believe that his dream of Laura went on, even when he had a mistress and a child. Why not? Every one must have something to which his dreams can cling, amid the degradations of actual life, and this tie is more real than the degradation; and if he holds to the tie, it will one day save him."

"What is the need of the degradation?" put in the clear-headed Harry.

"None, except in weakness," said Philip. "A stronger nature may escape it. Good G.o.d! do I not know how Petrarch must have felt? What sorrow life brings! Suppose a man hopelessly separated from one whom he pa.s.sionately loves. Then, as he looks up at the starry sky, something says to him: 'You can bear all these agonies of privation, loss of life, loss of love,--what are they? If the tie between you is what you thought, neither life nor death, neither folly nor sin, can keep her forever from you.' Would that one could always feel so! But I am weak.

Then comes impulse, it thirsts for some immediate gratification; I yield, and plunge into any happiness since I cannot obtain her. Then comes quiet again, with the stars, and I bitterly reproach myself for needing anything more than that stainless ideal. And so, I fancy, did Petrarch."

Philip was getting into a dangerous mood with his sentimentalism. No lawful pa.s.sion can ever be so bewildering or ecstatic as an unlawful one. For that which is right has all the powers of the universe on its side, and can afford to wait; but the wrong, having all those vast forces against it, must hurry to its fulfilment, reserve nothing, concentrate all its ecstasies upon to-day. Malbone, greedy of emotion, was drinking to the dregs a pa.s.sion that could have no to-morrow.