At the Mercy of Tiberius Part 59

"Alma, too intemperate and prolonged diet of sweets has ruined your digestion; has rendered you an ethical dyspeptic. A surfeit of sugar betrays itself in fermentation, and you have reached the stage of moral acidulation."

"Ah, don't drift into homiletics! I see your marron grows hard by the vineyard where sour grapes flourish. Leo, I am not so serenely proud as you, but a trifle more honest, and I have cried for my bonbon, never flouting its delicious flavor; hence, when I am ordered back to boiled milk and oatmeal, I make no feint to disguise my wry faces."

Alma's low, teasing laugh stung like some persistent buzzing insect, and a slight flush tinged her companion's cheek as she replied:

"Why plunge to the opposite extreme? You will starve on that porridge you are desperately preparing for yourself."

"What else remains? This world is a huge bazaar, a big church fair, and like other eager-eyed children I promptly set my heart on the great 'bisc' doll with its head turning coquettishly from side to side, singing s.n.a.t.c.hes from 'La Grande Duchcsse', and clad like Sheba's queen! I stake all my pennies on a chance in the raffle, which has a 'consolation prize' hidden away from vulgar gaze. By and by the dice rattle, and over my head, quite out of my reach, is borne the coveted beauty (owned now by a girl I know), bowing and singing to the new owner, who exultantly exhibits her as she departs; and into my outstretched arms falls something hideous enough to play Medusa in a tableau, a rag baby with grinning Senegambian lips, rayless owlish eyes, and a concave nose whose nostrils suggest the Catacombs! Bitter rage and murderous fury possess me, but I am much too wise to show my tempers at the fair; so I hug my 'consolation prize', and get away as fast as possible with my treasure, and once safe from observation, box, deride, trample upon it, and toss it into the garret as suitable prey for dust, cobwebs and mildew! After a time, the keenness of the disappointment dulls, like all other human aches that do not kill, and by degrees I think less vindictively of the despised subst.i.tute.

Finally comes a day, when all else failing to amuse me, I creep sheepishly into the attic and pick up the rejected, and persuade myself it is at least better than no doll at all, and forthwith adorn it with rags of finery; but the echoes of 'La Grande d.u.c.h.esse' will always ring in my ears, and through the halo of tears I see ever and anon the prize beauty that was withheld. The two-edged sword in the diablerie of fate is, that we are ordained to fret after 'bisc,' when stuffed rags have been meted out as our share of the fair."

Leo drew a chair near the divan and seated herself; looking steadily into the velvety black eyes that instead of betraying hid, like a domino, the soul of their owner.

"Alma, better cross empty arms forever over empty heart, than mock your womanhood by acceptance of a 'consolation prize'."

"We all say that the day after the fair; but wait a few years as I have done; and like all your sisters in the ranks of the disappointed, you will ultimately crawl back to the attic and kiss the thick lips, and try to persuade yourself the nose is not so formidable, though certainly a trifle less cla.s.sic than Antinous's! We set out with our eyes fixed on Vega, blazing above, and flaunt our banner--'tout ou rien!'--but when the campaign ends, Vega laughs at us from the horizon, quitting our world; and we console ourselves with a rushlight, and shelter it carefully from the wind with another flag: 'Quand on n'a pas ce qu'on aime, il faut aimer ce qu'on a!' Such is the worldly wisdom that comes with ripening years, like the deep stain on the sunny side of a peach. Moreover, 'folding empty arms,' is only melodrama metaphor, and 'empty hearts' are, begging your pardon, only figments of romantic brains. Our hearts aren't empty, more's the pity! They hold deep, deep, the image of Vega, and the flare of the tallow eandle on the surface serves as cross lights to dazzle the world, and help us to hide the reflection of our star. I saw that metaphor in some novel, and recognize its truth. Do you, my princess?"

"I will never so utterly degrade myself. I could neither lower my standard, nor sacrifice my ideal," said Leo, with a touch of scorn in her usually gentle voice.

"You prefer that your ideal should sacrifice you? One enjoys for a season the wide expanse visible from that lofty emotional pinnacle; but the atmosphere is too rarefied, and we gladly descend to the warm, denser air of the plains of common sense selfishness. If it be lowering your standard to become the wife of a bishop (the youngest ever ordained in his State), clothed with the double distilled odors of sanct.i.ty and popularity, then heaven help your standard, which only heaven can fitly house."

"Since you persist in a.s.suming that so flattering an offer has been made me, I will set this subject at rest, by a final a.s.surance that even were your surmise correct, I could never under any imaginable circ.u.mstances marry my cousin, Bishop Dougla.s.s. Although I trust and reverence him beyond all other men, 'I love my cousin cousinly, no more,' and he is too much absorbed by his holy office and its solemn responsibilities, to waste thought on the frail, sweet, rosy garland of any woman's love. Fret yourself no longer in casting matrimonial horoscopes for me."

The flushed cheeks, and a certain icy curtness in Leo's tone, warned her companion that she was rashly invading sacred precincts.

"Eight years ago I made the solemn a.s.severation that I would never marry; and I ran as a raw recruit to swell the army of foolish virgins who lost all the wedding splendors, the hypothetical 'cakes and ale', for want of the oil of worldly wisdom. Now I am thirty-three, and my lamp is filled to the brim, and the bridegroom is in sight. Why not?

Adverse weather, rain, rust and mildew spoiled my beautiful golden harvest ten years ago, but aftermath is better than bare stubble fields, and though you miss the song of the reapers, you escape starvation. Deny it as we may, we are hopelessly given over to fetichism, and each one of us ties around her stone image some beguiling orthodox label. Leo, yours is pride, masquerading in the dun garb of 'religious duty'. Mine is self-love, pure and simple, the worldly weal of Alma Cutting; but nominally it is dubbed 'grateful requital of a life of devotion' in my lover! You grieve over my heartlessness? That is the one compensation time brings, when men and women have killed the best in our natures. Teeth ache fiercely; then the nerve dies, and we have surcease from pain, and find comfort in knowing that the darkening wreck can throb no more. There was a time when the pangs of Prometheus seemed only pastime to mine, but all things end; and now I get on as comfortably without a heart, as the victims of vivisection--the frogs, and guinea pigs, and rabbits--do without their brains."

"I do indeed grieve over the fatal step you contemplate; I grieve over your unwomanliness in marrying a man whom you do not even pretend to love; and some terrible penalty will avenge the outrage against feminine nature. Some day your heart will stir in its cold torpor, and then all Dante's visions of horror, will become your realities, scuurging you down to despair."

"Because 'Farleigh Court' may lie dangerously close to 'Denzil Place'?

Be easy, Leo; the cold remains of my ossified affection will lie in as decorous repose as the harmless ash heaps of some long buried damosel of the era of Lars Porsenna, dug out of Vulci or Chiusi. To make a safe and brilliant marriage is the acme of social success. What else does the world to which I belong, offer me now?"

"There remains always, Alma, the alternative of listening to the instinctive monitors G.o.d set to watch in every woman's nature; and we have the precious and inalienable privilege of being true to ourselves.

Better mourn your 'bisc' than stoop to a lower subst.i.tute. Be loyal to yourself, be true to your own heart."

"I know myself rather too intimately to offer a tribute of admiration on the altar of ego; and I prefer to make the experiment of trying to be true and loyal to some one else, with whose imperfections I am not so well acquainted. When you meet your adorable 'bisc' in society, with a wife hanging on his arm,--when as pater familias he convoys his flock of small children who tread on your toes at the chrysanthemum shows, what then? The world, my world, is generously and munificently lax, and though the limits of respectable endurance may be as hard to find as the 'fourth dimension of s.p.a.ce', or the authenticity of the 'Book of Jasher', still for decency's sake we submit there are limits of decorum; certain proprietorial domains upon which we may not openly poach; and mc.u.m et tuum though moribund, is not yet numbered with belief in the 'grail'. Female emanc.i.p.ation is not quite complete even in America, and n.o.blesse oblige! our code still reads: 'Zeus has unquestioned right to Io; but woe betide Io when she suns her heart in the smiles that belong to Hera!' Some women find exhilaration in the effort to excel, by flying closest to the flame without singeing their satin wings; by executing a pirouette on the extremest ledge of the abyss, yet escape toppling in; female Blondins skipping across the tight rope of Platonic friends.h.i.+p, stretched above the unmentionable.

You are shocked?"

"Indeed, I am pained. I can scarcely recognize the Alma of old."

"Wait one moment, I have the floor. In the days when I wept for my--shall I say 'bisc'? for impersonality is hedged about with safety, and the consolation prize had not yet been invited to come back from Coventry, a funny trifle set me to thinking seriously of my sin of covetousness. One summer at a certain fas.h.i.+onable resort, let us call it villeggiatura of the Lepidoptera, the amus.e.m.e.nt programme had reached the last act, and people yawned for something new, when 'sweet charity' came to the rescue, and proposed an entertainment to raise funds for enlarging an ecclesiastical 'Columbary' where aged, unsightly and repentant doves might moult, and renew their plumage. Musical, dramatic, poetic recitations, and tableaux vivants const.i.tuted the method of collecting the money, and the selections would have made Rabelais chuckle. We had the most flagitiously erotic pa.s.sages (rendered in costume) from opera and opera bouffe, living reproductions of the tragic pose of Paolo and Francesca that would hare inspired Cabanel anew; of 'Ginevra Da Siena,' of 'Vivien,'--a carnival of the carnal! where nurseries were robbed to supply the mimic ballet, and where bald-headed clergyman, and white-haired mothers in Israel clapped and encored. One fair forsaken dame, whose indignant spouse was seeking a divorce, came to the footlights in an artistic garment so decollete that a man sitting behind me whispered to his friend: 'What pictures does she suggest to you? "Phryne before the Judges"--or Long's "Thisbe?" She languorously waved a floral fan of crimson carnations, and recited with all of Siddons' grace and Rachel's fire selections from a book of poems, that were so many dynamite bombs of vice smothered in roses. Amid tumultuous applause, she gave as encore something that contained a fragment of Feydeau, and its closing words woke up my drowsy soul, like a clap of thunder: 'Ce que les poetes appellent l'amour, et les moralistes l'adultere!' Leo, there is a moral somnambulism more frightful than that which leads to midnight promenades on the combs of roofs, and the borders of Goat Island; so I wiped my tears away, and after that day, began to read the billet doux and wear the flowers of my 'consolation prize'."

"You do not love him, and your marriage will degrade you in your own estimation. Your bridal vows will be perjury, an insult to your G.o.d, and a foul terrible wrong against the man who trusts your truthfulness.

According to our church, wedlock is a 'holy ordinance'; and to me an unloving wife is unhallowed; is a blot on her s.e.x, only a few degrees removed from unmarried mothers. You know the difference between friends.h.i.+p and love, and when you go to the altar, and give the former in exchange for the latter, the base counterfeit for the true gold, you are consciously and premeditatedly dishonest."

"Thanks, for your clearness of diction, your perspicuity which leaves no cobweb of misty doubt wherewith to drape my s.h.i.+vering moral deformity! To 'see ourselves as others see us' is as disappointing as the result of plunging one's hand into the 'grab-bag', but at least it brings the stimulating tingle of a new sensation. Suppose each knows perfectly well that as regards the true gold, both are equally bankrupt? There is a queer moral fungus called 'honesty among thieves', and we both know that we never sang s.n.a.t.c.hes from Offenbach to each other, through pink 'bisc' lips. He loved quite desperately a mignonne of a blonde, with heavenly blue eyes and cherubic yellow hair, who, not knowing his expectations from a California uncle, jilted him for a rich Cuban. Look you, Leo, because I cannot wear Kohinoor, must I disport myself without any diamond necklace? Since he can never own 'La Peregrina,' must he eschew pearl studs in his s.h.i.+eld front? We distinctly understand that we are not first prizes; but perhaps we may be something better than total blanks in the lottery, even though we quite realize the difference between love and friends.h.i.+p. Do you?

Portia should know every jot and t.i.ttle of the law, and all the subtle shades of evidence, before she lifts her voice in court."

Alma pushed away her cus.h.i.+on, sat upright, and the slumbering fire flashed up under her jet lashes.

"If I do, that knowledge which earlier or later comes to all women, is certainly linked with the comforting consciousness that I can trust myself to govern and protect myself, without being tied to a watch-dog, whose baying would serve much the same purpose as that picture in mosaic in the House of the Tragic Poet. I have a very sincere affection for you, Alma, but the day on which you sell yourself in a loveless marriage, will strain hard on the cable of esteem."

"Is it for this reason that you refuse to officiate as my bridesmaid?"

"Solely because I will neither witness nor partic.i.p.ate in an act which will give me great pain by lowering my estimate of your character."

Alma's long, supple, tapering fingers were outstretched, and taking Leo's white dimpled hands, drew them caressingly to her face, pressing a palm against each cheek.

"Your good opinion is so precious, I cannot afford to lose it. We accept men's flattery and expect their compliments, because it is a traditional homage that survives the chivalry that inspired it; but we don't mistake chaff for wheat, and the purest, sweetest, n.o.blest and holiest friends.h.i.+p in life is that of a true, good woman. The perfume is as different as the stale odor of a cigar, from the breath of the honeysuckle that bleached all night under crystal dew, floats in at your window like a message from heaven, I love you dearly, my pretty Portia, hence I wince a trifle at your harsh ascription of cave canem motives in my marriage. In the idyllic Arthurian days, the 'Lily Maid of Astolot' made a touching picture, weeping and dying for the man who rode away, marauding on kingly preserves; but this is the era of wise, common sense 'Maud Mullers', and she and the Judge, mating as best they can, lead peaceful lives in a wholesome atmosphere, and cause no scandal by following 'affinities' across the lines of law; as some high in literature, art, and society have done, trusting that the starred mantle of genius would hide their moral leprosy. With all my faults, at least I am honest; and when I bow my stiff neck under the yoke connubial, I promise you I will keep step demurely and sedately. Do you remember a sombre book we read while yachting, which contained this brave confession of a woman, whose marriage made her historic? 'I thought I had done with life. I knew I had now cause to be proud of belonging to this man, and I was proud. At the same time I as little feigned ardent love for him, as he demanded it from me.' Leo, you and I represent different types. You are an eagle brooding in cold eternal solitude upon the heights, rather than be wooed by valley hawks; I am only a very tired wren, who missed a mate on my first Valentine season, and seeing my plumage grows a rusty brown, I accept the overtures of one similarly forlorn, and hope for serene domesticity under the sheltering eaves of some quiet, cosey barn. You are a n.o.bler bird, no doubt; but trust me dear, I shall be the happier."

Leo withdrew her hands, and pushed back her chair, widening the s.p.a.ce that divided them.

"You disappoint me keenly. I thought you too brave to crouch before the jeers hurled at 'old maidenism'. Moral cowardice is the last flaw I expected in one of your fibre."

"Wait till you are thirty-three, and stand as a target at Society's archery meeting. Yesterday Celeste was pale with horror when she showed me two white hairs pulled from my 'bangs', and added, 'Helas races! and powdered hair no more the style!' My dear girl--

"'True love, of course, is scarcely in society, Unless in fancy dress, and masked like one of us--'"

still I really am very proud of my six feet two inches prospective conjugal yoke-fellow; proud of his martial bearing, his brilliant reputation, 'proud of his pride'; and I think I shall grow very fond of him, because in a mild way I think he cares for me'; and we can make a little Indian Summer for each other before the frosts of Winter fall upon us. What else can I do with my life? Think of it. Papa will be married soon, and while I don't propose to tear my hair and insult his bride, n.o.body can be expected to reach such alt.i.tudes of self-abnegation as to want a step-mother. Poor papa, I am sure I hope he may be very happy, but it is superhuman to elect to live under the same roof, and smile benignantly on his bliss. Rivers, too, has slipped under the matrimonial noose, and I am absolutely thrown on my own resources for companions.h.i.+p. What does society offer me? Haggard, weazen old witch, bedizened in a painted mask; don't I know the yellow teeth and bleared eyes behind the paste-board, and the sharp nails in the claws hidden under undressed kid? Have not I gone around for years on her gaudy wheel, like that patient, uncomplaining goat we saw stepping on the broad spokes of the great wheel that churned the b.u.t.ter, and pressed the cheese in that dairy, near Udine? The dizzying circle, where one must step, step--keep time or be lost! In Winter, b.a.l.l.s, receptions, luncheons, teas, Germans, theatre parties, opera suppers; a rush for the first glimpse of the last picture that emerges from the custom-house; for a bouquet of the newest rose that took the prize at the London Show. In season, coaching parties, tally ho! Then fox hunting minus the fox, and later, boating and bathing and lawn tennis!--and--always--everywhere heart-burnings, vapid formalities; beaux setting belles at each other like terriers scrambling after a mouse; mothers lying in wait, as wise cats watching to get their paws on the first-cla.s.s catch they know their pretty kittens cannot manage successfully. Oh! Don't I know it all! I dare say my world is the very best possible of its kind; and I am not cynical, but oh Lord! I am so deadly tired of everything, and everybody."

"No wonder, unless you mercilessly calumniate it; but you have only yourself to blame. You made social success your aim, fas.h.i.+onable life your temple of wors.h.i.+p, sham your only G.o.d. If you habitually drink poppy juice, can you fail to be drowsy?"

"Oh bless you! I have been polytheistic as any other well-read pagan of my day, and changed the heads and the labels of the fetiches on my altar almost as often as my ball wardrobe. I aspired to 'culture' in all the 'cults', and I improved diligently my opportunities. One year the stylish craze was sesthetics, and I fought my way to the front of the bedlamites raving about Sapphic types, 'Sibylla Palmifera' and 'Astarte Syriaca'; and I wore miraculously limp, draggled skirts, that tangled about my feet tight as the robes of Burne Jones' 'Vivien.' Next season the star of ceramics and bric-a-brac was in the ascendant, and I ran the gamut of Satsuma, Kyoto, de la Robbia, Limoge and Gubbio; of niello, and millchori gla.s.s, of Queen Anne bra.s.s and j.a.panese bronze; while my snuff boxes and my 'symphony in fans' graced all the loan exhibitions. Soon after, a celebrated scientist from England who had bowled over all the pins set up by his predecessors, lectured in our Bojotia; and fired with zeal for truth, I swept aside all my costly idealistic rubbish into a 'doomed pyramid of the vanities', and swore allegiance to the Positive, the 'Knowable', whose priests handled hammers, spectroscopes, electric batteries--and who set up for me a whole Pantheon of science fetiches. I bought a microscope and peered into tissues, pollen cells, diatoms, ditch ooze; and pitied my clever and very talented grandmother who died ignorant of the family secrets revealed by 'totemism', ignorant of 'parthenogenesis' which proved so conclusively the truth of her own firm conviction, that the faults she deplored in her son's children were all inherited directly from her daughter-in-law, whom she detested; ignorant of the fact that the sun which she regarded as a dazzling yellow fire was by bolometric measures shown to be in reality of a restful, and refres.h.i.+ng blue color. By the time I was fully convinced that teleology was as dead as the Ptolemaic theory, and that 'wings were not planned for flight, but that flight has produced wings', hence that Haeckel's gospel of 'Dysteleology' or purposelessness in Nature satisfactorily explained creation--a great wave of oriental theosophy overflowed us; and a revival of Buddhism invited me to seek Nirvana as the final beat.i.tude, where--

"'We shall be Part of the mighty universal whole, And through all icons mix and mingle with the Kosmic Soul!'"

Or to make matters clearer still:

"'Om, mani Padma, Om! the dewdrop slips Into the s.h.i.+ning sea!'"

Even a sponge can hold only so much, and I fell back--or shall I say forward--in the path of progress to rest in the dimness of agnosticism.

Is it strange, Leo, that I am desperately tired; and willing to plant my feet on the rock of matrimony, which will neither dissolve nor slip away, and to which my vows will moor me firmly?"

"If you had clung to your Bible, and prayed more, you would not have wasted so signally the years that might have brought you enduring happiness. Forgive me, Alma, but you have lived solely for self."

"Yet now, when I propose to live solely for somebody else, you shake me off, and repudiate me? Selfish you think? I dare say I am, but religion now-a-day winks at that, nay fosters it. Each church is an octopus, and the members are laboriously striving to disprove the Saviour's admonition: 'Ye cannot serve G.o.d and mammon.' I am no worse than my ritualistic sisters whom I meet and gossip with, under cover of the organ muttering, and sometimes I wonder if after all we are any nearer the kingdom of heaven that Christ preached, than the pagans whose customs we retain under evangelical names. 'They sacrificed a white kid to the propitious divinities, and a black kid to the unpropiticus.' Do not we likewise? The church or one of its pensioners needs money; so instead of denying ourselves some secular amus.e.m.e.nt, cutting short our chablis, terrapin, pate de foie gras, gateau, Grec, Amontillado; wearing less sealskin and sables, buying fewer pigeon-blood rubies, absolutely mortifying the flesh in order to offer a contribution out of our pockets to G.o.d, how ingeniously we devise schemes to extract the largest possible amount of purely personal pleasure from the expenditure of the sum, we call our contribution to charity? We build chapels, and feed orphans, and clothe widows, and endow reformatories, and establish beds in hospitals, how? By a devout, consecrating self-denial which manifests itself in eating and drinking, in singing and dancing, at kirmess, charity b.a.l.l.s, amateur theatricals, garden parties; where the cost of our XV. Siecle costume is quadruple the price of the ticket that admits to our sacrifice of black and white kids in the same sanctuary. We serve G.o.d with one hand, and we surely serve with the other the Mammon of selfishness and vanity. We have Lenten service, Lenten dietetics, Lenten costumes even; Lenten progressive euchre, Lenten clubs; but where are the Lenten virtues, where the genuine humility, charity, self-dedication of body and soul to true holiness?"

"The church is a school. If pupils will not heed admonition, and defy the efforts of instructors, is the inst.i.tution responsible for the failure in education? The eradication of selfishness is the mission of the churches; and if we individually practised at home a genuine self-denial for righteousness' sake, we should collectively show the world fewer flaws for scoffing reprimand."

"The Shepherds are too timid to control their flocks. If they only had the nerve to pick us up, turn our hearts inside out, show us the black corners, and the ossifications, and call sin, sin, we should begin to realize what despicable shams we are. Dr. Dougla.s.s, the Bishop, is the only one I know who lays us on the dissecting table, and who does not speak of 'human fallibility' when he means vice. He told us one day that the Gospel required a line of demarcation between the G.o.dly and the unG.o.dly, between Christians and unbelievers; but that it has become imaginary like the meridian and the equator; and that he very much feared the strongest microscope in the laboratories could not find where the boundary line ran between the World, the Flesh and the Devil, and the Kingdom of G.o.d in our souls. I am sorry a distant State called him to her Episcopal chair, for his cold steel is needed among us. Now tell me, Leo, what you intend to do with your life?"

"Spend it for G.o.d and my fellow creatures; and enjoy all the pure happiness I can appropriate without wronging others. I have so many privileges granted me, that I ought to accomplish some good in this world, as a thank offering."

"Take care you don't make a fetich of Jerusalem missions, Chinese tracts, and Sheltering Arms; and lose your dear, sweet personality in a goody-goody machine bigot. Forgive me, dear old girl, but sometimes I fear a shadow has fallen in your suns.h.i.+ne."

"Sooner or later they fall into every life, yet mine will pa.s.s away I feel a.s.sured. 'Pain, suffering, failure are as needful as ballast to a s.h.i.+p, without which it does not draw enough water, becomes a plaything for the winds and waves, travels no certain road, and easily overturns.' If the gloomiest pessimist of this century can extract that comfort, what may I not hope for my future? I am going to rebuild my house at X----and when it is completed, I shall expect the privilege of returning the hospitality you have so kindly shown me. I shall be very busy for at least two years, and I am glad to know that Aunt Patty is beginning to manifest some interest in my plans."

"Leo, may I ask something?"