Through the Eye of the Needle Part 9

"Oh, it's nothing. It's merely that--that when you are not here with us I lose my grasp on Altruria, and--and I begin to doubt--"

I smiled. "I know! People here have often hinted something of that kind to me. Tell me, Mrs. Gray, do Americans generally take me for an impostor?"

"Oh no!" she answered, fervently. "Everybody that I have heard speak of you has the highest regard for you, and believes you perfectly sincere.

But--"

"But what?" I entreated.

"They think you may be mistaken."

"Then they think I am out of my wits--that I am in an hallucination!"

"No, not that," she returned. "But it is so very difficult for us to conceive of a whole nation living, as you say you do, on the same terms as one family, and no one trying to get ahead of another, or richer, and having neither inferiors nor superiors, but just one dead level of equality, where there is no distinction except by natural gifts and good deeds or beautiful works. It seems impossible--it seems ridiculous."

"Yes," I confessed, "I know that it seems so to the Americans."

"And I must tell you something else, Mr. h.o.m.os, and I hope you won't take it amiss. The first night when you talked about Altruria here, and showed us how you had come, by way of England, and the place where Altruria ought to be on our maps, I looked them over, after you were gone, and I could make nothing of it. I have often looked at the map since, but I could never find Altruria; it was no use."

"Why," I said, "if you will let me have your atlas--"

She shook her head. "It would be the same again as soon as you went away." I could not conceal my distress, and she went on: "Now, you mustn't mind what I say. I'm nothing but a silly old woman, and Eveleth would never forgive me if she could know what I've been saying."

"Then Mrs. Strange isn't troubled, as you are, concerning me?" I asked, and I confess my anxiety attenuated my voice almost to a whisper.

"She won't admit that she is. It might be better for her if she would.

But Eveleth is very true to her friends, and that--that makes me all the more anxious that she should not deceive herself."

"Oh, Mrs. Gray!" I could not keep a certain tone of reproach out of my words.

She began to weep. "There! I knew I should hurt your feelings. But you mustn't mind what I say. I beg your pardon! I take it all back--"

"Ah, I don't want you to take it back! But what proof shall I give you that there is such a land as Altruria? If the darkness implies the day, America must imply Altruria. In what way do I seem false, or mad, except that I claim to be the citizen of a country where people love one another as the first Christians did?"

"That is just it," she returned. "n.o.body can imagine the first Christians, and do you think we can imagine anything like them in our own day?"

"But Mrs. Strange--she imagines us, you say?"

"She thinks she does; but I am afraid she only thinks so, and I know her better than you do, Mr. h.o.m.os. I know how enthusiastic she always was, and how unhappy she has been since she has lost her hold on faith, and how eagerly she has caught at the hope you have given her of a higher life on earth than we live here. If she should ever find out that she was wrong, I don't know what would become of her. You mustn't mind me; you mustn't let me wound you by what I say."

"You don't wound me, and I only thank you for what you say; but I entreat you to believe in me. Mrs. Strange has not deceived herself, and I have not deceived her. Shall I protest to you, by all I hold sacred, that I am really what I told you I was; that I am not less, and that Altruria is infinitely more, happier, better, gladder, than any words of mine can say? Shall I not have the happiness to see your daughter to-day? I had something to say to her--and now I have so much more! If she is in the house, won't you send to her? I can make her understand--"

I stopped at a certain expression which I fancied I saw in Mrs. Gray's face.

"Mr. h.o.m.os," she began, so very seriously that my heart trembled with a vague misgiving, "sometimes I think you had better not see my daughter any more."

"Not see her any more?" I gasped.

"Yes; I don't see what good can come of it, and it's all very strange and uncanny. I don't know how to explain it; but, indeed, it isn't anything personal. It's because you are of a state of things so utterly opposed to human nature that I don't see how--I am afraid that--"

"But I am not uncanny to _her!_" I entreated. "I am not unnatural, not incredible--"

"Oh no; that is the worst of it. But I have said too much; I have said a great deal more than I ought. But you must excuse it: I am an old woman.

I am not very well, and I suppose it's that that makes me talk so much."

She rose from her chair, and I, perforce, rose from mine and made a movement towards her.

"No, no," she said, "I don't need any help. You must come again soon and see us, and show that you've forgotten what I've said." She gave me her hand, and I could not help bending over it and kissing it. She gave a little, pathetic whimper. "Oh, I _know_ I've said the most dreadful things to you."

"You haven't said anything that takes your friends.h.i.+p from me, Mrs. Gray, and that is what I care for." My own eyes filled with tears--I do not know why--and I groped my way from the room. Without seeing any one in the obscurity of the hallway, where I found myself, I was aware of some one there, by that sort of fine perception which makes us know the presence of a spirit.

"You are going?" a whisper said. "Why are you going?" And Eveleth had me by the hand and was drawing me gently into the dim drawing-room that opened from the place. "I don't know all my mother has been saying to you. I had to let her say something; she thought she ought. I knew you would know how to excuse it."

"Oh, my dearest!" I said, and why I said this I do not know, or how we found ourselves in each other's arms.

"What are we doing?" she murmured.

"You don't believe I am an impostor, an illusion, a visionary?" I besought her, straining her closer to my heart.

"I believe in you, with all my soul!" she answered.

We sat down, side by side, and talked long. I did not go away the whole day. With a high disdain of convention, she made me stay. Her mother sent word that she would not be able to come to dinner, and we were alone together at table, in an image of what our united lives might be. We spent the evening in that happy interchange of trivial confidences that lovers use in symbol of the unutterable raptures that fill them. We were there in what seemed an infinite present, without a past, without a future.

XXIV

Society had to be taken into our confidence, and Mrs. Makely saw to it that there were no reserves with society. Our engagement was not quite like that of two young persons, but people found in our character and circ.u.mstance an interest far transcending that felt in the engagement of the most romantic lovers. Some note of the fact came to us by accident, as one evening when we stood near a couple and heard them talking. "It must be very weird," the man said; "something like being engaged to a materialization." "Yes," said the girl, "quite the Demon Lover business, I should think." She glanced round, as people do, in talking, and, at sight of us, she involuntarily put her hand over her mouth. I looked at Eveleth; there was nothing expressed in her face but a generous anxiety for me. But so far as the open att.i.tude of society towards us was concerned, nothing could have been more flattering. We could hardly have been more asked to meet each other than before; but now there were entertainments in special recognition of our betrothal, which Eveleth said could not be altogether refused, though she found the ordeal as irksome as I did. In America, however, you get used to many things. I do not know why it should have been done, but in the society columns of several of the great newspapers our likenesses were printed, from photographs procured I cannot guess how, with descriptions of our persons as to those points of coloring and carriage and stature which the pictures could not give, and with biographies such as could be ascertained in her case and imagined in mine. In some of the society papers, paragraphs of a surprising scurrility appeared, attacking me as an impostor, and aspersing the motives of Eveleth in her former marriage, and treating her as a foolish crank or an audacious flirt. The goodness of her life, her self-sacrifice and works of benevolence, counted for no more against these wanton attacks than the absolute inoffensiveness of my own; the writers knew no harm of her, and they knew nothing at all of me; but they devoted us to the execration of their readers simply because we formed apt and ready themes for paragraphs. You may judge of how wild they were in their aim when some of them denounced me as an Altrurian plutocrat!

We could not escape this storm of notoriety; we had simply to let it spend its fury. When it began, several reporters of both s.e.xes came to interview me, and questioned me, not only as to all the facts of my past life, and all my purposes in the future, but as to my opinion of hypnotism, eternal punishment, the Ibsen drama, and the tariff reform. I did my best to answer them seriously, and certainly I answered them civilly; but it seemed from what they printed that the answers I gave did not concern them, for they gave others for me. They appeared to me for the most part kindly and well-meaning young people, though vastly ignorant of vital things. They had apparently visited me with minds made up, or else their reports were revised by some controlling hand, and a quality injected more in the taste of the special journals they represented than in keeping with the facts. When I realized this, I refused to see any more reporters, or to answer them, and then they printed the questions they had prepared to ask me, in such form that my silence was made of the same damaging effect as a full confession of guilt upon the charges.

The experience was so strange and new to me that it affected me in a degree I was unwilling to let Eveleth imagine. But she divined my distress, and, when she divined that it was chiefly for her, she set herself to console and rea.s.sure me. She told me that this was something every one here expected, in coming willingly or unwillingly before the public; and that I must not think of it at all, for certainly no one else would think twice of it. This, I found, was really so, for when I ventured to refer tentatively to some of these publications, I found that people, if they had read them, had altogether forgotten them; and that they were, with all the glare of print, of far less effect with our acquaintance than something said under the breath in a corner. I found that some of our friends had not known the effigies for ours which they had seen in the papers; others made a joke of the whole affair, as the Americans do with so many affairs, and said that they supposed the pictures were those of people who had been cured by some patent medicine, they looked so strong and handsome. This, I think, was a piece of Mr.

Makely's humor in the beginning; but it had a general vogue long after the interviews and the ill.u.s.trations were forgotten.

XXV

I linger a little upon these trivial matters because I shrink from what must follow. They were scarcely blots upon our happiness; rather they were motes in the suns.h.i.+ne which had no other cloud. It is true that I was always somewhat puzzled by a certain manner in Mrs. Gray, which certainly was from no unfriendliness for me; she could not have been more affectionate to me, after our engagement, if I had been really her own son; and it was not until after our common kindness had confirmed itself upon the new footing that I felt this perplexing qualification on it. I felt it first one day when I found her alone, and I talked long and freely to her of Eveleth, and opened to her my whole heart of joy in our love. At one point she casually asked me how soon we should expect to return from Altruria after our visit; and at first I did not understand.

"Of course," she explained, "you will want to see all your old friends, and so will Eveleth, for they will be her friends, too; but if you want me to go with you, as you say, you must let me know when I shall see New York again."

"Why," I said, "you will always be with us."

"Well, then," she pursued, with a smile, "when shall _you_ come back?"