Chapter II: Part 2

It was too true--at least the first part of the statement; the second part was a work of imagination: Mr. Morley would have been only too glad to face his wife, for, stretched on a bed of sickness, and tossing with pain and fever, his wife’s presence would have been like cold water to his burning lips. He had indeed fallen from grace. On his way to the station a friend--a long-unseen friend, worse than any garroter--had begged him to dine with him; he had listened, longed, hesitated, yielded; he could at any rate enjoy his friend’s society, if he could not dine, and could return to Teresa by a later train. Vain thought! When that mulligatawny soup steamed in its tureen, when that striped bass in its port-wine sauce lifted its handsome side, when that breast of a mongrel duck saluted his famished eyes, when that single sip of Château Yquem made him think the world well lost, Mr. Morley fell. Four hours of delicious banqueting; twenty-four hours of dust and ashes. The stomach so long used to husks spurned the rich offering of blood and gravies, sauces and condiments; and no drunkard after a debauch ever suffered in body and in soul what Mr. Morley was suffering after this not too luxurious good square meal. Mrs. Morley buried her head in her husband’s bosom when Mr. Pearmain, with the kindliness of a man and the severity of a regicide, having carried her to the place next day, closed the door upon the interview--and surely we cannot do less than Mr. Pearmain did.

Poor Mrs. Morley! It is to be hoped that her husband promised better fashions. But on what was she to rely? On his word? A broken reed--and he had broken it. Poor Mr. Morley! He was thoroughly wretched. He went about with a craven air, conscious of suspicion. What is life without respect? And he knew that his wife’s respect was doubtful, that the Pearmains’ was not at all doubtful, and felt that even little Louie might learn to despise him. And, meantime, all the neighbors, aware that something very much out of the way had taken place and had been hushed up, regarded him as the culprit of a veritable escapade, of some vague and awful departure from rectitude, and looked upon this quiet, sober, steady citizen, who paid his taxes, went to church on Sundays, voted the right ticket, and never did anything very wrong in his life--except when he gave his wife the trusteeship of his diet--as little other than a regular Don Juan.

Really one cannot help thinking that it was too bad of Mr. Morley. He had promised his wife, and lulled her into false security, declaring that his word was as good as his bond; and he was a business man, and knew what his bond meant. Moreover, he knew that his wife had grown to have the affair very much at heart, being, like all converts, wonderfully bigoted, and convinced that it was a matter of life and death. “Why do you worry so over it, Teresa?” asked Mrs. Pearmain once. “You have established your own and Louie’s habits. There is no likelihood of your failing for yourself, or of your not securing her great destiny for her--yes, her great destiny. And why not let him return to his idols?”

“My George! oh, Emily, how can I? I had rather go with him. What satisfaction to me is it to be any better than he is? I want his blood to be pure, his life long. I want him to rise with me, and if all this is to separate us and make us a different race at last, I will have fried pork on my table every day, and eat it too! I wish I had never heard a word about it all! I don’t see that it makes us a bit better. George and I used to agree about everything, and now we quarrel about everything!”

Evidently indignation was not the weapon with which to meet this outbreak, and Mrs. Pearmain wearily went over all her fantastic premises and logical sequences till she had at length triumphantly welded the chains afresh on Mrs. Morley’s reason, and Mr. Morley’s œsophagus.

Of course, while all these agitations went on, time went on as well, and Harry Pearmain and Louie Morley were not standing still: their childhood was passing too. They were really beautiful children, and whether or not animal diet is good for the rest of us, their bright eyes, round limbs, and rosy cheeks, their boundless grace and happy natures, showed that the opposite diet was good for them. But then, on the other hand, nobody could dispute the fact that little Fanny Farwell’s cheeks were just as rosy, her pretty flesh as sweet, her grace as airy; and Fanny had been fed on the richest of steaks and the fattest of oysters ever since she had cut her teeth. They were the three best friends in the world, and the only drawback to the felicity of certain of the parents was, that Harry always persisted in calling Fanny his little wife, and Louie his dear sister, although it is uncertain if he were stimulated to that nomenclature by the gibraltars and the silver pieces that Mr. Morley now invariably bestowed upon him whenever he heard it. Sister or wife in the future, they were exceedingly affectionate in the present; they ran across the grounds to each other with their games and their secrets, and Louie was as much at home in Harry’s house as Harry was in hers; and Mrs. Pearmain used to look exultingly at Louie as upon her especial work, portray the future to herself, and rejoice over a daughter-in-law after her own heart. Meantime Mrs. Farwell had some thoughts of her own, the character of which may be known by the pitiful way in which she used to smooth Fanny’s sunshiny curls as she remarked to her husband upon the inconveniences attending the preparation of two different tables, that it was a pity if what was good enough for our grandparents wasn’t good enough for our grandchildren, that, after all, women were nothing but the slaves of men’s caprices, and that the whole of these new-fangled reformatory notions had not succeeded in making Louie Morley half so pretty as her Fanny: though when she had had her say, it is not impossible that the complacent sparkle in her eye as she now and then overlooked the Pearmain property was due to the consideration that it was her Fanny who might one day queen it over that fair demesne. Mrs. Farwell, however, if she pondered these things in her heart, kept them there so well that it never entered the heads of the other two mothers that any power could possibly arrange matters differently from the way in which they had arranged them themselves. So the three happy things grew up together, the girls skating with the boy in winter, and bird-nesting with him in summer, the boy playing house with them, doing their examples and threading their needles at times, astonishing them with his daring feats in riding and shooting and wrestling, while Louie’s great black eyes and brilliant colors gave her a certain prominence in their counsels, and her dashing courage made her assimilate most to the boy’s ways, and Fanny’s tenderness and timidity and soft sweetness moved his heart in quite another fashion. They were happy years to the children; they were years of apparent contentment with the Pearmains; they were years of a perpetual and open struggle with the Morleys. If Mr. Morley missed a train, or was delayed by conversation at the station, if he were late in returning from town-meeting or from the lodge, Mrs. Morley’s nerves began to twitter and her heart to flutter; now he comes, and now he doesn’t come; this foot-fall was his till it went by, this one surely was, and her heart beat like a forge, and fell with a mighty blow at the disappointment. “It is killing me, I know it is,” she would say to herself. “All this hope and fear and doubt and worry keep my pulses going so that I shall have a dreadful heart-disease fastened upon me. It really does not seem as if the good our plan may do outweighs the evil it does do.” And then she would take her work and run up to Mrs. Pearmain’s for some words to fortify her. Mrs. Pearmain always had them. More than once she had intimated that that was her branch of the business, and had even admitted that the person who furnished all the ideas ought not to be expected to furnish practice too, like those old-fashioned temperance lecturers who aroused their energies with a good nip of brandy before converting their audience to do away with brandy altogether.

“Never mind, never mind, Emily,” she would say. “It is worth any amount of heart-ache. It isn’t that it will so much benefit you and me--it would do little hurt to our plan, I suppose, if we took our bone in our cupboard--but our example is necessary to keep the children at the mark.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Mrs. Morley. “Length of days is as desirable for us as for the children; and when we discard Death from our diet, he has to stop long enough to seek some other approach, at any rate.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pearmain, “that is true. I feel as if these children might acquire immortality--at least return to such age as Melchizedek’s and Methuselah’s. And just think what work might be accomplished in such lifetimes as that will bring about! Now a person no sooner knows how to handle his talent, his inventive skill, or his learning, than off he goes, snuffed out like a candle; but then the man who invents a spring for a railroad car at thirty, at three hundred will be ballasting a road to the moon. What a period it will be after a few such generations! There will be no such thing as typhoids and diphtherias and all that ilk; we shall have killed off the plants that nourish the germs of parasitical disease; the organs of our bodies, no longer clogged with foul matter, will run on undisturbed indefinitely; the reducing of the temperature of the blood and abstracting the stimulus of strong flesh will abolish another class of disease and all the hereditary horrors that spring from it; and I can’t see that there will be anything but sudden accident to stop the machine any more than to stop a planet.”

“Well, that is for them, not for us. They will never give us a thought, nor dream of all our trouble and struggle to achieve it for them. They will only despise us as we do the wretches who sawed human bones with flint for the sake of the marrow.”

“I think such a race will have no room for contempt. They will pity us with every fresh gain. Why, Teresa, I can even think the time may come when there will be no eating at all, but science will have learned the required elements of food, the nitrates and phosphates and all that, and supply them to us in gaseous shape, great reservoirs feeding our houses through pipes: we will open the tubes in the dining-room, and sit a certain length of time together there, talking gayly, stimulated by the gas we are all breathing together, of which the system will take only what it needs, and then go our ways again without soil, grease, or trouble.”

“But, goodness, Emily, our teeth, our stomachs!”

“Well, teeth are useful in various ways. And as for our stomachs, they may be turned to the secretion of--now don’t you laugh at me, Teresa--I have really read a paper about it--to the secretion of wing material--”

“Wings!”

“Yes, wings--why not? If the first fish that ever dreamed of being a bird had seen a penguin with his flippers, transmigrating fins, he wouldn’t have thought himself visionary. But being determined to be a bird, he became a penguin; and some penguin probably determined upon becoming an eagle. We only have to be determined, Teresa, and we can do anything--in time--allowing, you know, that the ‘eternal years of God’ are ours to work in.”

“We can determine upon being angels,” said Mrs. Morley, slyly.

“And become so in time. How do you suppose the bodily idea of angels arose, if not from the forefeeling of those wings? It isn’t for you and me, Teresa, but it is for Harry’s and Louie’s descendants to have as fine

‘Sustaining wings of skyey grain,
Orange and azure deepening into gold,’

as any angel of them all.”

“It will be very awkward for dress-makers,” said Mrs. Morley, her needle on her lip, and rather too well accustomed to wonders from her friend’s lips for much surprise.

“On the contrary, it will simplify dress-making.”

“But, Emily, it will take more than our Harry and Louie to bring all this about. Their children will have to marry among the flesh-eaters, and all our work goes for nothing.”

“I know it. And that perplexes me a great deal. Really it doesn’t seem right to throw up the matter for that. Still it was an awful oversight. Sometimes it almost reconciles me to the bouillon and chops that Dr. Bonnamy ordered last fall.”

“Last fall?”

“When I grew so poorly from eating the lemons, you know.”

“Oh yes, to keep your bones--”

“From turning to chalk. I went too far. Oh, if we could only live up to our theories!” said Mrs. Pearmain, with a sigh.

“I can, and I will,” cried Mrs. Morley. “And George Morley must.”

“Now if we had only found two other mothers to begin life as we did, we should have been quite secure,” said Mrs. Pearmain, reflectively. “Then there would have been no need of abandoning our experiment.”

“Abandoning! Who talks of abandoning?” cried Mrs. Morley, with snapping eyes. “If it is right to do, I shall do it irrespective of the possibilities of Harry’s and Louie’s descendants.”

“But it is for them we are doing it. And all that wars against us is appetite--no, not even appetite, but the mere sense of taste. Why in the world cannot science take up the thing, and invent flavors for us, so that with a few drops of this extract we can give the flavor of roast fowl to this vegetable, with a few drops of that turn our porridge into turtle-soup, and with another get all the satisfaction out of a biscuit that we should out of a chop? But no,” said Mrs. Pearmain, wearily, “it never will, and I for one am almost tired of going against the stream, when all our work is to end like those rivers which are lost upon the desert.”

Then it was Mrs. Morley’s turn to exhort, to assure her friend she had been overworked, and was morbid, and must have a dish of strong gruel made immediately, and must stimulate herself with some cress and onion and tomato-salad, and presently must go away from home on a little visit. “Change of scene to us is like change of food to others,” said Mrs. Morley, and Mrs. Pearmain thought there was a great deal of wisdom in what her friend said. And so Mrs. Pearmain went away to a water-cure, where, as the authorities could not find anything the matter with her back, they began to concern themselves about her brain, upon which she returned home in high dudgeon.

She had been gone just long enough. A great deal of mischief can be accomplished in three months when people are seventeen or eighteen years old--between which years Louie now hung; and Mrs. Morley’s attention had been called off by a series of tergiversations on Mr. Morley’s part that had threatened not only to make her a widow, but to destroy her system of operations. Her own nerves had been badly shattered by his behavior, and by the impossibility of knowing her fate from dinner to dinner, and subsequently by the long watching and waiting that his illness devolved upon her when indulgence in corned pork and cabbage at a restaurant had produced an inflammation of the stomach that nearly proved fatal to him. On his recovery a demon of hunger had seemed to be gnawing at Mr. Morley’s vitals, and all the fancy grits and groats in the market did not meet his demand. Mr. Morley no sooner returned to business than a porter-house steak learned to expect him on the noon of every day.

But you may be sure that this was very mortifying to Mr. Morley. “Skulking round a corner like a lean dog for his bone,” as he used to grumble, was enough to make a sneak of any man, and he had always been proud of his uprightness. The consciousness that he was sacrificing his birthright for a mess of pottage made him exceedingly morose; and, convicted of his own dereliction, he was daily and hourly trying to find some fault in Mrs. Morley that should balance it, till life became little but crimination and recrimination in the household where it had been expected to bring about the millennium. Not in all this time being able to summon the courage to fight it out with his wife, he was every now and then swearing off again, every now and then suffering a relapse, making himself a martyr to dyspepsia and remorse; and, forgetting all old ties, he was encouraging something like hatred of the Pearmains, with every pang that came from yielding the right, from abandoning the pleasant, or from indigestion. Good Mr. Pearmain went on his patient, plodding way without giving Mr. Morley and his struggles a second thought; but Mr. Morley, in turn, never gave a second thought to the atmosphere of conciliation that of late years had seemed to grow up about Mrs. Pearmain’s manners. Things were imbittered for him, too, by the knowledge that the world had so well prospered with him that he was fully able to gratify his wishes, but with all his good luck and good bank account was obliged to live on prison fare. He lived, though, only in the hope of one day breaking his bonds; and the thought that his darling girl was being reared to belong to anything belonging to the Pearmains grew daily more obnoxious to him.

Mrs. Morley, however, had but a slight knowledge of what went on in the little cosmos of her husband’s emotions; she had no doubt that he broke faith with her frequently in the matter of his diet; she used to make scornful observations as to the freedom of a man to do wrong unobserved, but she had no idea to what extent that faith was broken, and only once in a while dimly felt herself trembling on the edge of a rebellion before whose outbreak she would go under. She was not at all happy, only triumphantly right, and she nailed her colors to the mast, and swept bravely forward.

Mr. Morley had little pleasure at home in those years; somehow all conversation led to the one theme, as all roads lead to Rome. He found hardly any other satisfaction than in walking with Louie in the woods, or else taking his book on the windy upland of the hill behind the two estates of Pearmain and Morley, and in dreaming his life away in the sun, now and then bursting out of calm repose into a storm of expletives that must have startled the ground-mice and the birds, as he thought of the pleasure he might have taken with his dear little Teresa “if that Pearmain woman had never fallen foul of her.”

Once, just as he was relapsing into quiet after such a burst, an arm stole round his neck, and a soft dimpled brown hand, with a big pearl on it, laid itself over his mouth. “Aren’t you ashamed, you dear profane Pa Morley?” cried Louie, and her laughing face came round in front till the great black eyes looked into his little gray ones. “Where do you expect to die when you go to? What makes you swear so, sitting up here in the sun? Is it some tender reminiscence connected with a beef-bone? Listen! I’m going to tell you a great secret. Do you know, I think turtle-soup is almost as good as mock-turtle!”

“Louie!” he gasped.

“Yes, indeed,” she said, with the gayest sort of a mischievous laugh, pulling herself round by the sod to her father’s side. “I mentioned that to show you how high up I am in the graduating class. Turtle-soup and terrapin are like a degree _cum summâ laudâ_ in the comestible line. I should like mutton-broth and gumbo every day when I didn’t have oyster-stew or chowder.”

It is true that in the instant, despite his own wishes, Mr. Morley recoiled as from a cockatrice inadvertently hatched in his bosom.

“Now, Pa Morley,” whimpered the sweet voice, in distress, “as if you weren’t really glad of it!”

“But--but, my dear--”

“Oh, now stop, please. I’ll tell you all about it. And it isn’t our fault at all. Ma drove us to it.”

“Our?”

“Well, yes, Harry’s or mine. When we found out what ma and Mrs. Pearmain were after--How would you like it, I want to know, Pa Morley,” she suddenly cried, “to have folks manœuvring about you in that way; to be set apart from everybody else in the world in that indelicate, indecent way; to be talked over as the--the--the beginner of a great future perfect race--”

“It’s nonsense! it’s nonsense!” cried Mr. Morley, springing to his feet.

“Now, pa, you just be quiet. I am. And I’m the party most directly concerned,” and she coaxed him down beside her again. “I don’t care anything about that great future race. This race is good enough for me. And I think ma and Mrs. Pearmain might be ashamed of themselves. And so does Harry.”

“What! you’ve talked it over?”

“We’ve heard _them_ talking it over--oh, times! And, pa dear, now don’t you go to being cross; it’s of no sort of use to speak to them about it; and--and the fact is, I like Harry very much indeed, very much, and so does he like me, but there’s somebody I like worlds, worlds, worlds better.”

“Oh, there is, is there?” And her father caught her shoulders in his two hands, and held her at arm’s-length till the face drooped and the eyes veiled themselves, and the little brazen thing was blushing and half crying. “And I know who it is!” he cried, releasing his hold and clasping the pretty head all at once into his breast, to the great damage of crimps and starch. “You don’t suppose I’ve seen Dr. Bonnamy’s gig waiting round these lanes so long for nothing?”

“You don’t care, do you, pa?” she whispered, looking up from her resting-place.

“I don’t know about that,” he answered, smoothing the rich hair in a reckless way. “What am _I_ going to do?”

“Threaten ma with a lunatic asylum, and make her behave herself.”

“No, no, ma has her rights. She believes in her principles thoroughly, and so do I. But the trouble is I never did have any backbone.”

“Nobody could have, or any other bone, living as we do.”

“I’m--I’m ashamed of it, but my senses are too much for me. Your mother ought to have married a better man.”

“For shame, Pa Morley! As if she could!”

“She’d have been a great deal happier, and perhaps have founded her great race. It does seem a shame that such a mighty plan should be thwarted just because I love gravy. She’ll say, Louie, that the reason you love soup is because of the rebellion of my senses against the--”

“Acquiescence of your reason.” And then they both laughed like two children. “It isn’t only soup, though,” said Louie. “I love everything that’s good, and take it whenever I can get it--chicken, calf’s-head, pork and beans--”

“O Lord! we might as well give up, then,” groaned Mr. Morley.

“We might as well give up,” repeated Louie, with great cheerfulness. “And you’ll help us, pa?”

“I? I? Why, how can I--”

“Oh, I know how! Just say you will.”

“If--if I dare to, my darling.”

“Well, I won’t trouble you much; not till after it’s all done, and can’t be helped. I love John Bonnamy, and I hate the great future race”--and all of a sudden she burst out crying inextinguishably, and it was all her father could do to kiss her and soothe her into calmness before walking away with her, her little elastic step hardly crushing the grass, into the wood where John Bonnamy was waiting.

It was an hour or two later in the day, just as the first tinge of sunset began to transmute all the summer world, when Mr. Morley came walking back alone over the brow of the hill, very quiet, very dazed, a little stunned it may be, a little wondering if nature were not on his side and requiting his wrongs after all. For what was this he had heard in the wood--as if Louie’s story were not marvel enough? Harry Pearmain, Fanny Farwell--those two children; he not a day more than twenty-one, she less than his Louie’s age--just seventeen; a secret whose seal no one dared to break. He didn’t know how to believe it all. It was like a dream. He felt that he must have a night’s sleep on it, and see if he dreamed it again, before he dared to think of it. He saw a great vista of release opening before him, if he could but find a sword to hew through the first hedge.

There was a shorter cut down the hill, that took him round under the Pearmain windows--those pretty mullioned windows all opening on the ground; he followed it. And he never knew what fate it was that suddenly made him turn, and tiptoe towards a certain window of them all, and pause there, looking in--whether some arresting sight had caught his eye and directed his feet while his conscious thoughts were otherwhere, or whether it was simply perverse curiosity. Whatever it was, he delayed there some seconds, his eyes glaring out of his head, his nose flattened against the pane of the narrow pantry window till it shone leprously white and blue. And in that plight, as if magnetized by the fixity of his gaze, Mrs. Pearmain turned and surveyed him.

“Oh, Mr. Morley! Mr. Morley!” she cried, as well as the circumstances allowed her to enunciate. “Don’t, don’t betray me!”

Mr. Morley chuckled. It was a moment of glorious recompense. Here was his sword. He pushed up the sash. “I’ll take a bite,” he said.

Mrs. Pearmain stared in a sort of stupor a moment. “I--I can’t help it, Mr. Morley,” she stammered then, with pale and shaking lips.

“It’s very well done,” said Mr. Morley. “It shows a good deal of experience--”

“Oh, the doctor ordered it long ago, and the habit grew upon me; and although I gave up hope for myself, I’ve tried to keep the way straight for the others--”

“Straight and narrow,” said Mr. Morley, wiping his mouth.

“--And I’ve talked and written about it, talked to every one, argued with every one--you know I have, Mr. Morley,” she cried, breathlessly, the tears gushing--“tried to convert every one--”

“Enough to strike a balance. I understand--whited sepulchres, Pharisees, and all that. You’ve been like the hero of the ballad who sat in the corner eating his Christmas-pie. You’ve been the means of starving me for nearly twenty years on oatmeal mush, while you’ve picked your bones and--”

“Mr. Morley! you can still insult--”

“Not at all, not at all. I don’t wish to insult you. On the contrary, I think you’ve shown the first ray of sense I’ve seen in you for twenty years. Only,” said Mr. Morley, lifting his finger impressively before his victim’s eyes, “now there’s to be no backing down.”

A stormy half-hour afterwards Mr. Morley might have been seen springing over the railing between the grounds as light as a boy, and he ate his supper of oatmeal mush with the relish of Jack sitting at the foot of the bean-stalk he was about to fell; for he never meant to partake of that viand again in his life.

The phaeton was coming round to the door to take Mrs. Morley, in the long twilight, to one of her poor women whom she helped on certain vegetarian conditions. The pony was rather gay, and pranced a good deal as Thomas held the bridle. “It is wonderful the strength these animals get out of grains,” said Mr. Morley, artfully.

“Wonderful!” said Mrs. Morley, falling delightedly into the trap.

“And the weakness other animals get,” continued Mr. Morley. “My dear, did you know that Mrs. Pearmain had been ailing for some time?”

“Triflingly,” said Mrs. Morley, drawing on her gauntlets.

“My dear, if you saw Mrs. Pearmain standing behind her pantry door, holding in one hand part of a cold sausage, the rest of which was in her mouth, and in the other hand a pickled martinoe--”

“Do talk common sense, Mr. Morley.”

“I call that very common sense--on Mrs. Pearmain’s part. As I was saying, in such case what should you think?”

“I shouldn’t think at all; I can’t reason on impossibilities.”

“Do you believe it would make any difference as to your tyranny over me?” urged Mr. Morley, with a laugh.

“Tyranny, George!” said Mrs. Morley, turning her still charming face wonderingly upon her husband.

“I said it advisedly,” replied Mr. Morley, with sudden acrimony.

“Is that tyranny to which your reason so fully consents?” asked Mrs. Morley, pulling off her gloves for a combat, in reverse of the custom of those knights who, before the fray, “pulled their ringing gauntlets on.”

“Teresa,” said Mr. Morley, with a firmness that surprised himself, “I adore your principles, but I abhor your practice. Don’t pull off your gloves, my love; that poor woman is famishing for her porridge. Go your ways, child; but if on your return you run over to Mrs. Pearmain’s I think you may learn something to--shall I say your?--no, to _my_ advantage.”

And little Mrs. Morley went her ways, with her mind in a state of bewilderment, and shivering as she remembered that the ancients held high spirits to be a presage of sudden death.

“Louie,” said Mr. Morley, when his wife was out of sight, “it is very wrong to disobey your mother.”

“Yes, pa.”

“But if your mother has given no orders, you can’t disobey them.”

“No, pa.”

“And it is equally wrong to disobey your father.”

“Yes, indeed, pa, dear.”

“And if your father gives you orders, you can do nothing else than obey them.”

“Certainly, pa, of course.”

“Very well, then, I order you to take a goose which you will find in the servants’ larder, and tell Jane to dress it and roast it at once. And when that is done I shall have some further orders to give you.”

When Mrs. Morley returned from her visit the house stood dark, with open doors and windows, and the fragrance of the honeysuckles blowing all about it, but with nobody inside it. She remembered what her husband had said, and hastened across the lawn and up to Mrs. Pearmain’s lighted mansion, arriving there just as Mr. Pearmain descended from the coach that had brought him to the end of a long journey. She spoke with the worthy man, looked up at him admiringly in the dusk, and yet paused one instant to think that her George, of whom no one stood in awe, was a pleasanter person for a husband after all. In the next instant a sound of revelry smote her ears, smote Mr. Pearmain’s too, and they went in together. The sound came from the dining-room. What odor was this that never before had profaned that pretty room? What sight was this that saluted the outraged eye?

There stood Mr. Morley, at one end of the freshly laid and glittering table, with his fork in the breast-bone of the goose and his knife in the air. There sat Mrs. Pearmain, pale, with traces of tears, daintily picking apart, but with no appetite whatever, a slice of the brown breast. There sat Fanny Farwell, blushing like a rose, with Harry’s protecting arm just thrown across her shoulder. There stood Louie Morley at one side of her father, flourishing a drumstick, and her great black eyes dancing to the music of Dr. Bonnamy’s merry laughter as he stood upon the other side.

“My dearest love,” said Mr. Morley, laying down his knife and waving his hand towards the remnants of the goose, “allow me to reintroduce to you an old but unforgotten acquaintance--”

“Oh, indeed!” cried Mrs. Morley, too much stupefied to express indignation, “as if I had not seen a goose every day of my life for twenty years!”

“Not roasted. Pardon me; your looking-glass reflects, but does not roast. Permit me also to remark that in future this acquaintance shall always be a welcome guest at our table, to which--while I accord you personally all liberty of groats--so help me Heaven, I never mean to sit down again without a joint! I told you this afternoon that I admired your principles, my dear Teresa. If I had known Dr. Bonnamy earlier and better, I never should have made so foolish a speech, and we should have been spared some years of trouble. Let me see. You declare that I inject dead flesh into my veins when I partake of this delicious morsel,” refreshing himself with a bit of the goose. “Do you, when you manure your hill of corn with barn-yard compost, inject that disgusting material into your ear of corn? No; the chemistry of sun and air absorbs from that compost only the proper constituents of corn. The stomach is a fine laboratory; it acts in the same way; it sends no dead flesh to the veins, but it separates that food into its elements, and sends merely the proper constituents of life along to their absorbents. Moreover,” continued Mr. Morley, wiping his forehead, and amazed at his eloquence and temerity, “you urge me to live according to your ideas, because comparative anatomy shows that animals with cellulated colons are herbivorous, and man has a cellulated colon--man and the ape. Is that right, Dr. Bonnamy? I am now convinced that the first ape that forsook his herbivorous diet and smacked his lips over some smoking flesh began to differentiate into man; and you may send this cellulated colon to Mr. Darwin as the missing link--”

“Bravo, papa, bravo!”

“And now, Mrs. Pearmain,” said Mr. Morley, “shall I speak for you?”

“I--I can’t speak for myself,” said Mrs. Pearmain, bursting into tears, and seeing twenty husbands with twenty valises all about to leave her forever, and gazing at her with awful austerities of farewell.

“Mrs. Pearmain, as Dr. Bonnamy will assure you,” said Mr. Morley, “was ordered by that physician, in whom you all believe so heartily, to resume her pristine diet some years since. This she stoutly refused to do; but learning that her life depended on it, I have brought this bird over here, and, as I may say, have forced her to share it with us. The rest,” continued Mr. Morley, happier than he had been for years, “I hope explains itself. Let me introduce this young lady”--as the little thing shrank closer and closer to her proud and defiant young husband--“formerly Miss Fanny Farwell, but for this three months past waiting an opportunity to confess herself Mrs. Harry Pearmain. And that done, let me present to you, my dear wife, Dr. Bonnamy, who became your son-in-law an hour ago.” And, quite out of breath, Mr. Morley sat down.

The whole English language failed to do justice to the occasion. There was silence in heaven for half an hour--that silence echoed here for half a moment, perhaps, but it seemed longer.

“I hope you will all be very happy,” said Mrs. Morley, then, with majesty, but a tremulous voice. “And as you have shown yourselves so capable of it without me, I--”

“Now, mother, mother,” said Mr. Morley, bending over the goose and waving his knife and fork affectionately towards her, “you know it would have been of no sort of use to talk with you, and it was a great deal better to clear your skirts of all responsibility.” Mr. Morley stopped and regarded the others. Mr. Pearmain, wide-eyed and open-mouthed and silent till this juncture, had suddenly broken the spell, dropped his valise, and bent and taken his wife in his arms. “Emily, my darling,” he was saying, “why didn’t I hear of this before? Do you suppose I would have sacrificed your precious health, your life, for a whim?” And he kissed the weak woman tenderly before turning to the others. “And as for these children,” said he.

“Hear! hear!” cried Mr. Morley, hilariously.

“Hear! hear!” cried Louie, who had never been afraid of Mr. Pearmain. “And will you sacrifice us for a whim, ma?”

“My dear,” said Mr. Morley, pouring out a bumper, “here’s to the great future perfect race. Let us wish it long life and--posterity. We have only postponed it a generation.”

AN IDEAL

AN IDEAL

Age comes to some people only like the wider opening of the rose, the gentle drooping of the creamy outer petal; and one must needs think of this in looking at Mrs. Fernalde. “I have had my threescore and ten,” she used to say. “I have had all that nature has to give, and now I am living on grace.” It was a sunny spirit that informed her, a lightsomeness that never let the substance of a tear penetrate beneath the surface that could endure nothing but happiness. Her unfailing good-nature was like a fairy wand that smoothed every trouble out of her way and out of the way of every one about her. If her hair was white, no great sorrow had made it so; and its contrast with the soft brilliancy of a black eye and the velvet flush of a cheek unwritten by many lines, made her perhaps as lovely as one standing in all the full radiance of youth. As for Mr. Fernalde--tall, dark, spare--he was by no means unattractive, and his courtly manners had a unique elegance. He loved his ease; and annoyances, when they chanced to break through the magic circle his wife drew about him, vexed him, as they usually do a nervous person. For the rest, he was one of those men who, having led a singularly fortunate life, maintain to themselves a fancy that they have just missed the last stroke to make the crystal complete, who have a vanishing ideal always just beyond sight and reach.

The Fernaldes were neighbors of ours. Wealth required no exertion of them, and advancing age secluded them in some measure from general society; their home was always cheerful; they were always in it; and if there had been no such person as crabbed old Mrs. Talliafero, who had spent the last six months with them, it would have been hard to see how heaven itself could be much improvement on it. However, she was going at once, and then where would be the crumple in the rose-leaf?

These old people loved young people. “The new generation lends us a part of its freshness,” they used to say. They always welcomed any of us, and indeed made me so particularly conscious of their flattering favor that I spent a good portion of my time with them, threaded the sweet little lady’s needles, read and wrote more or less for Mr. Fernalde, and was gradually taken into their confidence, which I am about to violate.

“Could I imagine a happier old age than this, my child, with my wife, my health, my flowers, our birds and pets and friends?” he said once, repeating my question. “Why, yes, my dear, it was much happier before my wife brought Mrs. Talliafero to stay with us. Some old school-mate or girl friend of hers--I don’t quite know--for the fact is she nettled me so the first day she came that I wouldn’t ask Rosalie a word about her, for fear I should show my displeasure at her having brought her home when she turned up. It is astonishing how an invisibly small thorn will destroy your equanimity. And then this woman has a quality that would turn honey into vinegar, I do believe. She has changed our quiet, peaceful, sunshiny life, that seemed like one long day in June, into a sharp, raw day in November. There is something very rasping about her. I don’t see what my wife invited her to spend such a season with us for. I wonder if she thought that at the end of the time I should press for a continuance? My dear, I have counted the days--it sounds sadly against all hospitable rites--I have counted the days till I should see her consult a railway time-table, as she did yesterday, about going home to-day. I believe she is not in affluent circumstances now. I would be glad to meet the expense of boarding her at Buckingham Palace if that would keep her away! I am speaking strongly. Yes, Rosalie,” looking at his laughing wife, “I know you say too strongly. But it is argument, assertion, contradiction, differing, bickering, finding fault with the servants who have suited us half a lifetime, questioning the expenditure, disordering the arrangements from one day to the next. Think of it, when she comes into my study and inveighs about my wife’s patience in enduring such a den of disorder in her house. She wonders that I do not wear a scratch. She warns me of indigestions, she threatens me with nightmares, she reminds me of my age, she interferes with my pipe! And then she wants so much fresh air! Thank Heaven! her time is up to-day, and my wife will not invite another guest for a half-year without giving me time to arrange a residence elsewhere! And such a voice, too! When one hears it, one longs for the proper infirmities of age that dull the hearing--sharp as a file, piercing as a locust’s whirr! What are you laughing at, Rosalie?”

“Ah, you are not quite just, my love,” said the sweet little old lady. “Mrs. Talliafero has a fine mind. She is really waking us up. She prevents our sinking down into a jelly-like existence, as so many of our age do. She keeps us bubbling.”

“There, there, there, my dear! Don’t say another word about your Mrs. Talliafero! Go and spend a season with her at Saratoga, if you ever want to see her any more. I’ll go to Richfield. Bubble! She’d make sulphuric acid bubble out of the sands of the desert! I’ve no doubt she worried Talliafero, poor man, into the grave! But there, I’ve said too much,” he added, directly. “I beg your pardon, my sweet, if I hurt your feelings about an old friend, but really--Now, Rosalie, my love, if you don’t care to go over these accounts, our young friend will.” And then Mrs. Fernalde tripped off with as light a foot as a girl of seventeen, and I drew up the great folding-screen around our chairs, stirred the fire a little, and took pencil and paper to add up the figures Mr. Fernalde was to read out to me.

But Mr. Fernalde was in a brown-study for a little, and I let him stay.

“It was strange you should have asked me that question, child,” he said at length. “I used, at your time of life, to imagine a very different old age from this, if I may so call that imagination, for, in fact, old age never entered into my calculations. I imagined nothing about the passage of time, only of the continuance of a condition. And that condition was the perpetual paradise of Alicia’s smiles.”

“Rosalie, you mean,” said I.

“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Fernalde, shortly. “I mean Alicia.”

“Alicia?”

“Alicia, who, when I was twenty, was the light of my eyes and the loadstar of my life.”

“I don’t know what you mean, sir.”

“Of course you don’t, of course you don’t. I’ve half the mind to tell you, though. It’s a long time ago--a long time--and no harm done. One is perhaps a fool at seventy,” said Mr. Fernalde presently again. “I’m not quite eighty. One is certainly a fool at twenty. I was, at any rate; but I didn’t know it, and I walked in a fool’s paradise. And to be a fool and not know it! Is there, on the whole, any further paradise? Pretty, pretty as a peach!” he began again, after another pause. “Ah! that would have sounded to me then like profanity. That heavenly fair face! those eyes like the stars in a blue midnight! that smile of exquisite innocence and purity! I used to tremble before her sometimes as before some young saint stepped from a shrine--one that I dared to desecrate by loving. Ah, how I loved her! The sight of certain flowers brings her back to me now! When the apples are in blossom, that pink and white snow, that ineffable delicacy of perfume, calls her before me like a revelation! There are times when this eternal smoothness of things in my life palls on me--times when I cannot bear the sound of evening bells coming across the water. It so renews for me that evening--that evening when I lost her--when I lost her, if I found Rosalie!”

“You lost her, then?” I said, to break the silence that followed.

“I will tell you. The two were inseparable. If I walked or rode or sailed with one, the other was not far away. Rosalie was a little gay, tormenting sprite; Alicia a pensive saint. It was Alicia’s home; her father was a man of wealth, and Rosalie was visiting her. Rosalie had no home, no fortune; she had just finished school and was to be a governess, dreading it as a butterfly might dread being broken to harness, dreading it all the more for this glimpse of luxurious life in her friend’s home since school. I myself had a fortune in my own right, and had been guilty of the follies of most of the _jeunesse dorée_ of that period, which, if comparatively innocent, were troublesome enough to the authorities of my college to need discipline, and I was passing a year of most unhappy rustication in the place adjoining Alicia’s home. Never shall I forget the first moment in which I saw Alicia running down one of the orchard aisles with her white garments fluttering about her, and her fair head bent over the branch of apple-blossoms in her hand. If lightning had fallen, the revolution that seized me could not have come more quickly. I seemed to be changed in a twinkling, to have been borne into another planet. I felt as if sunshine had pierced and penetrated once impenetrable gloom. When I fell asleep in the grass of that orchard, and woke with that heavenly creature bending over me, I rose only to walk on air. The little brown face of Rosalie, with its carnations, with the glint and glance of its great brown eyes, with its flood of brown curls that had a touch of gold on them, with the glittering teeth of its beautiful laugh, was just over her shoulder, but I merely know I saw it by remembering it afterwards. She was only a shadow to me in those days; and as for me, I was only Alicia’s shadow myself. She lived and moved in some exalted atmosphere, to my perception. She does now. Her father wore the front of Jove; I could not say that he did not carry the thunders. I felt myself a mote in the broad beam of their sunshine, as though I were something hardly visible in their large range of vision, as if it required an effort to make myself perceived by them. I hesitated to make the effort--I worshipped from afar. When she spoke to me my heart beat so I had hardly voice to answer; when she touched my hand it thrilled me through and through. And I asked no more. I thought of no more for a while than just to continue so forever; to see her from my window walking under the long aisles of the low-branched orchard, like some mediæval picture; to walk beside her sometimes; now and then to venture reading from the same page with her, now and then to be her partner in the dance. That Rosalie should be about with me, riding here, strolling there, walking to church, reading with the old pastor, in whose charge there was a fiction that I was, and so, in a way, studying with me--that was all a matter of common-place; she was sweet, she was fresh, she was charming. But what was all that when an angel was in the room?

“One night I was on the gallery just outside their drawing-room, looking in at the long window, and Alicia was singing. Ah, how delicious was that voice! The cherubim and seraphim who continually do sing, if I ever hear them, will not sing so sweetly. I wonder to whom that voice is singing now! Beside her, that night, was the scamp who had come to the place more than once--a proud, commanding fellow in his undress uniform, a man whom her father plainly intended she should marry. I can see the scene now--the rich and dimly lighted room full of purple shadows, the air laden with the scent of flowers; Alicia in her white drapery, more mystical, more beautiful, more holy, as she sang, than if revealed in the glow of her beauty; outside, the violet depths of the sky, and the moon just falling, like some great golden flower, low in the west; and as Alicia’s voice became silent, a choir of bell-tones coming far and fine and free across the water, like echoes of her song in heaven. My heart swelled with a fulness of rapture, life seemed too rich, too sweet, too sacred--and then I saw that man stoop and kiss her brow!

“The action turned me to stone for a moment, till he came sauntering to the window, and I knew no more what I was doing than that bronze Perseus in the corner would if he moved. I lifted the hand that had seemed stone, and as he passed me I struck him on the mouth--the mouth that had done the profanation.”

And Mr. Fernalde was quiet a little while.

“And that was the end of all things,” he resumed. “The fellow laughed at me for a mad boy. Her father launched one of the thunderbolts, and forbade me the house. What a stricken day and night of wretchedness! What a week of hopelessness, of annihilation! But perhaps Alicia felt differently from these creatures. Why should I not discover? Why should I suppose she had any other sympathy with that wretch than the sympathy of the star with the worm? And if my glad peradventure were true--why then we could fly from these places that should know us no more; the world was before us, heaven’s gates were open to us. And I wrote--my hand trembling at its sacrilegious daring--just a dozen lines, without address, without signature. She would know what it meant. And I sent it by the parson’s boy. And I waited for her, lying on the grass beneath the orchard trees, in the deep gloom just gilded by the influence of the unseen moon. There came the rustling of garments, the tripping of a foot; my heart beat, my eyes grew dim. Was it she coming up behind me, as I lay lifted on my elbow, kneeling and putting her arms about me, raining swift kisses on my face?--wild sweet kisses in that shadow; wild passionate whispers in that silence! And then a great pang smote me; and I rose and went out with her into the less dim darkness--and it was Rosalie.