Chapter VI: Part 6

The gray was growing silver on the silent water as they crossed. A star was melting back into the light like a pearl dissolving in a cup of gold. Suddenly a ray lit all the mast-heads and tipped them every one with fire. And it was in that moment, as they stood on the deck, that Honor flung open her domino and let the sunshine kindle all the radiance of her glory gown--a sheen of satin of an intense yellow, embroidery of gold-thread rippling all over it in lines of lustre, the breast, the throat, the hair, the waist, a blaze of deepest tinted Spanish topazes, with here and there a ruby. So dark, so rich, so splendid in the full light, the brown skin, the great luminous eyes, the flash of the laughing teeth--Ted’s heart stood still as he glanced at her and looked away and glanced back, finding it hard to believe he was awake, that he saw her, that she was his.

But it was with no such eyes that Mr. Chipperley beheld her. That yellow gown--it should be food for fishes as soon as they were in deep water! Those burning topazes and rubies--he was very tired from want of sleep, from hurry, from uncertainty, from emotion--they forced his eyes open and pinned the lids back! As she stood there, for one swift second she seemed to Mr. Chipperley an embodiment of the sin of the world.

And he was bound hand and foot at the chariot of the blazing creature. He saw instinctively that he would never be master again. The three Mrs. Chipperleys rose wavering before him, wringing their hands and vanishing into thin air. He felt, while he gasped and tried to collect himself, that he should like to go to sleep and never wake.

But Marian also had thrown off her domino and mask, and she stood, in a soft moonlight-colored velvet, a shawl of white blond lace, pinned on her blond hair, falling about her like a veil while she gazed at him. “Ah, now,” thought Mr. Chipperley, “she looks like a bride, she does. But that yellow abomination! Why, Ted Dane was right when he said of her once she dazzled when, the sun is down and robs the world of rest. She’s about to rob my world of rest!”

But all this was in the twinkling of an eye--intuition, not thought--while Marian was hanging her domino over her arm and Honor was folding hers about her again, as people came hurrying by, and the confusion of starting became noticeable; no one pausing to think twice of a gay party accustomed to going and coming, who had hastened on board in their ball dresses.

“Well, Marian,” said Ted, “here is your certificate. No; this is Honor’s and mine. You will find it all right, Mr. Chipperley. Honor and I will be thinking of you in these moonlight nights as you go parting the smooth seas. You’ll be quite in time for the carnival. You have helped us in a way not to be forgotten, and we--we--Honor and I--shall always associate you with the happiness of our lives.”

“I--who--what--what is this?” stammered Mr. Chipperley, hearing Ted’s voice like a voice in a dream, and at the same time looking over Marian’s shoulder at the scroll of paper she unfolded. “Theodore Chipperley--Marian Marcy. There is a mistake here. There--”

“No, no,” said Ted, calmly. “Nothing of the sort. No mistake. That would be impossible. I have married Honor and you have married Marian, just as we intended. We could never have overcome Mamma Humphreys if you hadn’t entered so fortunately into our scheme. It’s of no use to try and thank you; we can’t. There go the last people off--there isn’t a moment--good-bye, good-bye!” There was a hurried shaking of hands, a hurried embrace of Marian and Honor, and Ted and one of the dominos were on the pier waving farewells, and the _Utopia_ was slowly sliding seaward.

For an instant Mr. Chipperley stared at them, at Marian, at sky and water, all aghast, and then his eye rested on Marian again in her soft pearl color and lace, and in the midst of the whirl in his brain the words of an old, old lover came back to him: “And her eyes are doves.” Yes, her eyes were doves. And then he was caught in a wild revulsion of feeling, a sense of having cast off a gyve, a sense of having come home into peaceful twilight after long revel and riot, with thick wines honey sweet, flowers, and burning sunshine among Circe’s beasts. He remembered the reds and yellows, the mastiff, the spitz, the poodle; no more treading on a soft fur in the dark hall, and having it turn and rend you; no more sitting down on some softly-cushioned seat, and hearing a yell and a snarl from the cushion; no more tracing of resemblances between yourself and a marmoset; no more starts, no more dazzles, no more nips from the paroquet, no vociferation of canaries, no staring out of countenance from the owl, no menagerie in his house, no mother-in-law, with her courtship that always seemed to mask an assault! He took Marian by the hand and led her into her state-room. “May,” he said, “Mary--I beg your pardon--Maria--I mean Marian! you have made a great sacrifice for me. You have perhaps saved me from a great unhappiness. Let me recover my equipoise, and the devotion of a lifetime shall repay you. You knew me better than I knew myself. I was benumbed! I was bewitched! I was blind! It may take me a little time to get that other image out of my mind, but I shall do it--it had not become a habit. Be patient, and you shall find a tender husband. Great powers! to think that I might have yielded to that sort of temptation, and been disturbed, wearied, wretched for life! I thank Heaven for your wisdom and courage that rescued me. You could never have done it if you had not loved me. I thank Heaven that you are Mrs. Chipperley!” And May’s smile played around Marian’s mouth, and Marian’s eyes looked up with Mary’s gentle imploration, and echoes of Maria’s voice fluted in Marian’s tone, and Marian’s lips trembled with a kiss he had known before, and Mr. Chipperley, with a deep and quiet satisfaction, felt again that he had never been a widower.

MR. VAN NORE’S DAUGHTER-IN-LAW

MR. VAN NORE’S DAUGHTER-IN-LAW

The Van Nores were present at the creation of the world. Some people say they made it; but one really knows better than that. If it had not been for their unaccountable belief that the builder of the ark that rested on Mount Ararat was a Jew, and their unutterable contempt for the race of Spinoza and Mendelssohn, of Heine, Auerbach, and Disraeli, to mention no greater, they would not have hesitated to conceive that the family name of the Patriarch was Van Nore.

At any rate, you may understand that the Van Nores were an immensely ancient family, so old as to be really worm-eaten. In the dust of the Van Nores there were soldiers and statesmen, and even a less regarded author or two. In this century there was nothing at all to speak of. If, however, any one says their family tree was like one of those old, wide, and deep-rooted fir-trees sometimes seen, with but a single gnarled and lichened branch left of all its forest glory, the best part of it underground, you can see that the person is no friend of the Van Nores, but one whose eyes have been hurt by the dazzle of their splendor, who has been forgotten at their banquets, looked at with a stony glare upon the street, or possibly knocked down and bruised and ignored by their fast horses.

Being immensely ancient, immensely distinguished, and also immensely wealthy, it goes without saying that the Van Nores thought immensely well of themselves. They never soiled their garments by contact with the crowd; they bought their pictures and statues straight from the manufacturers before they had been profaned by the vulgar gaze; they would have liked the gold they spent cast with a Van Nore device, and the die broken. They could not hope to keep all the knowledge in the universe to themselves; but they did not care so much for that--there were always tutors and chaplains to be had, after the custom of certain of the South Sea Island chiefs, who maintain a Fila-oma or Talking Man of Knowledge. If, once in a while, they allowed themselves to come before the public in a matter of suffrage, it was not altogether without the sensation of some wicked scribe who has written the Sacred Name with unwashed hands; and, being usually defeated, they relapsed into a more profound contempt of the people than before, and talked glibly of the advantages of a monarchy, although not without an undercurrent of feeling that in the event of a monarchy the Van Nores would be monarchs. They intermarried, of course, only with families of a pedigree and assumption one degree less than--it could not be more than, and could hardly be equal to--the Van Nores.

Judge, then, of the bewildered and amazed wrath of the Van Nore family when the son of the house, the heir of the name, the last of the name, the only male Van Nore left to go down the ages with the weight of the family illustriousness upon his shoulders, married a young girl in the West, unknown, obscure, poor, and a Jewess!

Nore Van Nore had a sister older than himself--a dark and imposing creature with the Van Nore nose. He had a sister younger than himself, pallid, bloodless, with her mother’s delicacy of feature, and with nothing about her but her haughtiness to distinguish her from the herd of young women. He had one Van Nore cousin, a little apple-blossom hardly coming up to the family requirements. He had four Van Nore spinster aunts, who, if they quarrelled among themselves like birds in a wood, presented an unbroken phalanx of family integrity to the public, and who, with the idea that they had the manners of duchesses, really gave some reason to believe them directly descended from the Patriarch, they looked so extremely like the wooden women in the children’s toy arks. His father embodied all the dignity, pomposity, and grandeur of all the Van Nores before him, as if he were the flame of their ashes; he had but one gift, and that was a faculty for satirical speech, which he exercised with impunity upon his wife--his wife, the line of whose descent was so long that it had worn to a colorless, attenuated thread in her; a thin, pale, languid woman, of whose condition it expressed little to say she dared not call her soul her own, because, in looking at her, or looking through her, rather, it was not clear that she had a soul--a woman without intellect, without individuality, and almost without vitality. Into this assemblage Nore Van Nore had dared introduce a person absolutely without a grandfather, and whose grandfather, had she had one, would have been named Shacabac!

Mr. Van Nore and his household would treat this vile and vulgar intriguer, who had thrust herself upon them, and had thought to lift herself by pulling them down, as she deserved. In their heart of hearts they had a complete, if inarticulate, consciousness that no one could have married the bridegroom in question for any other purpose. And Nore Van Nore received a letter of repudiation from his father, disowning and casting him forever into the outer darkness of the world of people who were not Van Nores.

And who was Nore Van Nore? He was a young man of twenty-six years, whose mental processes had mastered the rudiments of learning to such an extent that he could read the newspaper and could make change. All attempts to cultivate those mental processes much further had failed; if he entered the university at last, it was because tutors and proctors and family influence, a fortuitous chance, and perhaps money, all wrought together. Entrance was all, however. Before the first term closed Mr. Van Nore had private but authoritative information that unless he wanted expulsion for--stupidity approaching imbecility were not the exact words--he had better withdraw his son. In a hot and self-righteous fury Mr. Van Nore turned the tables and expelled the university. He withdrew his son with a wild show of anger and scorn for faculty, curriculum, endowment, and career. “They have graduated no man who comes to anything in the last twenty-five years!” he said. And that the matter might be the sooner forgotten, he gave Mr. Nore Van Nore a purse and a travelling companion, and despatched him to the Far West. It was probably but a case of retarded development; perhaps he would do a little exploring and discovering; when he should return the affair would have quite blown over, and he would marry him to some maiden who had been so well brought up that she would feel herself taking a proper place among dominations, princes, and powers by marrying a Van Nore of any calibre. All the same, he did not fail to make his wife’s life a burden to her by sarcasms on her feeble wit that had been strong enough to adulterate the strength of the Van Nore; while the very sense of his son’s incapacity, thus forced upon him, was another argument against the woman who would marry an imbecile for the sake of climbing into his rank and position.

It was not altogether to be wondered at, then, if his wife did not fully sympathize with him in this extremity, and if, being of an affectionate disposition--so far as she had anything to impart, having imparted that also to her son--she wrote a little surreptitious letter--she who had usually not a thought nor a deed nor an emotion of her own:

“MY DARLING BOY,--I send you all my love. Any wife you choose to
marry will be the dear daughter of your mother.”

That was the letter written so secretly; it meant volumes to her; it meant volumes to her boy. She was frightened to a trembling ghost of her ghost-like self when she stopped the carriage and asked the footman to drop it in a street-box, for she felt that if her husband knew it it would not be impossible for him to blow out her flickering flame of life altogether, or stamp its feeble spark into the earth. He never had struck her; but she never knew what he might do yet.

The father’s letter, when it came, was not at all unexpected by Hero Van Nore; nor was the mother’s a surprise. She was a girl of twenty, superbly tall and fair. Her mouldings would have fed a sculptor’s eye with rapture, her coloring would have driven wild another than Titian; the great braids upon her head seemed made of strands of spun gold; she wore them like a crown, as became a daughter of the royal tribe of Judah--she was undoubtedly a Jewess--but as Miriam, as Deborah, as Susannah may have done she had the large beauty of that Clytie in her sunflower whom some think to be Isis in her lotus. She waited in her father’s shop; and she sold Mr. Van Nore a pair of gloves there.

He had given his purse, with his _congé_, some time since to his travelling companion, and he was waiting in this little place till he should receive a fresh remittance from his father. When he saw Hero he had something else to wait for. He hung round the shop corners, and when she went home he followed her. _Vera incessu patuit dea_--she stepped as if the earth were air; he said to himself that it was because his heart was under her feet. He knew intuitively that she would not give him a second look. What were the Van Nores out here in the wilderness? He was able to see, for all his deficiency, that she was on a higher plane of being than his own. But if he could not hope he could at least suffer; he could gaze at the star he might not win. He bought another pair of gloves. Ah, heavens! to feel the touch of those pointed fingers of hers as they stretched the kid from side to side on his hand! The next day he bought another pair. Before he was through he had bought the whole stock of gloves in the shop.

Of course this attracted her attention, and she made some inquiry concerning him. “You had better go away,” she said, when he came in again. “You do not need gloves, or ties, or any of our goods. You are making yourself ridiculous.”

“I have nothing to do with it,” he replied. “I was made so when I was born.”

And so one word led to another, and in the course of time he had told his story, which somehow seemed full of wrongs--the story of a rather feeble-minded youth who had been browbeaten and ill-used by a disappointed father from his birth. Her heart was stirred with pity; she let him come to the house. Hope bounded within him. If the star should fall from the sky to his arms! He wrote his father--I forgot to say that he could write--that he wanted his influence to help him marry the most lovely, the most virtuous, the most brilliant of women, who waited behind the counter of her father’s little Jew-shop. The answer to his letter made his hair stand on end. Sneering, vindictive, cruel, threatening. What should he do but show it to her? Her blood would have been cold and thin stuff had that not made it boil. “I can never go back to him,” said Nore. “I never will go back to him. It is the last blow he shall strike me.”

“Would you be happier here in the shop helping me?” she asked.

“Beyond measure!” he cried.

So she told him to see her father that night. She meant about the situation. He meant about a wife. And her father, in as good and strong contempt as Mr. Van Nore himself could feel, ordered the fellow from the house.

“The worthless varlet!” cried the old man. “Can he earn his salt? What do I care for his name and his family and his entailed moneys--the dog of a Christian! He can have them all; but he cannot marry my girl to an idiot!”

“He is not an idiot, father,” said Hero. “There is more in him than any see,” and she calmly canvassed the subject. “He has been made to look up till he does not know how to look straight ahead. Some day he will assert himself--”

“You?” said her father. “You? I believe you care for the lout! When you have sweethearts to fill a regiment! When you can marry any man in the county!”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I am sorry for him. I care to have him happy--he has had so much unhappiness.” And at that moment they heard a groan outside, and they ran to the door to pick up Nore Van Nore, helpless and just returning to consciousness, with a broken leg.

Hero installed herself as his chief attendant. In the long hours of patient pain, in the devotedness of his silent worship for her, something stirred her heart that was not pity. Heaven knows what it was! There are some strong natures that must wrap themselves about the weak. The first time that he could stand upon his feet again they were married. And then Nore Van Nore went down to help her wait behind the counter in the shop, where she consulted him and referred to him and honored him till she was likely to make others share the strange respect she had for him. “He is single-hearted,” she said to one of her old lovers in that primitive community, who felt the right to make some outspoken complaint. “He is upright. He is unselfish. He is kind to the fly on the wall. He loves me and no other. What more do I want in a husband? He suits me. And as for his religion, what does that signify when, at any rate, we both worship the same God?”

A year from that time Hero did not go to the shop much; she had a little son--and not such a very little one either--a bouncing, magnificent boy, with his mother’s colors and eyes, full of life and joy and spirit, and quite the most remarkable baby in the world. And so, when the child was six months old, it seemed to Nore Van Nore, in his happiness, that he was wrong to deprive his family of the blessing of knowing of such a blessing, and he wrote home for the third time; but this time to his mother.

This was shaking the red rag in the face of the bull. Mr. Van Nore trampled up and down his wife’s sitting-room awhile, reared and stamped and snorted and bellowed, and not till he had reduced her to tears for having brought such a son into the world, and had pursued it till she gasped for breath, and had to have the maids and ether and hot bottles, did he subside into silence and thought.

That this son of a beggarly shop-girl of a Jewess should be the Van Nore! Never, never, if he had to put out the light of all the Van Nores at once! Jocelyne, his eldest daughter, should marry young De Vere, and he should take the name of Van Nore. For a sum of money Nore should break the entail and renounce his name, taking, instead, that of his low-born wife. And so Jocelyne’s son, who was a foregone conclusion in Mr. Van Nore’s mind, should be the great Van Nore to come. He had a satchel packed within an hour, and he slept that night, for the first time in his life, in a vulgar sleeping-car, always before having left the train at nightfall rather than be one of the promiscuous canaille sleeping a common sleep. Days and nights and days and nights of this wretched contiguity. It was a hard experience for Mr. Van Nore. He added it all up against his son. And the selfishness of the modern traveller did not tend to increase his appreciation of his kind. His kind? Not the least bit his kind! Mr. Van Nore was more than ever persuaded that he was a superior integer of the race--marking, perhaps, one of those points of progress from which one development steps to a higher.

At last he stood in the presence of his daughter-in-law.

A shapeless little greasy Jewess, selling old clothes--or a stately young goddess assuming a human smile? One convulsive sensation thrilled across him of pride in Nore’s taste at least, souring instantly to anger to think that taste was all. And then he opened the subject.

“No, father-in-law,” said Hero, firmly, despite his wincing, and after the fashion of speech in use among her people--“no, father-in-law. We do not want your money. Nor will we surrender our name. It is our name by all right and law that it is yours. And, as for your grandson, we have no power to forswear his birthright for our mess of pottage.”

It was a will as strong as his own that opposed him. Storming was of no use here. He left the house without another word, and left Hero dancing her crowing boy in the broad transfiguring sunbeam, looking up proudly at her husband, yet fondly, to see if really she and the boy compensated him for all he had lost.

An hour afterwards Mr. Van Nore was brought back to his son on a stretcher. Two trains had collided, and he was among the killed and wounded. An artery had been nearly severed, and before a physician could reach him he was bleeding to death.

When at length the flow was stanched, and he lay fainting and sinking away, “It is almost hopeless,” said the surgeon. “There is little blood left in his body.”

The sight of his dying father had changed the current of Nore’s irate feeling. “If I could but give him mine!” he cried.

“It would do him small good,” said the doctor, looking at the pale and spindling fellow with an anatomist’s contempt. And from him the glance travelled to Hero, standing near in her abundant life, with the dancing boy in her arms, still followed by the sunbeam. Hero read the glance in a moment, and had given the child to her husband.

“Here, doctor,” she said, baring an arm that Hebe, carrying life and nectar to the gods, might have lifted.

“Do you know what it means for you,” said the doctor, “and for your child, perhaps? Loss of strength, it may be of health--”

“I know it is my husband’s father, my child’s grandparent,” she said, slowly. “If my blood can save him, it is right that he should have it.” And when she came to herself after the first fainting-fit of her life, save for fatigue and languor, she did not know that she felt much the worse, and her father-in-law was smiling at her with lustre in the eyes that she so lately saw nearly set in death.

Strange and awful moment to Hero! She had given life to this man. She had gone behind the veil of death and darkness, and worked with the forces of creation. There was a bond between her and him such as there could be between no other people in the world. For half a fainting heart-beat she thought she had made him; for half as long again he thought she had. She felt her heart irradiate with a tender warmth towards her husband’s father. She fell on her knees beside him and kissed his hand. “Oh, my father,” she said, “you must forgive us, for we love you!”

As for Mr. Van Nore, I never saw anybody happier than he was, some weeks afterwards, on his way home with his party. His son accompanied him, with the nurse of a superb rosy baby folded in white fleecy wools, and a lady, stately as any princess ought to be, but seldom is, with her black fox robes about her. “She is very teachable,” thought Mr. Van Nore. “A month of our life will give her all the _savoir faire_ she needs. Her tact is inestimable.” And then he wondered if she could hold her own with Jocelyne. “My grandson, the future Van Nore,” he said to every acquaintance he came across, and they all seemed to be travelling on various portions of that trip. “Hero, my dear! My daughter-in-law, Mrs. Van Nore. My daughter-in-law. A great addition to our circle, I assure you. An old family, an old family. We--we are not exactly, so to say, related, but we--we--we have some of the same blood in our veins!”

THE END

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Perceived typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.