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A Face Illumined

by Edward Payson Roe · English · Gutenberg #2501 · 944,765 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: A Face Illumined

Author: Edward Payson Roe


        
Release date: February 1, 2001 [eBook #2501]
                Most recently updated: April 3, 2015

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2501


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A FACE ILLUMINED ***
Ver.04.29.93*END*





A Face Illumined

by E. P. Roe


Preface




As may be gathered from the following pages, my title was obtained
a a number of years ago, and the story has since been taking form
and color in my mind.  What has become of the beautiful but discordant
face I saw at the concert garden I do not know, but I trust that
that the countenance it suggested, and its changes may not prove
so vague and unsatisfactory as to be indistinct to the reader.  It
has looked upon the writer during the past year almost like the face
of a living maiden, and I have felt, in a way that would be hard
to explain, that I have had but little to do with its expressions,
and that forces and influences over which I had no control were
moulding character.

The old garden, and the aged man who grew young within it, are not
creations, but sacred memories.

That the book may tend to ennoble other faces than that of Ida
Mayhew, is the earnest wish of

E. P. Roe.

Cornwall-on-the-Hudson, N. Y.





Contents




Chapter I:  A Face..............................................11
Chapter II:  Ida Mayhew.........................................22
Chapter III:  An Artist's Freak.................................35
Chapter IV:  A Parthian Arrow...................................42
Chapter V:  Spite...............................................51
Chapter VI:  Reckless Words and Deeds...........................60
Chapter VII:  Another Feminine Problem..........................71
Chapter VIII:  Glimpses of Tragedy..............................85
Chapter IX:  Unexpectedly Thrown Together.......................96
Chapter X:  Phrases too Suggestive.............................108
Chapter XI:  A "Tableau Vivant"................................118
Chapter XII:  Miss Mayhew is Puzzled...........................126
Chapter XIII:  Nature's Broken Promise.........................137
Chapter XIV:  A Revelation.....................................145
Chapter XV:  Contrasts.........................................159
Chapter XVI:  Out Among Shadows................................172
Chapter XVII:  New Forces Developing...........................184
Chapter XVIII:  Love Put to Work...............................195
Chapter XIX:  Man's Highest Honor..............................203
Chapter XX:  A Wretched Secret that Must be Kept...............209
Chapter XXI:  A Deliberate Wooer...............................216
Chapter XXII:  A Vain Wish.....................................225
Chapter XXIII:  Jennie Burton's Remedies.......................232
Chapter XXIV:  A Hateful, Wretched Life........................239
Chapter XXV:  Half-Truths......................................246
Chapter XXVI:  Sunday Table-Talk...............................251
Chapter XXVII:  A Family Group.................................262
Chapter XXVIII:  Rather Volcanic...............................268
Chapter XXIX:  Evil Lives Cast Dark Shadows....................278
Chapter XXX:  The Deliberate Wooer Speaks First................284
Chapter XXXI:  An Emblem.......................................293
Chapter XXXII:  The Dangers of Despair.........................303
Chapter XXXIII:  "Hope Dies Hard"..............................311
Chapter XXXIV:  Puzzled........................................324
Chapter XXXV:  Desperately Wounded.............................335
Chapter XXXVI:  Temptation's Voice.............................350
Chapter XXXVII:  Voices of Nature..............................360
Chapter XXXVIII:  A Good Man Speaks............................369
Chapter XXXIX:  Van Berg's Escape..............................387
Chapter XL:  Van Berg's Conclusions............................397
Chapter XLI:  The Protestant Confessional......................403
Chapter XLII:  The Corner-Stone of Character...................424
Chapter XLIII:  A "Heavenly Mystery"...........................435
Chapter XLIV:  "The Garden of Eden"............................443
Chapter XLV:  Problems Beyond Art..............................470
Chapter XLVI:  A Resolute Philosopher..........................486
Chapter XLVII:  The Concert Garden Again.......................500
Chapter XLVIII:  Ida's Temptation..............................518
Chapter XLIX:  The Blind God...................................538
Chapter L:  Swept Away.........................................555
Chapter LI:  From Deep Experience..............................569
Chapter LII:  An Illumined Face................................589
Chapter LIII:  A Night's Vigil.................................601
Chapter LIV:  Life and Trust...................................615





Chapter 1.  A Face.




Although the sun was approaching the horizon, its slanting
rays found a young artist still bending over his easel.  That his
shoulders are broad is apparent at a glance; that upon them is placed
a shapely head, well thatched with crisp black hair, is also seen
at once; that the head is not an empty one is proved by the picture
on the easel, which is sufficiently advanced to show correct and
spirited drawing.  A brain that can direct the hand how to do one
thing well, is like a general who has occupied a strategic point
which will give him the victory if he follows up his advantage.

A knock at the door is not answered at once by the intent and
preoccupied artist, but its sharp and impatient repetition secures
the rather reluctant invitation,

"Come in," and even as he spoke he bent forward to give another
stroke.

"Six o'clock, and working still!" cried the intruder.  "You will
keep the paint market active, if you achieve nothing else as an
artist."

"Heigho!  Ik, is that you?" said he of the palette, good-naturedly;
and rising slowly he gave a lingering look at his work, then turned
and greeted his friend with the quiet cordiality of long and familiar
acquaintance.  "What a marplot you are with your idle ways!" he
added.  "Sit down here and make yourself useful for once by doing
nothing nothing for ten minutes.  I am in just the mood and have
just the light for a bit of work which perhaps I can never do as
well again," and the artist returned promptly to his picture.

In greeting his friend he had revealed that he was above middle
height, that he had full black eyes that were not only good for
seeing, but could also, if he chose, give great emphasis to his
words, and at times be even more expressive.  A thick mustache
covered his lip, but the rest of his face was cleanly shaven, and
was strong and decided in its outlines rather than handsome.

"They say a woman's work is never done," remarked Ik Stanton, dropping
into the easiest chair in the studio, "and for this reason, were
there no other, your muse is evidently of the feminine persuasion.
I also admit that she is a lady of great antiquity.  Indeed I would
place her nearer to the time when 'Adam delved and Eve span' than
to the classic age."

"My dear Ik," responded the artist, "I am often at a loss to know
whether I love or despise you most.  If a little of the whirr of
our great grandam's spinning wheel would only get into your brain
the world might hear from you.  You are a man of unbounded stomach
and unbounded heart, and so you have won all there is of me except
my head, and that disapproves of you."

"A fig for the world! what good will it do me or it to have it hear
from me? you ambitious fellows are already making such a din that
the poor old world is half ready for Bedlam; and would go stark mad
were it not for us quiet, easy-going people, who have time for a
good dinner and a snack between meals.  You've got a genius that's
like a windmill in a trade wind, always in motion; you are worth
more money than I shall ever have, but you are the greatest drudge
in the studio building, and work as many hours as a house-painter."

"When your brain once gets in motion, Ik, fiction will be its natural
product.  You must admit that I have not painted many pictures."

"That is one of the things I complain of; I, your bosom friend and
familiar, your, I might add, guardian angel--I, who have so often
saved your life by quenching the flame of your consuming genius
with a hearty dinner, have been able to obtain one picture only
from you, and as one might draw a tooth.  Your pictures are like
old maid's children--they must be so perfect that they can't exist
at all.  But come, the ten minutes are up.  Here's the programme
for the evening--a drive in the Park and a little dinner at a cool
restaurant near Thomas's Garden, and then the concert.  That prince
of musical caterers has made a fine selection for to-night, and,
with the cigar stand on one side of us and the orchestra on the
other, we are certain to kill a couple of hours that will die like
swans."

"You mention the cigar-stand first."

"Why not?  Smoke is more real than empty sound."

"Are you not equally empty, Ik, save after dinner?  How have the
preceding hours of this long day been killed?"

"Like boas.  They have enfolded me with a weary weight."

"The snakes in your comparison are larger than your pun, and the
pun, rather than yourself, suggests a constrictor's squeeze."

"Come, you are only abusing me to gain time, and you may gain too
much.  My horses have more mettle than their master, and may carry
off my trap and groom to parts unknown, while you are wasting
paint and words.  You are like the animals at the Park, that are
good-natured only after they are fed.  So shut up your old paint
shop, and come along; we will shorten our ride and lengthen our
dinner."

With mutual chaffing and laughter the young men at last went down
to where a liveried coachman and a pair of handsome bays were in
waiting.  Taking the high front seat and gathering up the reins, Ik
Stanton, with his friend Harold Van Berg at his side, bowled away
towards the Park at a rapid pace.

Harold Van Berg was, in truth, something of a paradox.  He was an
artist, and yet was rich; he had inherited large wealth, and yet
had formed habits of careful industry.  The majority of his young
acquaintances, who had been launched from homes like his own, were
known only as sons of their fathers, and degenerate sons at that.
Van Berg was already winning a place among men on the ground of
what he was and could do himself.

It were hard to say which was the stronger motive, his ambition or
the love of his art; but it seemed certain that between the two,
such talent as he had been endowed with would be developed quite
thoroughly.  And he did possess decided talent, if not genius.  But
his artistic gift accorded with his character, and was controlled
by judgement, correct taste, and intellectuality rather than by
strong and erratic impulses.  His aims were definite and decided
rather than vague and diffusive; but his standards were so high
that, thus far, he had scarcely attempted more than studies that
were like the musician's scales by which he seeks to acquire a
skill in touch that shall enable him to render justly the works of
the great composers.

His family had praised his work unstintedly, and honestly thought
it wonderful; he had also been deluged with that kind of flattery
which relaxes the rules of criticism in favor of the wealthy.  Thus
it was not strange that the young fellow, at one time, believed
that he was born to greatness by a kindly decree of fate.  But as
his horizon widened he was taught better.  His mind, fortunately,
grew faster than his vanity, and as he compared his crude but
promising work with that of mature genius, he was not stricken
with that most helpless phase of blindness--the inability to see
the superiority of others to one's self.  Every day, therefore,
of study and observation was now chastening Harold Van Berg and
preparing him to build his future success on the solid ground of
positive merit as compared with that of other and gifted artists.

Van Berg's taste and talent led him to select, as his specialty,
the human form and countenance, and he chiefly delighted in those
faces which were expressive of some striking or subtle characteristic
of the indwelling mind.  He would never be content to paint surfaces
correctly, giving to features merely their exact proportions.  Whether
the face were historical, ideal, or a portrait, the controlling
trait or traits of the spirit within must shine through, or else
he regarded the picture as scarcely half finished.

A more sincere idolator than Van Berg, in his worship of beauty,
never existed; but it was the beauty of a complete man or a complete
woman.  Even in his early youth he had not been so sensuous as to
be captivated by that opaque fragment of a woman--an attractive
form devoid of a mind.  Indeed with the exception of a few boyish
follies, his art had been his mistress thus far, and it was beginning
to absorb both heart and brain.

With what a quiet pulse--with what a complacent sense of security
we often meet those seemingly trivial events which may change the
whole character of our lives!  The ride had been taken, the dinner
enjoyed, and the two friends were seated in the large cool hallway
off the concert garden, where they could smoke without offence.  The
unrivalled leader, Thomas, had just lifted his baton--that magic
wand whose graceful yet mysterious motion evokes with equal ease,
seemingly, the thunder of a storm, the song of a bird, the horrid
din of an inferno, or a harmony so pure and lofty as to suggest
heavenly strains.  One of Beethoven's exquisite symphonies was to
be rendered, and Van Berg threw away his half-burned cigar, settled
himself in his chair and glanced around with a congratulatory air,
as if to say, "Now we are to have one of those pleasures which
fills the cup of life to overflowing."

Oh, that casual glance!  It was one of those things that we might
justly call "little."  Could anything have been more trivial,
slight, and apparently inconsequential than this half involuntary
act?  Indeed it was too aimless even to have been prompted by a
conscious effort of the will.  But this book is one of the least
results of that momentary sweep of the eye.  Another was, that Van
Berg did not enjoy the symphony at all, and was soon in a very bad
humor.  That casual glance had revealed, not far away, a face that
with his passion for beauty, at once riveted his attention.  His
slight start and faint exclamation, caused Ik Stanton to look around
also, and then, with a mischievous and observant twinkle in his
eyes, the bon vivant resumed his cigar, which no symphony could
exorcise from his mouth.

At a table just within the main audience room, there sat a young
lady and gentleman.  Even Van berg, who made it his business to
discover and study beauty, was soon compelled to admit to himself
that he had never seen finer features than were possessed by this
fair young stranger.  Her nose was straight, her upper lip was
short, and might have been modelled from Cupid's bow; her chin did
not form a perfect oval after the cold and severe Grecian type, but
was slightly firm and prominent, receding with decided yet exquisite
curves to the full white throat.  Her cheeks had a transparent
fairness, in which the color came and went instead of lingering
in any conventional place and manner; her hair was too light to be
called brown and too dark to be golden, but was shaded like that on
which the sunlight falls in one of Bougereau's pictures of "Mother
and Child;" and it rippled away from a broad low brow in natural
waves, half hiding the small, shell-like ears.

Van Berg at first though her eyes to be her finest feature, but
he soon regarded them as the worst, and for the same reason, as he
speedily discovered, that the face, each feature of which seemed
perfect, became, after brief study, so unsatisfactory as to cause
positive annoyance.  To a passing glance they were large, dark,
beautiful eyes, but they lost steadily under thoughtful scrutiny.
A flashing gem may seem real at first, but as its meretricious rays
are analyzed, they lose their charm because revealing a stone not
only worthless worse than worthless, since it mocks us with a false
resemblance, thus raising hopes only to disappoint them.  The other
features remained beautiful and satisfactory to Van Berg's furtive
observation because further removed from the informing mind, and
therefore more justly capable of admiration upon their own merits;
but the eyes are too near akin to the animating spirit not to suffer
from the relationship, should the spirit be essentially defective.

That the beautiful face was but a transparent mask of a deformed,
dwarfed, contemptible little soul was speedily made evident.  The
cream and a silly flirtation with her empty-headed attendant--a
pallid youth who parted his hair like a girl and had not other parts
worth naming--absorbed her wholly, and the exquisite symphony was
no more to her than an annoying din which made it difficult to hear
her companion's compliments that were as sweet, heavy, and stale
as Mailard's chocolates, left a year on the shelves.  Their mutual
giggle and chatter at last became so obtrusive that an old and
music-loving German turned his broad face towards them, and hissed
out the word "Hist!" with such vindictive force as to suggest that
all the winds had suddenly broken lose from the cave of Aeolus.

Ik Stanton, who had been watching Van Berg's perturbed, lowering
face, and the weak comedy at the adjacent table, was obviously much
amused, although he took pains to appear blind to it all and kept
his back, as far as possible, towards the young lady.

The German's "hist" had been so fierce as to be almost like a rap
from a policeman's club, and there was an enforced and temporary
suspension of the inane chatter.  The attendant youth tried
to assume the incensed and threatening look with which an ancient
gallant would have laid his hand on the hilt of his sword.  But
some animals and men only become absurd when they try to appear
formidable.  It was ludicrous to see him weakly frowning at the
sturdy Teuton who had already forgotten his existence as completely
as he might that of a buzzing mosquito he had exterminated with a
slap.

They young girl's face grew even less satisfactory as it became
more quiet.  A muddy pool, rippled by a breeze, will sparkle quite
brilliantly while in motion; but when quiet it is seen the more
plainly to be only a shallow pool.  At first the beautiful features
expressed only petty resentment at the public rebuke.  As this
faintly lurid light faded out and left the countenance in its normal
state it became more heavy and earthy in its expression than Van
Berg would have deemed possible, and it ever remained a mystery to
him how features so delicate, beautiful, and essentially feminine
could combine to show so clearly that the indwelling nature
was largely alloyed with clay.  there was not that dewy freshness
in the fair young face which one might expect to see in the early
morning of existence.  The Lord from heaven breathed the breath of
life into the first fair woman; but this girl might seem to have
been the natural product of evolution, and her soul to be as truly
of the earth as her body.

It was evident that she had been made familiar too early and
thoroughly with conventional and fashionable society, and, although
this fraction of the world is seldom without its gloves, its touch
nevertheless had soiled her nature.  Her face did not express any
active or malignant principle of evil; but a close observer, like
Van Berg, in whom the man was in the ascendant over the animal, could
detect the absence of the serene, maidenly purity of expression,
characteristic of those girls who have obtained their ideas of life
from good mothers, rather than from French novels, French plays,
and a phase of society that borrows its inspiration from fashionable
Paris.

With the ending of the symphony the chatting and flirting at the
table began again, to Van Berg's increased disgust.  Indeed, he
was so irritated that he could no longer control himself, and rose
abruptly, saying to his companion:

"Come, let us walk outside."

His sudden movement drew the young lady's attention, but by this
time he had only his broad shoulders turned towards her.  She saw
Ik Stanton looking at her, however, with a face full of mischief,
and she recognized him with a nod and a smile.

He, with the familiarity that indicated relationship, but with a
motion too slight to be noticed by others, threw her a kiss from
the tips of his fingers, as one might toss a sugar-plum to a child,
and then followed his friend.





Chapter II.  Ida Mayhew.




What is the matter, Van?  You remind me of a certain horned beast
that has seen a red flag," said Ik Stanton, linking his arm in that
of Van Berg's.

"An apt illustration.  I have been baited and irritated for the
last twenty minutes."

"I thought you enjoyed Beethoven's music, and surely Thomas rendered
it divinely to-night."

"That is one of the chief of my grievances.  I haven't been able
to hear a note," was the wrathful response.

"That's strange," said Stanton with mock gravity.  "Were I not
afraid you would take it amiss I would hint that your ears are of
goodly size.  How comes it that they have so suddenly failed you?"

"Having seen your dinner you have no eyes for anything else.  If
you had, you would have seen a face near us."

"I saw a score of faces near us.  A German had one with the area
of an acre."

"Was he the one who said, 'hist,' like a blast from the North?"

"From a porpoise rather."

"Did you observe the girl towards whom his gusty rebuke was directed?"

"Yes, an inoffensive young lady."

"Inoffensive, indeed!" interrupted Van Berg.  "She has put me into
purgatory."

"You do seem quite ablaze.  Well, you are not the first one that
she has put there.  But really, Van, I did not know that you were
so inflammable."

"If you had any of the instincts of an artist you would know that
I am inflamed with no gentler feeling than anger."

"Why! what has the poor child done to you?"

"She is not a child.  She knows too much about some things."

"I've no doubt she is better than either you or I," said Stanton,
sharply.

"That fact would be far from proving her a saint."

"What the dickens makes you so vindictive against the girl?"

"Because she has the features of an angel and the face of a fool.
What business has a woman to mock and disappoint one so!  When I
first saw her I thought I had discovered a prize--a new revelation
of beauty; but a moment later she looked so ineffably silly that
I felt as if I had bitten into an apple of Sodom.  Of course the
girl is nothing to me.  I never saw her before and hope I may never
see her again; but her features were so perfect that I could not
help looking at them, and the more I looked the more annoyed I became
to find that, instead of being blended together into a divine face
by the mind within, they were the reluctant slaves of as picayune
a soul as ever maintained its microscopic existence in a human
body.  It is exasperating to think what that face might be, and
to see what it is.  How can nature make such absurd blunders?  The
idea of building so fair a temple for such an ugly little divinity!"

"I thought you artists were satisfied with flesh and blood women,
if only put together in a way pleasing to your fastidious eyes."

"If nature had designed that women should consist only of flesh
and blood women, if only put together in a way pleasing to your
fastidious eyes."

"If nature had designed that women should consist only of flesh and
blood, one would have to be content; but no one save the 'unspeakable
Turk,' believes in such a woman, or wants her.  Who admires such a
fragment of a woman save the man that is as yet undeveloped beyond
the animal?  My mother is my friend, my companion, my inspiration.
The idea of yonder silly creature being the companion of a MAN."

"Good evening, Coz," said a voice that was a trifle shrill and loud
for a public place, and looking up, the friends saw the subject
of their conversation, who, with her spindling attendant was also
taking a promenade.

Stanton raised his hat with a smile, while Van Berg touched his
but coldly.

"I wish to speak with you," she said in passing.

"I will join you soon," Stanton answered.

"So this lady is your cousin?" remarked Van Berg.

"She is," said Stanton laughing.

"You will do me the justice to remember that I spoke in ignorance
of the fact.  If I were you I would give her some cousinly advice."

"Bless you!  I have, but it's like pouring water on a duck's
back.  For one sensible word I can say to her she gets a thousand
compliments from rich and empty-headed young fools, like the one
now with her, who will eventually be worth half a million in his
own name.  I was interested to see how her face would strike you,
and I imagine that your estimate has hit pretty close upon the
truth, for in my judgment she is the prettiest and silliest girl in
New York.  She has recently returned from a year's absence abroad,
and I was in hopes that she would find something to remember besides
her own handsome face, but I imagine she has seen little else than
it and the admiring glances which everywhere follow her.  Take us
as we average, Van, Mr. Darwin has not go us very far along yet,
and if the face of a woman suits us we are apt to stare at it
as far as such politeness as we possess permits, without giving
much thought to her intellectual endowments.  When it comes to
companionship, however, I agree with you.  Heaven help the man who
is tied to such a woman for life.  Still, in the fashionable crowd
my cousin trains with, this makes little difference.  The husband
goes his way and the wife hers, and they are not long in getting
a good ways apart.  But come, let me introduce you, I have always
thought the little fool had some fine gold mingled with her dross,
and you are such a skilful analyst that perhaps you will discover
it."

"No, I thank you," said Van Berg, with a slight expression of
disgust.  "I could not speak civilly to a lady that I had just seen
giggling and flirting through one of Beethoven's finest symphonies."

"Well well," said Stanton laughing, "I am rather glad to find one
man who is not drawn to her pretty face like a moth to a candle.
I will join you again by and by."

Van Berg sat down in one of the little stalls that stood open to
the main promenade, and saw his friend thread his way among the
moving figures, and address his cousin.  As she turned to speak
with Stanton, the artist received again that vivid impression of
beauty, which her face ever caused before time was given for closer
scrutiny.  Indeed from his somewhat distant point of observation,
and in the less searching light, the fatal flaw could scarcely be
detected.  Her affected tones and silly words could not be heard,
and he saw only dark lustrous eyes lighting up features that were
almost a revelation even to him with his artistic familiarity with
beauty.

"If I could always keep her at about that distance," he muttered,
"and arrange the lights and shadows in which to view her face, I
could not ask for a better study, for she would give me a basis of
perfect beauty, and I could add any expression of characteristic
that I desired."  And now he feasted his eyes as a compensation,
in part, for the annoyance she had caused him in the glare of the
audience room.

He soon saw a frown lower upon her hitherto laughing face like the
shadow of a passing cloud, and it was evident that something had
been said that was not agreeable to her vanity.

A moment or two after Stanton had joined the young lady her escort
for the evening had excused himself for a brief time, and had left
the cousins together.  She had then asked, "I say, Ik, who was that
gentleman you were talking with?"

"He's an old friend of mine."

"He's not an OLD friend of any one.  He is young and quite good-looking,
or rather he has a certain 'distingue' air that makes one look at
him twice.  Who is he?"

"He is an artist, and if he lives and works as he is now doing,
through an ordinary lifetime, he will indeed by distinguished.  In
fact, he stands high already."

"How nice," she exclaimed.

"He has another characteristic, which you will appreciate far more
than anything he will ever accomplish with his brush--he is very
rich."

"Why! he's perfectly splendid.  Whoever heard of such a strange,
rare creature!  I've flirted with lots of poor artists, but never
with a rich one.  Bring him to me, and introduce him at once."

"He is not one that you can flirt with, like the attenuated youth
who has just meandered to the barroom."

"Why not?"

"If you had eyes for anything save your own pretty face, and the
public stare, you would have seen that my friend is not a 'creature,'
but a man."

"Come, Cousin Ik," she replied in more natural tones, "too much
of your house is made of glass for you to throw stones.  Flirting
and frolicking are as good any day as eating, smoking, and dawdling."

Stanton bit his lip, but retorted, "I don't profess to be a bit
better than you are, Coz; but I at least have the sense to appreciate
those who are my superiors."

"So have I, when I find them; I am beginning to think, however,
that you men are very much alike.  All you ask is a pretty face,
for you all think that you have brains enough for two.  But bring
your paragon and introduce him, that I may share in your gaping
admiration."

"You would, indeed, my dear Coz, yawn over his conversation, for
you couldn't understand half of it.  I think we had better remain
where we are till your shadow returns with his eyes and nose
slightly inflamed.  He is aware of at least one method of becoming
a spirited youth, it seems."

"A man who is worth half a million is usually regarded as rather
substantial," she retorted.

"Yes, but in this case the money-bags outweigh the man too
ridiculously.  For heaven's sake, Coz, do not make a spectacle of
yourself by marrying this attenuation, or society will assert there
was a regularly drawn bill of sale."

"I assure you that I do not intend to put myself under any man's
thumb for a long time to come.  I am having too good a time; and
that reminds me that I would enjoy meeting your friend much more
than listening to your cynical speeches.  Did I not know that you
were like my little King Charles--all bark rather than bite--I
wouldn't stand them; and I won't any longer, to-night.  So go and
bring your great embryo artist, or he will become one of the old
masters before I see him."

"I fear I must give you a wee bit of bite this time.  I have offered
to introduce him and he declines the honor."

"How is that?" she asked, flushing with anger.

"I will quote his words exactly, and then you can interpret them
as you think best.  He said, 'I could not speak civilly to a lady
that I had just seen giggling and flirting through one of Beethoven's
finest symphonies.'"

The young girl's face looked anything but amiable in response to
this speech; but, after a moment, she tossed her head, and replied:

"'N'importe'--there are plenty who can use not only civil words
but complimentary ones."

"Yes, and the mischief of it is that you will listen to them and
to no others.  What sort of muscle can one make who lives only on
sugar-plums?"

"They agree with me better than the vinegar drops you and your
unmannerly friend delight in.  I don't believe he ever painted
anything better than a wooden squaw for one of your beloved
cigar-shops--welcome back Mr. Minty.  You have been away an
unconscionably long time."

"Thanks for the compliment of being missed.  I have tried to make
amends by ordering a 'petit souper' for three, for I was sure your
cousin would join us.  It will be brought to one of yonder stalls,
where, while we enjoy it, we can both see and hear."

Surmising that the viands would consist of the choicest delicacies
of the season, Stanton readily accepted the invitation, and it so
happened that the cloth was laid for the party in the stall next to
that in which Van Berg was quietly enjoying a cigar and a frugal glass
of lager.  They took their places quite unaware of his proximity,
and he listened with considerable interest to the tones and words
of the fair stranger who had so unexpectedly taken possession of
his thoughts.  Were it not for a slight shrillness and loudness at
times, and the fashionable affectation of the day, her voice would
have been sweet and girlish enough.  As it was, it suggested an
instrument tuned to a false key and consequently discordant with
all true and womanly harmonies.  Her conversation with young Minty
was as insipid as himself, but occasionally Stanton's cynical banter
evoked something like repartee and wit.

In the course of her talk she said:  "By the way, Ik, mother and
I start for the country next week.  We are to spend the summer at
the Lake House, which is up the Hudson somewhere--you know where
better than I.  If you will bring your bays and a light wagon
I shall be very glad to see you there; otherwise I shall welcome
you--well--as my cousin."

"If I come I will surely bring my bays, and possibly may invite
you to drive with me."

"Oh, I will save you all trouble in that respect by inviting myself,
when so inclined."

The orchestra was now about to give a selection that Van Berg wished
to hear to better advantage than he could in his present position;
therefore, unobserved by the party on the other side of the thin
partition, he returned to his old seat in the main hallway.  Not
very long after, Stanton, with his cousin and Mr. Minty, entered
from the promenade, and again Van Berg received the same vivid
impression of beauty, and, with many others, could not withdraw his
eyes from the exquisite features that were slightly flushed with
champagne and excitement.  But, as before, this impression passed
quickly, and the face again became as exasperating to the artist
as the visage of the Venus of Milo would be should some vandal hand
pencil upon it a leer or a smirk.  A heavy frown was gathering upon
his brow when the young lady, happening to turn suddenly, caught
and fully recognized his lowering expression.  It accorded only
too well with her cousin's words in regard to Van Berg's estimate
of herself, and greatly increased her resentment towards the one who
had already wounded her vanity--the most vulnerable and sensitive
trait in her character.  The flush that deepened so suddenly upon
her face was unmistakably that of anger.  She promptly turned her
back upon her critic, nor did she look towards him again until
the close of the evening.  That his words and manner rankled in
her memory, however, was proved by a slightly preoccupied manner,
followed by fits of gayety not altogether natural, and chiefly by
the fact that she could not leave the place without a swift glance
at the disturbing cause of her wonted self-approval.  But Van Berg
took pains to manifest his indifference by standing with his back
towards her when she knew that he must be aware of her departure,
from her slightly ostentatious leave-taking of her cousin, in which,
of course, the spoiled beauty had no other object than to attract
attention to herself.

As Van Berg, with his friend, was passing out a few minutes later,
he asked rather abruptly, showing that he also was not so indifferent
as he had pretended to be:

"What is your cousin's name, Stanton?"

"Her name is as pretty as herself--Ida Mayhew, and it is worse than
a disquieting ghost in a good many heads and hearts that I know
of.  Indeed its owner has robbed men that I thought sensible, not
only of their peace, but, I should say, of their wits also.  I had
one friend of whom I thought a great deal, and it was pitiable to
see the abject state to which the heartless little minx reduced
him.  I am glad to find that her witchery has no spell for you, and
that you detect just what she is through her disguise of beauty.
'Entre nous,' Van, I will tell you a secret.  I was once over ears
in love with her myself, but my cousinly relationship enabled me
to see her so often and intimately that she cured me of my folly
on homeopathic principles.  'Similia similibus curantur.'  Even
the blindness of love could not fail to discover that when one
subtracted vanity, coquetry, and her striking external beauty from
Ida Mayhew, but little was left, and that little not a heavenly
compound.  Those who know her least, and who add to her beauty
many ideal perfections, are the ones that rave about her most.  I
doubt whether she ever had a heart; if so, it was frittered away
long ago in her numberless flirtations.  But with all her folly
she has ever had the sense to keep within the conventionalities of
her own fashionable 'coterie,' which is the only world she knows
anything about, and whose unwritten laws are her only creed and
religion.  Her disappointed suitors can justly charge her with
cruelty, silliness, ignorance, and immeasurable vanity, but never
with indiscretion.  She has to perfection the American girl's
ability to take care of herself, and no man will see twice to take
a liberty beyond that which etiquette permits.  I have now given
you in brief the true character of Ida Mayhew.  It is no secret,
for all who come to know her well, arrive at the same opinion.  When
I saw you had observed her this evening for the first time, I was
quite interested in watching the impression she would make upon
you, and I am very glad that your judgment has been both good and
prompt; for I slightly feared that your love of beauty might make
you blind to everything else."

Stanton's concluding words were as incense to Van Berg, for he
prided himself in no slight degree on his even pulse and sensible
heart, that, thus far, had given him so little trouble; and he therefore
replied, with a certain tinge of complacency and consciousness of
security:

"You know me well enough, Ik, to be aware that I am becoming almost
a monomaniac in my art.  A woman's face is to me little more than
a picture which I analyze from an artistic stand-point.  A MERELY
PRETTY face is like a line of verse of musical rhythm, but without
sense or meaning.  This is bad and provoking enough; but when
the most exquisite features give expression only to some of the
meanest and unworthiest qualities that can infest a woman's soul,
one is exasperated almost beyond endurance.  At least I am, for I
am offended in my strongest instincts.  Think of employing stately
Homeric words and measure in describing a belle's toilet table with
its rouge-pots, false hair, and other abominations!  Much worse is
it, in my estimation, that the features of a goddess should tell
us only of such moral vermin as vanity, silliness, and the egotism
of a poor little self that thinks of nothing, and knows nothing
save its own small cravings.  Pardon me, Ik; I am not speaking of
your cousin but in the abstract.  In regard to that young lady,
as you saw, I was very much struck with the face.  Indeed, to tell
the honest truth, I never saw so much beauty spoiled  before, and
the fact has put me in so bad a humor that you, no doubt, are glad
I have reached my corner and so must say good-night."

"Ida Mayhew can realize all such abstractions," muttered Ik Stanton,
as he walked on alone.

The reader will be apt to surmise, however, that some resentment,
resulting from his former and unrequited sentiment towards the
girl, gave an unjust bias to his judgement.





Chapter III.  An Artist's Freak.




Van Berg's night-key admitted him to a beautiful home, which he
now had wholly to himself, since his parents and sister had sailed
for Europe early in the spring, intending to spend the summer
abroad.  The young man had already travelled and studied for years
in the lands naturally attractive to an artist, and it was now his
purpose to familiarize himself more thoroughly with the scenery of
his own country.

On reaching his own apartment he took down a prosy book, that he
might read himself into that condition of drowsiness which would
render sleep possible; but sleep would not come, and the sentences
were like the passers-by in the street, whom we see but do not note,
and for whose coming and going we know not the reasons.  Between
himself and the page he saw continually the exquisite features and
the exasperating face of Ida Mayhew.  At last he threw aside the
book, lighted a cigar, and gave himself up to the reveries to which
this beautiful, but discordant visage so strongly predisposed him.
Its perfection in one respect, its strongly marked imperfection
in another, both appealed equally to his artistic and thoughtful
mind.  At one moment it would appear before him with an ideal
loveliness such as had never blessed the eye of his fancy even;
but while he yet looked the features would distort themselves into
the vivid expression of some contemptible trait, so like what he
had seen in reality, during the evening, that, in uncontrollable
irritation, he would start up and pace the floor.

His uncurbed imagination conjured up all kinds of weird and grotesque
imagery.  He found himself commiserating the girl's features as if
they were high-toned captives held in degrading bondage by a spiteful
little monster, that delighted to put them to low and menial uses.
To one of his temperament such beauty as he had just witnessed,
controlled by, and ministering to, some of the meanest and pettiest
of human vices, was like Mary Magdalene when held in thraldom by
seven devils.

A cool and matter-of-fact person could scarcely understand Van
Berg's annoyance and perturbation.  If a true artist were compelled
to see before him a portrait that required only a few skillful
touches in order to become a perfect likeness, and yet could not
give those touches, the picture would become a constant vexation;
and the better the picture, the nearer it approached the truth, the
deeper would be the irritation that all should be spoiled through
defects for which there was no necessity.

In the face that persistently haunted him Van Berg saw a beauty
that might fulfil his best ideal; and he also saw just why it did
not and never could, until its defects were remedied.  He felt
a sense of personal loss that he should have discovered a gem so
nearly perfect and yet marred by so fatal a flaw.

The next day it was still the same.  The face of Ida Mayhew interposed
itself before everything that he sought to do or see.  Whether it
were true or not, it appeared to him that in all his wanderings and
observations he had never seen features so capable of fulfilling
his highest conception of beauty did they but express the higher
qualities and emotions of the soul.  He also felt that never
before had he seen a face that would seem to him so hideous in its
perversion.

He threw down his brush and palette in despair and again gave himself
up to his fancies.  He then sketched in outline the beautiful face
as expressing joy, hope, courage, thought or love, but was provoked
to find that he ever obtained the best likeness when portraying
the vanity, silliness, or petulance which had been the only
characteristics he had seen.

He now grew metaphysical and tried to analyze the girl's mind.
He sought to grope mentally his way back into the recesses of the
soul, which had looked, acted, and spoken the previous evening.
A strange little place he imagined it, and oddly furnished.  It
occurred to him that it bore a resemblance to her dressing room,
and was full of queer feminine mysteries and artificial ideas that
had been created by conventional society rather than inspired by
nature.

He asked himself, "Can it be that here is a character in which the
elements of a true and good woman do not exist?  Has she no heart,
no mind, no conscience worthy of the name?  At her age she cannot
have lost these qualities.  Have they never been awakened?  Do
they exist to that degree that they can be aroused into controlling
activity?  I suppose there can be pretty idiots.  As people are
born blind or scrofulous, so I suppose others can be born devoid of
heart or conscience, inheriting from a degenerate ancestry sundry
mean and vile propensities in their places.  Human nature is
a scale that runs both up and down, and it is astonishing how far
the extremes can be apart."

"How high is it possible for the same individual to rise in this
scale?  I imagine we are all prone to judge of people as if they
were finished pictures, and to think that the defects our first
scrutiny discovers will remain for all time.  It is in real life
much as in fiction.  From first to last a villain is a villain,
as if he had been created one.  The heroine is a moss rose-bud by
equal and unchanging necessity.  Is this girl a fool, and will she
remain one by any innate compulsion?  By Jove!  I would like to see
her again in the searching light of day.  I would like to follow
her career sufficiently long, to discover whether nature has been
guilty of the grotesque crime of associating inseparably with that
fine form and those exquisite features, a hideous little mind that
must go on intensifying its dwarfed deformity, until death snuffs
it out.  If this be true, the beautiful little monster that is
bothering me so suggests a knotty problem to wiser heads than mine."

Somewhat later his musings led him to indulge in a broad laugh.

"Possibly," he said aloud, "she is a modern and fashionable Undine,
and has never yet received a woman's soul.  The good Lord deliver
me from trying to awaken it, as did the knight of old in the story,
by swelling the long list of her victims.  I can scarcely imagine
a more pitiable and abject creature than a man (once sane and
sensible) in thraldom to such a tantalizing semblance of a woman.
She would no more appreciate his devotion than the jackdaw the
pearl necklace it pecked at.

"I fear my Undine theory won't answer.  Stanton says she has no heart,
and her face and manner confirm his words.  But now I think of it,
the original Undine lived a long time ago--in the age of primeval
simplicity, when even cool-blooded water nymphs had hearts.  One
is induced to think, in our age, that this organ will eventually
disappear with the other characteristics of ancient and undeveloped
man, and that the brain, or what stands for it, will become all in
all.  In the first instance the woman's soul came in through the
heart; but I suppose that in the case of a modern Undine it could
enter most readily through the head.  I wonder if there is something
like an unawakened mind, sleeping under that broad low brow that
mocks one with its fair intellectual outline.  I wonder if it
would be possible to set her thinking, and so eventually render
her capable of receiving a woman's soul.  As it is now she seems
to possess only certain disagreeable feminine propensities.  One
might engage in such an experiment as a philosopher rather than a
lover; or, what is more to my purpose, as an artist.

"By Jove! I would half like to make the attempt; it would give zest
to one's summer vacation.  Well, what is to hinder?  Now I think
of it she remarked that she was to spend the season at the Lake
House, not far from the Hudson, a place well suited to my purposes.
There are the wild highlands on one side, and a soft pastoral country
on the other.  I could there find abundant opportunity for varied
studies in scenery, and at the same time beguile my idle hours at
the hotel with this face of marvellous capabilities and possibilities.
The features already exist, and would be beautiful if the girl were
dead, and they could be no longer distorted by the small vices of
the spirit back of them.  They might become transcendently beautiful,
could she in very truth receive the soul of a true and thoughtful
woman--a soul such as makes my mother beautiful in her plain old
age.

"I'm inclined to follow this odd fancy.  That girl is a 'rara
avis' such as has never flown across my path before.  I shall have
a quarrel with nature all my life if I must believe she can fashion
a face capable of meaning so much and yet actually meaning so
little, and that little disgusting."

After a few moments of deep thought, he again started to his feet
and commenced pacing his studio.

"Suppose," he soliloquized, "I attempt a novel bit of artistic work
as my summer recreation.  Suppose I take the face of this stranger
instead of a piece of canvas and try to illumine it with thought,
with womanly character and intelligence.  If I fail, as I probably
shall, no harm will be done.  If her silliness and vanity are
ingrained and essential parts of her nature, she shall learn that
there is at least one man who can see her as she is, and whose
heart is not wax on which to stamp her pretty and senseless image.
If I only partially succeed, if I discern she has a mind, but
so feeble that it can only half reclaim her from her weakness and
folly, still something will be accomplished.  Her features are so
beautiful, that should they come to express even the glimmerings
of that which is admirable, the face will be in part redeemed.
But if by some happy miracle, as in the instance of the original
Undine, a mind can be awakened that will gradually prepare a place
for the soul of a true woman, I shall accomplish the best work of
my life, even estimated from an artistic point of view.  Possibly,
for my reward, she will permit me to paint her portrait as a souvenir
of our summer's acquaintance."

It did not take Van Berg long to complete his arrangements for
leaving town.  He wrote a line to his friend Stanton, saying that
he proposed spending a few weeks in the vicinity of the Highlands
on the Hudson, and that he could not say when he would be at his
rooms or at home again.  The afternoon of the following day found
him a passenger on a fleet steamboat, and fully bent upon carrying
out his odd artistic freak.





Chapter IV.  A Parthian Arrow.





As, in the quiet June evening, Harold Van Berg glided through the
shadows of the Highlands, there came a slight change over his spirit
of philosophical and artistic experiment.  The season comported
with his early manhood, and the witching hour and the scenery were
not conducive to cold philosophy.  He who prided himself on his
steady pulse and a devotion to art so absorbing that it even prompted
his impulses and gave character to his recreation, was led to feel,
on this occasion, that his mistress was vague and shadowy, and to
half wish for that companionship which the most self-reliant natures
have craved at times, ever since man first felt, and God knew, that
it was "not good for him to be alone."  If he could turn from the
beauty of the sun-tipped hills and rocks and the gloaming shadows
to an appreciative and sympathetic face, such as he could at
least imagine the visage of Ida Mayhew might become, would not his
enjoyment of the beauty he saw be doubly enhanced?  In his deepest
consciousness he was compelled to admit that it would.  He caught
a glimpse of the truth that he would never attain in his highest
manhood until he had allied himself to a womanhood which he should
come to believe supremely true and beautiful.

The ringing of the bell announced his landing, and in the hurry and
bustle of looking after his luggage and obtaining a ticket which he
had forgotten to procure, he speedily became again, in the world's
estimation, and perhaps in his own, a practical, sensible man.  An
hour or two's ride among he hills brought him at last to the Lake
House, where he selected a room that had a fine prospect of the
mountains, the far distant river, and the adjacent open country,
engaging it only for a brief time so that he might depart when he
chose, in case the object of his pursuit should not appear, or he
should weary of the effort, or despair of its success.

A few days passed, but the face which had so haunted his fancy
presented no actual appearance.  The scenery, however, was beautiful,
the weather so perfect, and he enjoyed his rambles among the hills
and his excursions on the water so thoroughly that he was already
growing slightly forgetful of his purpose and satisfied that he
could enjoy himself a few weeks without the zest of artistically
redeeming the face of Ida Mayhew.  But one day, while at dinner,
he overheard some gossip concerning a "great belle" who was to come
that evening, and he at once surmised that it was the fair stranger
he had seen at the concert.

At the time, therefore, of the arrival of the evening stage he
observantly puffed his cigar in a corner of the piazza, and was
soon rewarded by seeing the object of his contemplated experiment
step out of the vehicle, with the airy grace and confidence of one
who regards each new abiding-place as a scene of coming pleasures
and conquests, and who feels sure every glance toward her is one
of admiration.  There were eyes, however, that noted disapprovingly
her jaunty self-assurance and self-assertion, and when she met those
eyes her complacency seemed disturbed at once, for she flushed and
promptly turned her back upon them.  In fact, from the time she
had first seen Van Berg's frowning face it had been a disagreeable
memory, and now here it was again and frowning still.  Although
he sat at a distance from the landing-place, her eyes seemed drawn
towards his as if by some fascination, and she already had the
feeling that whenever he was present she would be conscious of his
cool, critical observation.

Van Berg had scarcely time to note a rather stout and overdressed
person emerge from the stage, how was evidently the young lady's
mother, when Ik Stanton, with his bays and a light country wagon,
dashed up to the main entrance.  Stanton was an element in the
artistic problem that Van Berg had not bargained for, and what
influence he would have, friendly or adverse, only time could show.

While Stanton was accompanying his aunt and cousin to the register,
as the gentleman of the party, the young lady said to him:

"That horrid artist friend of yours is here.  I wish he hadn't
come.  Did you tell him we were coming here?"

"No, 'pon my honor."

"I have believe you did.  If so I'll never forgive you, for the
very sight of him spoils everything."

"Come now, Coz, be reasonable.  From all the indications I have
seen, Van Berg is the last man to follow you here or anywhere else,
even though he knew of your prospective movements.  He is here, as
scores of others are, for his own pleasure.  So follow your mother
to your room, smooth your ruffled plumage and come down to supper."

Even Miss Mayhew's egotism could find no fault with so reasonable
an explanation, and she went pouting up the stairway in anything
but a complacent mood.

Stanton stepped out upon the piazza to greet his friend, saying:

"Why, Van, it is an unexpected pleasure to find you here."

"I was equally and quite as agreeably surprised to see you drive
to the door.  If you cousin had not come I might have helped you
exercise your bays.  I am doing some sketching in the vicinity."

"My cousin shall not keep you from many an idle hour behind the
bays--that is, if you will not carry your antipathy so far as to
cut me on account of my relationship."

"I'm not conscious of any antipathy for Miss Mayhew," replied Van
Berg, with a slight shrug.

"Oh, only indifference!  Well, if you will both maintain that
attitude there will be no trouble about the bays or anything else.
I'll smoke with you after supper."

"She evidently has an antipathy for me," mused Van Berg.  "Stanton,
no doubt, has told her of my uncomplimentary remarks, and possibly
of the fact that I declined an introduction.  That's awkward, for
if I should now ask to be presented to her, she would very naturally
decline, and so we might drift into something as closely resembling
a quarrel as is possible in the case of two people who have never
spoken to each other."

He concluded that it would be best to leave to chance the occasion
which should place them on speaking terms, and tried to persuade
himself that her unpromising attitude towards him was not wholly
unfavorable to his purpose.  He never could hope to accomplish
anything without at first piquing her pride and wounding her vanity.
His only fear was that this had been done too effectually, and that
from first to last she would simply detest him.

In his preoccupation he forgot that the supper hour was passing,
but at last started hastily for his room.  As he rapidly turned a
sharp corner he nearly ran into two ladies who were coming from an
opposite direction, and looking up saw Mrs. Mayhew and the flushed,
resentful face of her daughter.  In spite of himself our even-pulsed
philosopher flushed also, but instantly removing his hat he
ejaculated:

"I beg your pardon," and passed on.

As Ida joined her cousin at the supper-table she whispered exultantly:

"He has spoken to me."

"Who has spoken to you?"

"Your artist-bear."

"How did that happen?"

"Well, he nearly ran over me--horrid thing!  I suppose that's
another of his peculiar ways."

"Did he embrace you?"

"Embrace me!  Good heavens, what an escape I have had!  So this
too is characteristic of your friend?"

"You said he was a bear.  If so, he should have given you a hug on
the first opportunity."

"He didn't have an opportunity, and he never will."

"Poor fellow!  It will make him sick if I tell him so.  Well, since
it is another case of beauty and the beast, what did the beast
say?"

"He said that it was very proper he should say to me after all his
hatefulness.  He said, 'I beg your pardon.'"

"And then I suppose you kissed and made up."

"Hush, you horrid thing.  I noticed him no more than I would a
chair that I might have stumbled over."

"Thus displaying that sweet trait of yours--Charity.  But I thought
it was he that stumbled over you?"

"A musty, miserable pun!  It was he, and I'm delighted it so happened,
that the first time he ever spoke to me he had to ask my pardon."

"Well, well!  I'm glad it so happened, too, and that the ice is
broken between you, for Van Berg is a good friend of mine, and it
would be confoundedly disagreeable to have you two lowering at each
other across a bloody chasm of dark, revengeful thoughts."

"The ice isn't broken at all.  He has begged my pardon as he ought
to do a hundred times; but I haven't granted it, and I never will.
What's more, I'll never speak to him in all my life; never, never!"

"Swear it by the 'inconstant moon'!"

"Hush, here he comes.  Ah, 'peste!' his table is right opposite
ours."

"Who is that tall and rather distinguished-looking gentleman
that just entered?" asked Mrs. Mayhew, suddenly emerging from a
pre-occupation with her supper which a good appetite had induced.

"He IS distinguished, or will be.  He's a particular friend of
Ida's, and is as rich as Croesus."

"Three items in his favor," said Mrs. Mayhew complacently; "but Ida
has so many friends, or beaux, rather, that I can't keep track of
them.  Her friends speedily become furnace-like lovers, or else
escape for their lives into the dim and remote region of mere bowing
acquaintanceship.  I once tried to keep a list of the various and
variegated gentlemen with red whiskers and black whiskers, with
whiskers sandy, brown, and occasionally almost white, but borrowing
a golden hue from their purses, that appeared and disappeared so
rapidly, as to almost make me dizzy.  I was about as bewildered as
the poor Indian who sought to take the census of London by notching
a stick for every passer-by he met.  And now before we are through
supper on the first evening of our arrival, another appears, who
is evidently an eligible 'parti' and twice as good as the minx
deserves; but in a few days he, too, will vanish into thin air,
and another and different style of man will take his place.  Mark
my words, Ida, you will be through the woods before long, and I
expect you will take up with the crookedest of crooked sticks on
the farther side," and the voluble Mrs. Mayhew resumed her supper
with a zest which this dismal prospect did not by any means impair.

"If I were in search of a crabbed, crooked stick, I would not have
to look farther than yonder table," said the young lady, petulantly.
"What you suppose about that dabbler in paint is about as far from
the truth as your sketch of those who are my friends.  That man
never was my friend, and never shall be.  I don't want you to get
acquainted with him or speak to him.  You must not introduce him
to me, for if you do, I shall be rude to him."

"Hoity-toity! what's the matter?"

"I don't like him.  Only Ik thinks he's wonderful.  He has probably
blinded our cousin to his faults by painting a flattering likeness
of the vain youth here."

"But in suggesting another portrait that was not altogether pleasing,
he sinned beyond hope," whispered Stanton.

Ida bit her lip and frowned, recalling the obnoxious artist's portrait
of herself as giggling and flirting through one of Beethoven's
symphonies; and she said spitefully:

"He can never hope for anything from me."

"Poor, hopeless wretch!" groaned Stanton.  "How can he sip his tea
yonder so complacently oblivious of his doom?"

"Mother, I'm in earnest," resumed the daughter.  "I have reasons
for disliking that man, and I do not wish the annoyance of his
acquaintance."

"Well, well," said Mrs. Mayhew; "as long as the wind blows from
that cool quarter, we can keep cool till it changes.  If I mistake
not, he is the same gentleman who met us in the corridor.  I'm sure
he has fine manners."

"If it is fine manners in a man to nearly run over two ladies, he
is perfect.  But I am sick of hearing about him, and especially
of seeing him.  I insist, Ik, that you have our table changed to
yonder corner, and then arrange it so that I can sit with my back
towards him."

"I am your Caliban, but would hint, my amiable Coz, that you should
not bite off your own pretty nose in spite.  Must all your kin join
in this bitter feud?  May I not smoke with my ancient familiar?"

"Oh, be off, and if you and your friend disappear like your cigars,
the world will survive."

"I fear it is because my friend will never dissolve in sighs that
you are so willing he should end in smoke."

Having winged this Parthian arrow over his shoulder, Stanton strolled
out on the piazza whither Van Berg had preceded him.





Chapter V.  Spite.




Miss Mayhew apparently had not given a single glance to the artist,
as he sat opposite to her and but a little out of earshot.  Indeed,
so well did she simulate unconsciousness of his presence, that
were if not for an occasional glance from Mrs. Mayhew he might have
thought himself unnoticed; but something in that lady's manner, as
caught by occasional glances, led him to suspect that he was the
subject of their conversation.

But Ida's indifference was, in truth, only seeming; for although
she never looked directly at him, she subjected his image, which
was constantly flitting across the retina of her eye, to the closest
scrutiny, and no act or expression of his escaped her.  She was
piqued by the fact that he showed no disturbed consciousness of her
presence, and that his glance was occasionally as free and natural
towards her as towards any other guest of the house.  His bearing
annoyed her excessively, for it seemed an easy and quiet assertion
of indifference and superiority--two manifestations that were to
her as objectionable as unusual.  Neither in looks nor manner did
she appear very agreeable during the brief time she spent in the
public parlors.  The guests of the house, even to the ladies who
foresaw an eclipse of their own charms, were compelled to admit
that she was very pretty; but it was a general remark that her face
did not make or leave a pleasant impression.

Van Berg surmised that Stanton's disposition to teaze and banter
would lead him to repeat and, perhaps, distort, anything he might
say concerning the young lady, so he made no reference whatever
to the Mayhews, but took pains to give the impression that he was
deeply interested in the scenery.

"I shall probably be off with my sketch-book before you are up," he
said; "for if I remember correctly, you are up with the lark only
when you have been up over-night."

"You are the greater sinner of the two," yawned Stanton; "for if I
occasionally keep unseasonable hours at night, you do so habitually
in the morning.  Either you are not as brilliant as usual this
evening, or else the country air makes me drowsy.  Good-night.  We
will take a ride to-morrow, and you can sketch five miles of fence
if you find that you cannot resist your mania for work."

Perhaps Stanton HAD found his friend slightly preoccupied, for, in
spite of the constraint he had put upon himself to appear as usual,
this second and closer view of the face which had taken so strong
a hold upon his fancy did not dissipate his first impressions.
Indeed, they were deepened rather, for he saw again and more clearly
the same marvellous capabilities in the features, and also their
exasperating failure to make a beautiful face.

He dreamed over his project some little time after his friend had
retired, and the conclusion of his revery was:

"I must soon make some progress in my experiment or else decamp, for
that girl's contradictory face is a constant incentive to profanity."

After seeing Mrs. Mayhew, however, he felt that justice required
him to admit that the daughter was a natural and logical sequence;
and in the mother he saw an element more hopelessly inartistic and
disheartening than anything in the girl herself; for even if the
latter could be changed, would not the shadow of the stout and
dressy mother ever fall athwart the picture?

Van Berg retired with the feeling that his project of illuminating
a face by awakening a mind that, as yet, had slept, did not promise
very brilliantly.

Miss Mayhew tried to persuade herself that it was a relief not to
see the critical artist at breakfast, nor to meet him as she strolled
from the parlors to the piazza and thence to the croquet-ground,
where she listlessly declined to take part in a game.

There was, in truth, great need that her mind should be awakened
and her whole nature radically changed, if it were a possible
thing,--a need shown by the fact the fair June morning, with its
fragrance and beauty, could not light up her face with its own
freshness and gladness.  The various notes of the birds were only
sounds; the landscape, seen for the first time, was like the map
of Switzerland, that, in the days of her geography lessons, gave
her as vivid an idea of the country as a dry sermon does of heaven.
Although her ears and eyes were so pretty, she was, in the deepest
and truest sense of the word, deaf and blind.  The lack of some
petty and congenial excitement made time hang heavily on her hands
and clouded her face with 'ennui.'"

Even her cousin had failed her, for he was down at the stables,
making arrangements for the care of his bays and his carriage.  Thus
from very idleness she fell to nursing her small spite against the
man whose voice had made such harsh discord with the honeyed chorus
of flattery to which she was accustomed.  She wished that he would
appear, and that in some way she might show how little she cared
for him or his opinion; but as he did not, she at last lounged to
her room and sought to kill a few hours with a novel.

Her wounded pride, however, induced her to dress quite elaborately
for dinner; for she had faith in no better way of asserting her
personality than that afforded by the toilet.  She would teach him,
by the admiration she excited in others, how mistaken he had been
in his estimate, and her vanity whispered that even he could not
look upon her beauty for any length of time without being won by
it as so many others had been.

The change of seats having been effected, she scarcely thought it
necessary to turn her back upon him while sitting at such a dim
distance.  Indeed she was inclined to regret the change, for now
her toilet and little airs, which she imagined to be so pretty,
would be lost upon him.

It would seem that they were, for Van Berg ate his dinner as quietly,
and chatted as unconcernedly to those about him as if she had no
existence.  Never had a man ignored her so completely before, and
she felt that she could never forgive him.

After the event of the day was over, and the guests were circling
and eddying through the halls and parlors and out on the piazza,
Ida still had the annoyance of observing that Van Berg was utterly
oblivious of her as far as she could perceive.  He spoke here and
there with the ease and freedom of one familiar with society, and
she saw more eyes following his tall form approvingly than were
turned towards herself.  Few gentlemen remained at the house during
the week, and Miss Mayhew was not a favorite with her own sex.
Those who most closely resembled her in character envied rather
than admired her, and those who were better endowed and developed
found fault even with her beauty from a moral point of view, as
Van Berg had on artistic grounds.  She consoled herself, however,
with the thought that it was Saturday, and that the evening boat
and trains would bring a number of gentlemen, among whom she told
Stanton, exultantly, that she had "some friends"--moths rather
whose wings were in danger of being singed.

As the afternoon was not sultry, Stanton had said to his friend
that they could enjoy their cigars and a ride at the same time, and
that he would drive around for him in a few minutes.  Ida overheard
the remark, and, quietly slipping off to her room, returned with
her hat and shawl.  As her cousin approached she hastened down the
steps, past Van Berg, exclaiming:

"Oh, thank you, Ik!  How good of you!  I was dying for a ride.
Don't trouble yourself.  I can get in without aid," and she sprang
lightly into the buggy before her cousin could utter a word.

He turned with a look of comic dismay and deprecation to his friend,
who stood laughing on the steps.  Ida, also, could not resist
her inclination to catch a glimpse of the artist's chagrin and
disappointment, but she was provoked beyond measure to find him
acting as if Stanton were the victim rather than himself.  As the
sweep of the road again brought them in view of the piazza, this
impression was confirmed by seeing Van Berg stroll carelessly away,
complacently puffing his cigar as if he had already dismissed her
from his mind.

"Really," grumbled Stanton, "I never had beauty and happiness thrust
upon me so unexpectedly before."

"Very well then," retorted Ida; "stop your horses and thrust me
out into the road.  I'd rather go back, even if I have to walk."

"Oh, no! there is to be no going back for two hours or more.  I
once cured a horse of running away by making him run long after he
wanted to stop."

"You seem to be learning your friend's hateful manners."

"I asked you this morning if you would take a drive, and you
declined."

"I changed my mind."

"Very abruptly, indeed, it seemed.  Since you took so much touble
to annoy my friend, it's a pity you failed."

"I don't believe I failed.  He's probably as cross as you are about
it, only he can keep it to himself."

"Dove-like creatiah! thanks.  Will you please drive while I light
a cigar?"

"I don't like any one to smoke as near me as you are."

"If your theory in regard to Van Berg is correct, none of us will
enjoy what we like this afternoon.  Of course I never smoke without
a lady's permission, but unless quieted by a cigar, I am a very
reckless driver," and he enforced his words by a sharp crack of
the whip, which sent the horses off like the wind.

"Oh, stop them; smoke; do anything hateful you wish, so you don't
break my neck.  I will never ride with you again, and I wish I had
never come to this horrid place; and if your sneering painter does
not leave soon, I will."

"I'm afraid Van would survive, and you only suffer from your spite.
But come, since you have so sweetly permitted me to smoke, I'll
make your penance as light as possible, and then we will consider
matters even between us," and away they bowled up breezy hills and
down into shady valleys, Stanton stolidly smoking, and Ida nursing
her petty wrath.  Two flitting ghosts hastening to escape from the
light of day, could not have seen less, or have felt less sympathy
with the warm beautiful scenes through which they were passing.
There is no insulation so perfect as that of small, selfish natures
preoccupied with a pique.

When, late in the afternoon, her cousin, with mock politeness, assisted
her to alight at the entrance of the hotel, Ida was compelled to
feel that she had indeed been the chief victim of her own spite.
but, with the usual logic of human nature, she never thought of
blaming herself, and her resentment was chiefly directed against
the man whose every word and glance, although he was but a stranger,
had seemed to possess a power to annoy and wound from the first.
She felt an almost venomous desire to retaliate; but he appeared
invulnerable in his quiet and easy superiority, while she, who
expected, as a matter of course, that all masculine thoughts should
follow her admiringly, had been compelled to see that his critical
eyes had detected that in her which had awakened his contempt.

"I'll teach him this evening, when my gentlemen friends arrive,
how ridiculous are his airs," she muttered, as she went to her room
and sought to enhance her beauty by all the arts of which she was
the mistress.  "I'll show him that there are plenty who can see
what he cannot, or will not.  Because he is an artist, he need not
think he can face me out of the knowledge of my beauty, the existence
of which I have been assured of by so many eyes and tongues ever
since I can remember."

When she came down to await the arrival of the stages and carriages,
she was indeed radiant with all the beauty of which she was then
capable.  Her neck and shoulders, with their exquisite lines and
curves, were more suggestively revealed than hidden by a slight
drapery of gauze-like illusion, and her white rounded arms were
bare.  She trod with the light airy grace of youth, and yet with
the assured manner of one who is looking forward to the familiar
experiences of a reigning belle.

Van Berg, from his quiet corner of observation, was compelled to
admit that, seen at her present distance, she almost embodied his
best dreams, and might do so wholly were there less of the fashionable
art of the hour, and more of nature in her appearance.  But he knew
well that if she came nearer, and spoke so as to reveal herself,
the fatal defect in her beauty would be as apparent as a black line
running athwart the sculptured face of a Greek goddess.  The only
question with him was, did the ominous deformity lie so near the
surface that it could be refined away, or was it ingrained into
the very material of her nature, thus forming an essential part
of herself?  He feared that the latter might be true, or that the
remedy was far beyond his skill or power; but every glance he caught
of the girl, as with her mother she paced the farther end of the
piazza, deepened his regret, as an artist, that so much beauty
should be in degrading bondage to a seeming fool.





Chapter VI.  Reckless Words and Deeds.




Light carriages now began to wheel rapidly up to the entrance,
and were followed soon by the lumbering and heavily-laden stages.
Joyous greetings and merry repartee made the scene pleasant to
witness even by one who, like Van Berg, had no part in it.  Stanton,
who at this moment joined him, drew his special attention to a thin
and under-sized gentleman somewhat past middle age, who mounted the
steps with a tread that was as inelastic as his face was devoid of
animation.

"There is poor Uncle Mayhew," remarked the young man indifferently.
"I suppose I must go and speak to him."

"Mr. Mayhew?" said Van Berg, in some surprise.  "You have not spoken
of him before.  I was not aware that there was any such person in
existence."

"You are not to blame for that," replied Stanton with a shrug.
"You might have been one of the friends of the family and scarcely
have learned the fact.  Indeed, poor man, he only about half exists,
for he has been so long overshadowed by his fashionable wife and
daughter, that he is but a sickly plant of a man."

Van Berg saw that the greeting received by Mr. Mayhew from his wife
and daughter was very undemonstrative to say the least, and that
then the gentleman quickly disappeared, as if fearing that he might
be in the way.

"From my very limited means of judging," Van Berg remarked, "I
cannot see anything more objectionable in the head of the family
than in the other members."

"Your phrase, 'head of the family,' as applied to Mr. Mayhew, makes
me smile.  His name figures at the head of the large family bills,
but scarcely elsewhere with much prominence.  You will soon learn,
if you remain here, that Mr. Mayhew imbibes rather more than is
good for him, so I may as well mention the disagreeable fact at
once.  But to do the poor man justice, I suppose he drinks to keep
his spirits up to the ordinary level, rather than from any hope
of becoming a little jolly occasionally.  Why my aunt married him
I scarcely know; and yet I have often thought that he might be a
very different did she not so quench him by a manner all her own.
As it is, his life seems to consist of toiling and moiling all the
week, and of stolidly and joylessly soaking himself into semi-stupidity
on Sunday.  It this wretched state of affairs could be kept secret
I would not mention it even to you, my intimate friend; but, since it
continues no secret wherever they happen to remain for any length
of time, I would rather tell you the exact truth at once, than
permit you to guess at it through distorted rumors.  As you artists
occasionally express yourselves concerning pictures, so I suppose
you will think that this family, with all its wealth is quite
lacking in tone."

"Well, Stanton, I must admit that I find myself chiefly inclined
towards the subdued and neutral-tinted Mr. Mayhew.  If you have a
chance I wish you would introduce me to him."

"Are you in earnest?"

"Certainly."

"Then I'll ask him to smoke with us after supper.  Well, Van,
I congratulate you again that your correct and cultivated taste
enabled you to see the fatal flaw in my cousin's beauty.  If you
had been bewitched by her, and had insisted on imagining (as so
many others have done) that her faultless features were the reflex
of what she is or could become in mind and character, I might have
had a good deal of trouble with you; for you are a mulish fellow when
you get a purpose in your head.  I don't care how badly singed the
average run of moths become.  You may see two or three fluttering
around to-night, if you care to look on, but I wish no friend of mine
to make sport, at serious cost to himself, for yonder incorrigible
coquette, if she is my cousin.  But after what you have seen and now
know, you would be safe enough, even if predisposed to folly.  The
little minx! but I punished her well for her spite this afternoon."

"O most prudent Ulysses! you have indeed filled my ears with wax.
I thank you all the same as if my danger were greater."

"Well, view them all with such charity as you can.  I hope you were
not very much annoyed by the loss of your ride.  The young lady
will not be in a hurry to play such a trick again.  I'll join you
after supper in this your favorite and out-of-the-way corner."

"Was beauty ever environed within and without by such desperately
prosaic and inartistic surroundings?" mused Van Berg.  "It glistens
like a lost jewel in an ash-barrel; or, more correctly, it is like
an exquisite flower that nature has perversely made the outcome
of a rank and poisonous vine.  Of course the flower is poisonous
also, and as soon as its first delicate bloom is over, will grow
as rank and repulsive as the vine that bears it.  Like produces
like; and with such parentage, what hope is there for her?  I am
glad no one suspects my absurd project; for every hour convinces
me of its impracticability.  The ancient Undine was a myth, and my
modern Undine might be called a white lie, but one that will grow
darker every day.  At a distance she presents the semblance of a
very fair woman, but I have been unable to detect a single element
yet that will prevent her from developing into an old and ugly hag,
in spite of all that art and costume can do for her."

After supper Stanton brought Mr. Mayhew to Van Berg's retired
nook, and the artist gave the hand of the weary, listless man such
a cordial pressure as to cause him a slight surprise, but after
satisfying his faint interest by a brief glance, he turned the back
of his chair towards all the gay company, although it contained
his wife and daughter, puffed mechanically at his cigar, and looked
vacantly into space.  Before the evening was over, however, Van berg
had drawn from him several quite animated remarks, and secured the
promise that he would join him and Stanton in a ramble immediately
after breakfast the following morning.

Nor had the young man been oblivious of the daughter who now seemed
in her native element.  From his dusky point of observation he
caught frequent glimpses of her, now whirling through a waltz in
the parlor, now talking and laughing in a rather pronounced way from
the midst of a group of gentlemen, and again coquettishly stealing
off with one of them through the moonlit walks.  Her manner, whether
assumed or real, was that of extravagant gaiety.  Occasionally she
seemed to glance towards their obscure corner, but neither she nor
her mother came to seek the man who had been toiling all the week
to maintain their idle luxury.

As Mrs. Mayhew and her daughter were preparing for dinner on the
following day, Mr. Mayhew entered with a brisker step than usual.

"Why, father, where have you been?" Ida asked, surprised by the
fact that he had not been drinking and dozing in his room all the
morning.

"I have been shown a glimpse of something that I have not seen for
many years."

"Indeed, and what is that?"

"Beauty that seemed beautiful."

"That's a compliment to us," remarked Mrs. Mayhew, acidly.

"I mean the kind of beauty which does one good and makes a man wish
that he were a man."

"Do you mean an unmarried man?" said his wife with a discordant
laugh.

"Probably your own wishes suggested that speech, madam," replied
the husband, bitterly.

"And pray, where did you find so much beauty?" said Mrs. Mayhew,
ignoring his last remark.

"On a breezy hill-side.  It's a kind of beauty, too, that one can
enjoy without paying numberless bills for its enhancement.  I refer
to that of the scenery."

"Oh," remarked Mrs. Mayhew, indifferently; "it would have been
more to your credit if you had gone to church instead of tramping
around the fields."

"I think the fields have done more for me than church for you."

"Why so?" was the sharp response.

"They have at least kept me from indulging in one bad habit.  I am
sober."

"They do not keep you from making ill-natured remarks," said Mrs.
Mayhew, sailing out of the room fully bedizened for the solemnity
of dinner.

"You say you were 'shown' all this beauty," remarked Ida, who was
giving the finishing touches to her toilet before a large mirror,
and by whom the frequent bickerings of her parents were scarcely
noted.  "Who officiated as showman?"

"A man who understands the beauties of a landscape so well that he
could make them visible even to my dim eyes, and attractive to my
deadened and besotted nature.  I'd give all the world if I could
be young, strong, and hopeful like him, again.  It was good of
him--yes, good of him, to try to cheer a stranger with pleasant
thoughts and sights.  I suppose you are acquainted with Mr. Van
Berg, since he is a friend of Ik's?"

"No, I'm not," was the sharp reply; "nor do I wish to be."

"Why not?" asked Mr. Mayhew in some surprise.

"It's sufficient that I don't like him."

"He's not your style, I suppose you mean to say?"

"Indeed he is not."

"So much worse for your style, Ida."

She was sweeping petulantly from the room when her father added
with a depth of feeling very unlike his wonted apathy:  "O, Ida, it
were better that all three of us had never been born than to live
as we do!  Your life and your mother's is froth, and mine is mud.
How I hated it all this bright June morning, as Mr. Van Berg gave
me a glimpse into another and better world!"

"Do you mean to say that Mr. Van Berg presumed to criticise my mode
of life?" Ida asked with a darkening face.

"Oh, no, no!  How small and egotistical all your ideas are!  He
never mentioned you, and probably never thought of you.  He only
took a little pains that a tired and dispirited man might see and
feel the eternal beauty and freshness of nature, as one might give,
in passing, a cup of water to a traveller."

"I don't see what reason you have for feeling and appearing so
forlornly, thus asking for sympathy from strangers, as it were,
and causing it to seem as if we were making a martyr of you.  As
for this artist, with his superior airs, I detest him.  He never
loses a chance to annoy and mortify me.  I've no doubt he hoped
you would come home and tell us, as you have, how much better he
was than---"

"There, there, quit that kind of talk or I'll be drunk in half
an hour." said her father, harshly.  "If you had the heart of a
woman, let alone that of a daughter, you would thank the man who
had unwittingly kept me from making a beast of myself for one day
at least.  Go down to your dinner, I'm in no mood for eating."

She went without a word, but with a more severe compunction of
conscience than she had ever felt before in her life.  Her father's
face and words smote her with a keen reproach, piercing the thick
armor of her vanity and selfishness.  She saw, for a moment, how
unnatural and unlovely she must appear to him, in spite of her
beauty, and the thought crossed her mind:

"Mr. Van Berg despises me because he sees me in the same light.
How I hate his cold, critical eyes!"

Even at his far remove Van Berg could see that she was ill at
ease during the dinner hour.  There would be times of forced and
unnatural gayety, followed by a sudden cloud upon the brow and
an abstracted air, as if her thoughts had naught to do with the
chattering group around her.  It would also appear that her appetite
was flagging unusually, and once or twice he thought she darted an
angry look towards him.

As if something were burdening her mind, she at last left the table
hastily, before the others were through with their dessert.

As may be surmised, she sought her father's room.  Receiving no response
to her knock, she entered and saw at a glance the confirmation of
her fears.  Her father sat in an arm-chair with his head upon his
breast.  A brandy bottle stood on the table beside him.  At the
sound of her step he looked up for a moment with heavy eyes, and
mumbled:

"He ain't of your style, is he?  Nor of mine, either.  Froth and
mud!"

Ida gave a sudden stamp of rage and disgust, and whirled from the
room.

Van Berg happened to see her as she descended to the main hall-way,
and her face was so repulsive as to suggest to him the lines from
Shakespeare:


"In nature there's no blemish, but the mind;
 None can be called deformed, but the unkind;
 Virtue is beauty; but the beauteous--evil
 Are empty trunks, o'er flourished by the devil."


That afternoon and evening her reckless levity and open coquetry
secured unfavorable comment not only from the artist, but from
others far more indifferent, whose attention she half compelled by
a manner that did not suggest spring violets.

Van Berg was disgusted.  He was less versed in human nature than
art, and did not recognize in the forced and obtrusive gayety the
effort to stifle the voice of an aroused conscience.  Even to her
blunted sense of right it seemed a hateful and disgraceful truth
that a stranger had helped her father towards manhood, an that she
had destroyed the transient and salutary influence.  Her complacency
had been disturbed from the time her cousin had repeated Van Berg's
remark, "I could not speak civilly to a lady that I had just seen
giggling and flirting through one of Beethoven's finest symphonies;"
and now, through an unexpected chain of circumstances, she had,
for the first time in her life, reached a point of self-disgust and
self-loathing.  Such a moral condition is evil's opportunity when
a disposition towards penitence or reform is either absent or
resisted.  The thought, therefore, of her father's drunkenness that
day, and of herself as the immediate cause, made her so wretched and
reckless that she tried to forget her miserable self in excitement,
as he had in lethargy.  Even her mother chided her, asking if she
did not "remember the day."

"Indeed, I shall have occasion to remember it," was her ambiguous
answer; "but Mondays in the country are always blue, and I'll do
my repenting then.  If I were a good Catholic I'd hunt up a priest
to-morrow."

"I'll be your father-confessor to-day," said a black-eyed young
man, twirling his mustache.

"You, Mr. Sibely?  You would lead me into more naughtiness than you
would help me out of, twice over.  For my confessor I would choose
an ancient man who had had his dinner.  What a comfortable belief
it is, to be sure!  All one has to do is to buzz one's sins through
a grating (that is like an indefinite number of key-holes) to
a dozing old gentleman inside, and then away with a heart like a
feather, to load up again.  I'd bless the man who could convert me
to a Papist."

But she hated the man who had made her feel the need of absolution,
and who seemed an inseparable part of all her disagreeable experiences.
Although he appeared to avoid any locality in which she remained,
she observed his eyes turned towards her more than once before the
day closed, and it exasperated her almost beyond all endurance to
believe that their expression was only that of contempt.

She might have been a little better pleased, perhaps, if she had
known that she made the artist almost as uncomfortable as herself.
Never before had there seemed to him so great a contrast between
her beauty and herself, her features and her face.  The latter could
not fail to excite his increased disgust, while the former was so
great that he found himself becoming resolutely bent on redeeming
them from what seemed a horrid profanation.  In accordance with
one of his characteristics, the more difficult the project seemed,
the more obstinately fixed became his purpose to discover whether
she had a mind of sufficient calibre to transform her into what she
might be, in contrast with what she was.  The more he saw of her
the more his interest as an artist, and, indirectly, as a student
of character, was deepened.  If she had no mind worth naming he
would give the problem up to the solution of time, which, however,
promised nothing but a gradual fading away of all beauty, and the
intensifying of inward deformity until fully reproduced in outward
ugliness.





Chapter VII.  Another Feminine Problem.




Early on Monday morning, Mr. Mayhew hastened from the breakfast-table
to the stage.  His wife and daughter were not down to see him
off, and he seemed desirous of shunning all recognition.  With
the exception that that his eyes were heavy and bloodshot from his
debauch, his face had the same dreary, apathetic expression which
Van Berg had noted on his arrival.  And so he went back to his
city office, where, fortunately for him, mechanical routine brought
golden rewards, since he was in no state for business enterprise.

From his appearance, Van Berg could not help surmising what had been
his condition the previous day.  Indeed Stanton, with a contemptuous
shrug, had the same as said on Sabbath evening, that his uncle had
"dropped into the old slough."  Although neither of the young men
knew how great an impetus Ida had given her father towards such
degradation, they both felt that if his wife and daughter had had
the tact to detect and appreciate his better mood, produced by the
morning ramble, they might have sustained him, and given him at
least one day that he could remember without shame and discouragement.

Van Berg found something pathetic in Mr. Mayhew's weary and
disheartened manner.  It was like that of a soldier who has suffered
defeat, but who goes on with his routine in a mechanical, spiritless
manner, because there is nothing else to do.  He seemed to have no
hope, nor even a thought of retrieving the past and of reasserting
his own manhood.  Accustomed as the young artist had ever been to
a household in which affection, allied to high-bred courtesy and
mutual respect, made even homely daily life noble and beautiful,
he could not look on the discordant Mayhew family with the charity,
or the indifference, of those who have seen more of the wrong side
of life.  Had there been only poor, besmirched Mr. Mayhew, and
stout, dressy, voluble Mrs. Mayhew, he would never have glanced
towards them the second time; but his artist's eyes had fallen on
the contradictory being that linked them together.  Morally and
mentally she seemed one with her parent stock; but her beauty, in
some of its aspects, was so marvellous, that the desire to redeem
it from its hateful and grotesque associations grew stronger every
hour.

Instead, therefore, of going off upon solitary rambles, as he had
done hitherto, he mingled more frequently in the amusements of
the guests of the house, with the hope he would thus be brought so
often in contact with the subject of his experiment, that her pique
would wear away sufficiently to permit them to meet on something
like friendly terms.

As far as the other guests were concerned, he had not trouble.
They welcomed him to croquet, to walking and boating excursions,
and to their evening games and promenades.  Such of the ladies as
danced were pleased to secure him as a partner.  Indeed, from the
dearth of gentlemen during the week, he soon found himself more
in demand than he cared to be, and saw that even the landlord
was beginning to rely upon him to keep up a state of pleasurable
effervescence among his patrons.  His languid friend, Stanton, was
not a little surprised, and at last remarked:

"Why, Van, what has come over you?  I never saw you in the role of
a society fellow before!"

But his unwonted courtesies seemed wholly in vain.  He propitiated
and won all save one, and that one was the sole object of his effort.
While all others smiled, her face remained cold and averted.  Indeed
she took such pains to ignore and avoid him, that it was generally
recognized that there was a difference between them, and of course
there was an endless amount of gossiping surmise.  As the hostility
seemed wholly on the lady's side, Van Berg appeared to the better
advantage, and Ida was all the more provoked as she recognized the
fact.

She now began to wish that she had taken a different course.  As
Van Berg pursued his present tactics, her feminine intuition was
not so dull but that she was led to believe he wished to make her
acquaintance.  Of course there was, to her mind, but one explanation
of this fact--he was becoming fascinated, like so many others.

"If I were only on speaking and flirting terms," she thought (the
two relations were about synonymous in her estimation), "I might
draw him on to a point which would give me a chance of punishing
him far more than is now possible by sullenly keeping aloof.  As
it is, it looks to these people here as if he had jilted me instead
of I him, and that I am sulking over it."

But she had entangled herself in the snarl of her own previous
words and manner.  She had charged her mother and cousin to permit
no overtures of peace; and once or twice, when mine host, in his
good-natured, off-hand manner, had sought to introduce them, she
had been so blind and deaf to his purpose as to appear positively
rude.  Her repugnance to the artist had become a generally recognized
fact; and she had built up such a barrier that she could not break
it down without asking for more help than was agreeable to her
pride.  But she chafed inwardly at her false position, and at the
increasing popularity of the object of her spite.

Even her mother at last formed his acquaintance; and, as the artist
listened to the garrulous lady for half an hour with scarcely an
interruption, she pronounced him one of the most entertaining of
men.

As Mrs. Mayhew was chanting his praises that evening, Ida broke
out petulantly:

"Was there ever such a gad-fly as this artist!  He pesters me from
morning till night."

"Pesters you!  I never saw a lady so severely let alone as you are
by him.  Whatever is the cause of your spite it seems to harm only
yourself, and I should judge from your remark that it disturbs you
much more than you would have it appear--certainly far more than
it does him."

There was no soothing balm in these words, as may well be supposed;
and yet the impression grew upon Ida that the artist would be
friendly if he could; and the belief strengthened with him also
that she took far too much pains to manifest what she would have
others think to be mere indifference and dislike, and he intercepted
besides, with increasing frequency, furtive glances towards himself.
So much ice had accumulated between them, however that neither knew
how it was to be broken.

One day, about the middle of the week, Van Berg found a stranger
seated opposite to him at the dinner table.  His first impression
was, that the lady was not very young and that her features were
quite plain; but before the meal was over he concluded that her
face was decidedly interesting, and that the suggestion of age had
been made by maturity of character and the impress which some real
and deep experience gives to the countenance, rather than by the
trace of years.

While yet a stranger, the expression of her blue eyes, as she
glanced around, was so kindly that she at once won the good-will
of all who encountered them.  This genial, friendly light in her
eyes seemed a marked characteristic.  It was so different from the
obtrusive, forward manner with which some seek to make acquaintances,
that it would not have suggested a departure from modest reserve,
even to the most cynical.  It rather indicated a heart aglow with
gentle feeling and genial good-will, like a maple-wood fire on a
hospitality hearth, that warms all who come within the sphere of
its influence.

Van Berg was naturally reserved, and slow to make new acquaintances.
But before he had stolen many glances of the face opposite him he
began to wish for the privilege of speaking to her--a wish that
was increased by the fact that they were alone at the table, the
other guests who usually occupied the chairs not having returned
from their morning drive.  she did not look at him in particular,
nor appear to be in the least struck by his "distingue" air, as
Ida had been before she was blinded by prejudice; but she looked
out upon the world at large with such a friendly aspect that he
was sure she had something pleasant to say.  He was therefore well
pleased when at last the landlord bustled up in his brusque way
and said:

"Mr. Van Berg, permit me to make you acquainted with Miss Burton.
She has had the faith to put herself under my charge for a few
weeks, and I shall reward her by sharing the responsibility with
you, who seem blessed with the benevolent desire of giving us all
a good time," and then he bustled off to look after some other matter
which required his attention during the critical hour of dinner.

Miss Burton acknowledged the young man's bow without a trace of
affectation or reserve.

"I shall try not to prove a burden to either of you," she said,
with a smile.

"I have already discovered that you will not be," said Van Berg,
"and was wishing for an introduction."

"I hope your wishes may always find so ready a fulfillment."

"That's a kindly wish, Miss Burton, but a vain one."

"Were we misanthropical people, Mr. Van Berg, we might sigh, 'and
such are human wishes generally.'"

"One is often tempted to do that anyway, even when not especially
prone to look askance at fortune."

"There is an easy way of escaping that temptation."

"How?"

"Do not form many wishes."

"Have you very few wishes?"

With a slight and piquant motion of her head she replied, "I was
only giving a bit of trite advice.  It's asking a great deal to
require that one should both preach and practice."

"I think you are possessed by one wish which swallows up most
others," said Van Berg, a little abruptly.

A visible pallor overspread her face, and she drew back perceptibly
as one might shrink from a blow.

"You know how strong first impressions are," resumed Van Berg
hastily, "and the thought has passed through my mind that you might
be so preoccupied in wishing good things for others as to quite
forget yourself."

"If one could be completely occupied in that way," she said, with
a faint smile which suggested rather than revealed a vista of her
past experience, "one might have little occasion to wish for anything
for self.  But, Mr. Van Berg, only we poor unreasoning women put
much faith in first impressions; and you know how often they mislead
even us, who are supposed to have safe instincts."

"Do they often mislead you?"

"Indeed, sir," she replied, with a merry twinkle in her eye, "I
think you must have learned the questions in the catechism, if not
the answers."

Van Berg bit his lip.  Here was a suggestion of a thorn in the
sweetbrier he believed he had discovered.

"Now see how far I am astray," she resumed with a frankness which
had in it no trace of familiarity.  "It is my impression you are
a lawyer."

At this Van Berg laughed outright and said:  "You are indeed
mistaken.  I have no connection with the influential class whose
business it is to make and evade the laws.  I am only one among
the humble masses who aim to obey them.  But perhaps you think your
intuition goes deeper than surface facts and that I OUGHT to have
been a cross-questioner."

"I am quite sure my intuition is correct in thinking that you would
not be very cross about it."

"Perhaps not, if disarmed by so smiling a face as yours."

The others, who had been delayed by a longer ride than usual, now
entered and took the vacant chairs around the table.  Van Berg felt
sufficiently acquainted with them to introduce Miss Burton, for he
was curious to observe whether she would make the same impression
on them as he had been conscious of himself.

They bowed with the quiet, well-bred manner of society people, but
were at first inclined to pay little heed to the plainly dressed
and rather plain appearing young stranger.  As one and another,
however, glanced towards her, something about her seemed to linger
in their memories and cause them to look again.  The lady next to
her offered a commonplace remark, chiefly out of politeness, and
received so pleasant a reply in return that she turned her thoughts
as well as her eyes to see who it really was that had made it.  Then
another spoke, and the response led her to speak again and again;
and soon the entire party were describing their drive and living
over its pleasantest features; and before the meal ended they were
all gathered, metaphorically, around the mystical, maple-wood fire
that burned on the hearth of a nature that seemed so hospitable
and kindly as to have no other mission than to cheer and entertain.

"Who is that little brown thrush of a woman that you were so taken
with at dinner?" asked Stanton, as they were enjoying a quiet smoke
in their favorite corner of the piazza.

"Good for you, Stanton.  I never knew you to be so appreciative
before.  Your term quite accurately describes her.  She is both shy
and reserved, but not diffident or awkward in the least.  Indeed
her manner might strike some as being peculiarly frank.  But there
is something back of it all; for young as she undoubtedly is, her
face suggests to me some deep and unusual experience."

"Jupiter Ammon!  What an abyss of mystery, surmise, and metaphysics
you fell into while I was eating my dinner!  I used the phrase
'brown thrush,' only in reference to her dress and general homeliness."

"Oh, I beg your pardon!  I take all back about your nice appreciation
of character.  I now grasp the whole truth--your attention wandered
sufficiently from your dinner to observe that she wore a brown
dress, and the one fact about the thrush that has impressed you is
that it is brown.  'Here be truths' which leave nothing more to be
said."

"You imaginative fellows are often ridiculously astray on the other
tack, and see a thousand-fold more than exists.  But it's a pity
you could not read all there was in this young woman's face, for
it was certainly PLAIN enough.  At this rate you will be asking our
burly landlord to unbosom himself, insisting that he has a 'silent
sorrow' tucked away somewhere under his ample waistcoat."

"His troubles, like yours, are banished by the dinner hour.  I
recognize your feeble witticism about her plain face, and forgive
you because I thought it plain also at first, but when she came to
speak and smile it ceased to be plain.  I do not say she has had
trouble, but she has had some experience in her past history which
neither you nor I could understand."

"Quite likely; the measles, for instance, which I never had to my
knowledge.  Possibly she has had a lover who was not long in finding
a prettier face, and so left her, but not so disconsolate that she
could not smile bewilderingly upon you."

"Come now, Stanton, I'll forewarn and forearm you.  I confidently
predict that the voice of this brown thrush will lure you out
of a life which, to put it mildly, is a trifle matter-of-fact and
material.  You have glanced at her, but you have not seen her yet.
Mark my words; your appetite will flag before many weeks pass."

"I wish I could pin you down to a large wager on this absurdity."

"I agree to paint you a picture if my prediction fails."

"And to finish it within a natural lifetime?" said Stanton, with
much animation.

"To finish as promptly as good work can be done."

"Pardon me, Van.  You had too much wine for dinner; I don't want
to take advantage of you."

"I did not have any."

"In order to carry out this transaction honestly, am I expected to
make conscious and patient effort to come under the influence of
this maiden in brown, who has had some mysterious complaint in the
past, about which 'neither you, nor I, nor anybody knows,' as the
poet saith: or, like the ancient mariner, will she 'hold me with
her glittering eye?'"

"You have only to jog on in your old ways until she wakes you up
and makes a man of you."

"I surely am dreaming; for never did the level-headed Van Berg talk
such arrant nonsense before.  If she seems to you such a marvel,
why don't you open your own mouth and let the ripe cherry drop into
it."

"One reason will answer, were there no others--she wouldn't drop.
If you ever win her, my boy, you will have to bestir yourself."

"I'd rather win the picture.  Let me see--I know the very place in
my room where I shall hang it."

"You are a little premature.  That chicken is not yet hatched,
and you may feel like hanging yourself in the place of the picture
before the summer is over."

"Let me wrap your head in ice-water, Van.  There's mine host--O, Mr.
Burleigh!" he cried to the landlord, who at that moment happened
to cross the piazza; "please step here.  My friend Mr. Van Berg has
been strangely fascinated by the stranger in brown whom you, with
some deep and malicious design, placed opposite to him at the
table.  What are her antecedents, and who are her uncles?  I take
a friendly interest in this young man.  Indeed, I'm sort of a
guardian angel to him, having saved his life many a time."

"Saved his life!" ejaculated the landlord.  "How?"

"By quenching his consuming genius with good dinners.  But come--solve
for me this riddle in brown.  My friend usually gives but little
heed to the feminine conundrums that smilingly ask to be answered,
but for some occult reason he is in a state of sleepless interest
over this one, and I know that his waistcoat is selling with
gratitude to me for having the courage to ask these questions."

"He is speaking several words for himself to one for me," said
Van Berg; "and yet I admit that her face and manner struck me very
pleasantly."

"Well, she has a pleasant little phiz, now hasn't she, Mr. Van Berg?
I don't wonder Mr. Stanton was taken by her, for I was myself.
It's but little I can tell you, save that she is a teacher in one
of the New England female colleges, and that she brings letters to
me from the most respectable parties, who introduce her as a lady
in the best sense of the word.  Further than that nothing was
written, nor do I know anything concerning her.  But any one who
can't see that she's a perfect lady is no judge of the article."

"I will stake any amount on that, basing my belief only on the
first impression of one interview," added Van Berg, decidedly.

"You now see how deeply my friend is impressed," said Stanton, with
a satirical smile.  "Thanks, Mr. Burleigh; we will not detain you
any longer."

When alone again, he resumed, with an expression of disgust:

"A 'New England FEMALE college!'  How aptly he words it.  If there's
any region on the face of the earth that I detest, it's New England;
and if there is one type of women that I'd shun as I would 'ever
angry bears,' it's a New England school-ma'am."

"'But if thy flight lay toward the raging sea' of a restless,
all-absorbing passion, 'Thou'dst meet the bear I' the mouth,' as
you will try to in this case.  You will be ready to barter your
ears for a kiss before very long."

"It will be after they have grown prodigiously long and hairy in
some transformation scene like that in which the immortal Bottom
was the victim."

"Your illustration tells against you, for it was only after his
appropriate transformation that Bottom saw the fairy queen; but in
your case the desire to 'munch' will be banned."

"Come, Van, we have had enough chaff on this topic, already
worn threadbare.  I now know all about the mysterious complaint,
the impress of which on the face of the school-ma'am has so dazed
you.  It's a New England female college--a place where they give
a razor-like edge to the wits of Yankee women, already too sharp,
and develop in attenuated maidens the hatchet faces of their sires.
You may as well set about that picture at once, whenever you feel
in the mood for work."

"I admit that I have been speaking nonsense, and yet you may find
many grains of truth in my chaff, nevertheless."

"But is my picture to end in chaff?"

"I will stand by my promise.  If I lose, perhaps I'll paint you
the school-ma'am's portrait."

"Then we would both lose, for I would have no earthly use for that."

"Well, I will paint what you wish, within reason."

"I'm content, and with good reason, for never did I have such absurd
good luck before."

"Ha! look yonder--quick!"

Both the young men started to their feet, but before they could
spring forward, the event, which had so suddenly aroused them, was
an accomplished fact.

Both drew a long breath of relief as they looked at each other,
and Van Berg remarked, with some emphasis:

"Act first, scene first, and it does not open like a comedy either."





Chapter VIII.  Glimpses of Tragedy.




Stanton threw away his half-burned cigar--an act which proved him
strongly moved--and strode rapidly towards the main entrance near
which a little group had already gathered, and among the others,
Ida Mayhew.  Not a hair of anybody's head was hurt, but an event
had almost occurred which would have more than satisfied Stanton's
spite against 'Yankee school-ma'ams,' and would also have made him
very miserable for months to come.

He had ordered his bays to the farther end of the piazza where they
were smoking, as he proposed to take Van Berg out for a drive.  His
coachmen liked to wheel around the corner of the hotel and past the
main entrance in a dashing showy style, and thus far had suffered
no rebuke from his master for this habit.  But on this occasion a
careless nursery maid, neglectful of her charge, had left a little
child to toddle to the centre of the carriage drive and there it had
stood, balancing itself with the uncertain footing characteristic
of first steps.  Even if it could have seen the rapidly approaching
carriage that was hidden by the angle of the building, its baby
feet could not have carried it out of harm's way in time, and it
is more than probable that its inexperience would have prevented
any sense of danger.

But help was at hand in the person of one who never seemed so
preoccupied with self as to lose an opportunity to serve others.

Two of the ladies, who had casually formed Miss Burton's acquaintance
at dinner, still lingered in the door-way to talk with her, wondering
in the mean time why they remained so long, and meaning to break
away every moment, but the expression of the young lady's eyes was
so pleasant, and her manner, more than anything she said, so like
spring sunshine that they were still standing in the door-way when
the rumble and rush of the carriage was heard.  The others did not
notice these sounds, but Miss Burton, whose eyes had been following
the child with an amused interest, suddenly broke off in the midst
of a sentence, listened a second, then swiftly springing down the
steps, darted towards the child.

Quick as she had been it seemed as if she would be too late, for,
with cries of horror, the startled ladies on the piazza saw the
horses coming so rapidly that it appeared that both the maiden and
the child must be trampled under their feet.  And so they would
have been, had Miss Burton sought to snatch up the child and return,
but with rare presence of mind she carried the child across the
carriage track to its farther side, thus making the most of the
impetus with which she had rushed to the rescue.

The exclamations of the ladies drew many eyes to the scene, and
all held their breath as the horses dashed past, the driver vainly
endeavoring to pull them up in time.  Having passed, even Stanton
was compelled to admit that the "school-ma'am" appeared to very
great advantage as she stood panting, and with heightened color,
holding in her arms the laughing child that seemed to think that
the whole excitement was created for its amusement.  She was about
to restore the child to its nurse quietly, who now came bustling
up with many protestations, when she was arrested by a loud voice
exclaiming:

"Don't let that hateful creature touch my child again--give him
to me," and a lady, who had been drawn to the scene by the outcry,
ran down the steps, and snatching the child, almost devoured him
with kisses.  Then, turning to the trembling nurse, she said harshly:

"Begone; I never wish to see your face again.  Had it not been for
this lady, my child would have been killed through your carelessness.
Excuse me, Miss--Miss--"

"Miss Burton," said the young lady quietly.

"Excuse my show of feeling; but you can't realize the service you
have done us.  Bertie is our only child, and we just idolize him.
I'm so agitated, I must go to my room."

When the lady had disappeared, Miss Burton turned to the sobbing
nurse and said:

"Will you promise me to be careful in the future if I intercede
for you?"

"Dade, Miss, an' I will."

"Come to me, then, after supper.  In the mean time remain where
your mistress can summon you should she need your services, or be
inclined to forgive you of her own accord," and leaving the crude
and offending jumble of humanity much comforted, she returned to
the piazza again.

Of course many pressed around her with congratulations and words
of commendation.  Van Berg was much interested in observing how
she would receive this sudden gush of mingled honest praise and
extravagant flattery, for he recognized that the occasion would
prove a searching and delicate test of character for which there
was no time to prepare.  She did not listen to their words with
deprecatory smirk, nor with the pained expression of those sensitive
souls to whom hearty words and demonstrations are like rough winds;
nor was there a trace of exultation and self-complacency in her
bearing.  Van Berg thought that her manner was peculiarly her own,
for she looked into the faces around her with frank gladness, and
her unconsciousness of herself can be, perhaps, best suggested by
her own words.

"How fortunate it was," she said, "that I stood where I did, and
happened to be looking at the child.  If somebody had not been at
hand it might have gone hard with the little fellow.  Not that I
think he would have been killed, but he might have been maimed or
disfigured in a way that would have caused him pain and mortification
all his life."

"Miss Burton, I take my hat to you," said Van Berg, laughing.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you all appreciate the force of Miss
Burton's phrase, 'somebody,' since it implies that any one of us
would have shown like courage and presence of mind if we had only
been 'at hand,' or had stood where she did.  Really Miss Burton,
you are like smiling fortune, and 'thrust upon' us 'greatness' and
heroism."

"Mr. Van Berg, you are laughing at me, and your quotation suggests
that other Shakespearean words are in your mind--to wit, 'much
ado about nothing.'  Now if YOU had had the opportunity you would
have achieved the rescue in a way that would have been heroic and
striking.  Instead of scrambling out of the way with the child,
like a timid woman, you would have rushed upon the horses, seized
them by their heads, thrown them back upon their haunches, and
while posing in that masterful attitude, you would have called out
in stentorian tones--'Remove the child.'"

All laughed at this unexpected sally, and no one enjoyed it more
than Stanton, who, a little before, had been excessively angry
at his coachman, and, like the mother of the child, had summarily
dismissed the poor fellow from his service.  Quite forgetful of his
uncomplimentary words concerning "Yankee school-ma'ams" in general,
and this one in particular, he now stood near, and was regarding
her not only with approval but with admiration.  Her ready reply
to Van Berg pleased him exceedingly, especially as the rising color
in the face of his self-possessed friend indicated a palpable hit.
But the artist was equal to the occasion, and quickly replied as
one who had felt a slight spur.

"I fear you are in part correct, Miss Burton.  Instead of deftly
saving the child and taking both it and myself out of harm's way,
after your quiet womanly fashion, I should, no doubt, have 'rushed
upon the horses and seized them by their heads.'  But I fear your
striking tableau, in which I appeared to such advantage, would
have been wholly wanting.  I could not have stopped the horses in
time; the child would have been run over and killed; the big, fat
coroner would have come and sat on it and have made us all, who
witnessed the scene, swear over the matter; the poor mother would
have gone to the lunatic asylum; the father would have committed
suicide; the nursery maid would have--obtained another place and
been the death of an indefinite number of other innocent babies;
and last, but not least, I should have been dragged and trampled
upon, my legs and arms broken, and perhaps my head, and so you
would all have had to take care of me--and you know a cross bear
is a pleasanter subject than a sick man."

"Oh, what a chapter of horrors!" exclaimed several ladies in chorus.

"Nevertheless, we would have been equal to the occasion, even if
you had been so dreadfully fractured," said Miss Burton.  "We all
would have become your devoted nurses, and each one of us would
have had a separate and infallible remedy, which, out of courtesy,
you would have been compelled to use."

"Oh, bless my soul!" exclaimed Van Berg; "I have had a greater
escape than the child.  In being 'at hand' as you express it, Miss
Burton, I am beginning to feel that you have saved me from death
by torture."

"What a compliment to us!" said Miss Burton, appealing to the ladies;
"he regards our ministrations as equivalent to death by torture."

"Oh, pardon me, I referred to the numberless 'separate and infallible
remedies,' the very thought of which curdles my blood."

"I cannot help thinking that my friend's prospects would have been
very dismal," put in Stanton; "for with broken legs and arms and
head he would have been very badly fractured indeed to begin with,
and then some one of his fair nurses might have broken his heart."

"My friend probably thinks, from a direful experience," said Van
Berg, "that this would be worse than all the other fractures put
together; and perhaps it would.  An additional cause for gratitude,
Miss Burton, that you, and not I, were 'at hand.'"

"My reasons for gratitude to Miss Burton," said Stanton, "do not
rest on what undoubtedly would have happened had my friend attempted
the rescue, but on what has happened; and if Mr. Van Berg will
introduce me I will cordially express my thanks."

"With all my heart.  Miss Burton, permit me to present to you Mr.
Stanton, whose only fault is a slight monomania for New England
and her institutions."

The lady recognized Stanton with her wonted smiling and pleasant
manner, which seemed so frank and open, but behind which some
present eventually learned the real woman was hiding, and said:

"I am inclined to think that Mr. Van Berg's English, like Hebrew,
reads backwards.  I warn you Mr. Stanton, not to express any
indebtedness to me, or I shall straightway exhibit one of the Yankee
traits which you undoubtedly detest, and attempt a bargain."

"Although assured that I shall get the worst of this bargain, I
shall nevertheless heartily thank you that you were not only 'at
hand,' but that you acted so promptly and courageously that the
child was saved.  What pleasure could I have taken with my horses
if their feet had trampled that little boy?"

"I see my opportunity," replied Miss Burton, with a decisive little
nod.  "Your afternoon drives might have been marred by unpleasant
thoughts as one's sleep is sometimes disturbed by bad dreams.  You
have no idea what a delight it is to the average New England mind,
Mr. Stanton, to secure the vantage ground in a bargain.  In view of
your own voluntary admissions, you can scarcely do otherwise than
let me have my own way."

With the exception of the two or three who had formed Miss Burton's
acquaintance at dinner, those who at first had gathered around her
had by this time dwindled away.  Ida Mayhew sat near in an open
window of the parlor, ostensibly reading a novel, but in reality
observant of all that occurred.  Both she and Van Berg had been
amused by the fact that Stanton, usually so languid and nonchalant,
had been for once thoroughly aroused.  Between anger at his coachmen,
alarm for the child, and interest in its preserver, he was quite
shaken out of his wonted equanimity, which was composed equally
of indolent good-nature, self-complacency, and a disposition to
satirize the busy, earnest world around him.  It was apparent that
he was somewhat nonplussed by Miss Burton's manner and words, and
those who knew him well enjoyed his perplexity, although at a loss
themselves to imagine what object Miss Burton could have in view.
Half unconsciously Van Berg turned his smiling, interested face
towards Ida Mayhew, who was regarding her cousin with a similar
expression, but the moment she caught the artist's eyes she coldly
dropped her own to her book again.

"Well, Miss Burton," said Stanton, with a slightly embarrassed
laugh, "I admit that I am cornered, so you can make your own terms."

"They shall be grievous, I assure you.  Do you see that rueful face
in your carriage yonder?"

"That of my coachman?  Bad luck to his ill-omened visage!  Yes."

"No need of wishing bad luck to any poor creature--it will come only
too soon without.  In view of the indebtedness--which you have so
gracefully acknowledged--to one of that trading and thrifty race
that never loses an opportunity to turn, if not a penny more or
less honest, why, something else, to their advantage, I stipulate
that you give your dependent there another chance.  I heard you
dismiss him from your service a short time since, and he evidently
does not wish to go.  His disconsolate face troubles me; so please
banish his dismal looks, and he'll be more careful hereafter."

"And have you had time to see and think about him?" said Stanton,
with a little surprise in his tone.  "You shall banish his dismal
looks yourself.  Barney," he called, "drive close to the piazza
here.  This lady has probably saved you from arrest, and she now
intercedes in your behalf.  In compliance with her request, I will
keep you in my service, but I wish you to thank her and not me."

Barney took off his hat and ejaculated:  "May yees shadder niver
grow less, me leddy, an' may the Powers grant that yees bright
eyes may see no trouble o' their own, bain they're so quick to see
a poor man's bad luck."

The smiling manner with which she acknowledged his good wishes
seemed to warm the man all over, and he looked as if transformed
as he drove back to his stand.

"How is this, Miss Burton?" said Stanton.  "I feel as if I had had
the best of this bargain."

"That impression is wholly due to my Yankee shrewdness; and now,
having gained my point," she added, with a graceful inclination,
"I will not keep you from your drive any longer."

"My conscience will not permit me to complete this transaction
until I have assured you that my horses and carriage are at your
service at any time."

"Be careful; I may take advantage of you again."

"Please do so," replied Stanton, lifting his hat; and then he went
to his carriage more surprised at himself than at anything else
that had occurred.  Miss Burton returned to the doorway and quietly
resumed the conversation that had been interrupted by the peril of
the child.

Van Berg was about to follow his friend, but an acquaintance coming
up the steps, detained him a few moments.

"Oh, Harold, come!" cried Stanton, impatiently.

Miss Burton started violently.  The sentence upon her lips was never
finished, and her face became ashen in color.  She looked at Van
Berg with a strange expression as he, unconscious of her agitation,
answered:

"Yes, I'm coming," and moved away.

"My dear Miss Burton," said the lady with whom she was speaking,
"you are ill; you look ready to faint.  This excitement has been
a greater strain upon you than you have realized."

"Perhaps I had better go to my room," faltered the young lady; and
she fled with a precipitancy that her companion could not understand.

Ida Mayhew also witnessed this unexpected bit of mystery, and it
puzzled her not a little.  She had left the parlor and was standing
in the hall-way when her cousin's voice summoned his friend after
his familiar fashion.  Why should this stranger look at Mr. Van
Berg as if the sound of his Christian name were a mortal wound?  Or
was that a mere coincidence--and in reaction from excitement and
unwonted effort had she suddenly taken ill?  For a wonder, she
thought more about Miss Burton than herself that afternoon.  She
had decided from the first that she did not like this new-comer.
That point had been settled by the fact that the artist's first
impressions concerning her had evidently been favorable, and she
remembered that his earliest glances and words in regard to herself
had been anything but complimentary.





Chapter IX.  Unexpectedly Thrown Together.




"I suppose you are satisfied by this time, Stanton," began Van
Berg, as they drove away, "that I was very safe in offering you
that picture on the conditions named, and that you have not the
ghost of a chance of obtaining it."

"Nonsense," replied Stanton.  "The picture is practically won already.
I admit that Miss Burton is an exception to all her species; and,
now that I have seen her, I prove how little I am under the influence
of prejudice by acknowledging the fact, and by giving her credit
for her courage and agreeable manners.  But how absurd to imagine
that this plain little stranger can ever be to me more than she is
to-day--a summer acquaintance at a summer resort!  She will soon
drop from our memories and leave no more trace than these rustling
leaves overhead after they have fulfilled their brief purpose."

"Here's a symptom already," cried Van Berg.  "My matter-of-fact
friend is already in the subtle current, and unconsciously drops
into sentiment, and expresses himself in poetic trope.  I foresee
that the 'rustling leaves' will end in a rustling wedding-robe and
gorgeous apparel; for when you cage the 'brown thrush' you will
have the bad taste to insist on a change of plumage."

"I begin to understand you at last," retorted Stanton.  "You have
been smitten yourself, and this is your strategy to conceal the fact.
The trouble is that you have overdone the matter, and revealed your
transfixed heart long before I should have suspected the wound.
Had you not better commence on the picture soon, for this matter
may disable you for a season?"

"I won't swear that I will not become your rival, for our little
heroine interests me hugely.  There is something back of her smiling
face.  Her manner seems like crystal in its frankness, and yet I
think few in the house will ever become better acquainted with her
than they are to-day."

"I shall take more than a languid interest in watching you progress
with this smiling sphinx," said Stanton, "and in the mean time
shall gloat over my picture."

"Well, Barney," said Van Berg, as they drove up to the stables on
their return, "you did have a streak of good luck this afternoon.
I hope you are grateful to the lady who secured it for you."

"Faix, sur, an' I niver seed the likes o' her afore.  The smilin'
look she gave me jist warmed the very core o' me heart, and her swate
eyes seemed to say, 'Nary a bit o' ill-luck would ye have again,
Barney, had I me way.'  What's more, she's a goin' to intercade
for the nurse-maid.  They nadn't tell me that all the heretics will
stay in purgatory."

"Look here, Stanton, were I a theologian I'd make a note of that.
Miss Burton has discovered a logic that routs superstition."

Van Berg quite longed for the supper hour, that he might resume
conversation with the interesting stranger, and he was promptly
in his place at the table.  But she did not appear.  The lady with
whom she had been conversing, remarked:

"She was taken suddenly ill, just as you and your friend drove
away this afternoon.  Learning from Mr. Burleigh that she is here
alone and without friends, I knocked at her door before I came
down, and asked if I could do anything for her.  She said that she
would be better in the morning, and that all she needed was perfect
quiet.  It's strange how suddenly she was taken ill!  She seemed
perfectly well one moment, and then she fled to her room as if the
ghost were in pursuit.  I suppose it was reaction from excitement;
or she may have some form of heart disease."

"Are heart difficulties so serious as that with ladies?" asked Van
Berg with a smile.

"I never had acute symptoms of any kind," the lady replied.  "Indeed
I think I am a trifle cold and matter-of-fact in my disposition,
but I began to thaw so perceptibly under Miss Burton's influence
that I became quite interested in her.  I think I deserve some credit
for saving the child also, for it was I who kept her talking in the
doorway.  Most people are a weariness to me, and I was surprised
to find so marked an exception."

It must not be supposed that Van Berg's interest in the new arrival
had led him to forget the motive which had brought him to the Lake
House.  This would not be in accordance with his character, and
as far as possible, he had been closely observant of Miss Mayhew
during the scenes of the afternoon.  He had been rewarded by
discovering, for the first time, that she was at least capable of
a good and generous impulse, for her face had been expressive of
genuine admiration and gladness when she saw Miss Burton with the
rescued child in her arms after the carriage swept by.  In this
expression he obtained a clearer hint than he had ever before
received of the beauty that might be her constant possession could
the mean and marring traits of her character be exchanged for
qualities in harmony with her perfect features.  But while this
gleam, this flash of ideal beauty increased his desire for success
in his experiment, the young lady's bearing towards him was as
discouraging as ever.  If he had not been at Miss Burton's side,
he believed that she would have come forward and offered her
congratulations as had several other ladies.  It would seem that
her vanity had been so severely wounded she would never forgive
him, and he determined he would no longer make a martyr of himself
by playing the agreeable to all in the hotel in the hope that,
by pouring so much oil on the waters, even her asperity might be
removed.  He half believed that she recognized his effort to form
her acquaintance, and found a malicious pleasure in thwarting him.
Therefore, he decided to take his sketch-book and go off upon
the hills in the morning, thus enjoying a little respite from his
apparently philanthropic labors.

Before he left the breakfast table the following day, Miss Burton
appeared.  He thought he detected an ominous redness about her
eyes, as well as the pallor which would be the natural result of
illness; but she seemed to have recovered her spirits, and the rather
quiet and self-absorbed little group that had hitherto seriously
devoted themselves to steak and coffee, speedily brightened up
under her pleasantries.  Indeed she kept them lingering so long
that the Mayhews and Stanton passed out before them, the latter
casting a wistful glance at the cheerful party, for he had been
having a stupid time.

When, much later than he expected, he started on his brief sketching
excursion he found that his mind was kindled and aglow with pleasant
thoughts, and that the summer landscape had been made sunnier by
the sunny face he had just left.

But as he plodded his way back late in the afternoon, the sunbeams,
no longer genial, became oppressive, and he was glad to hail one
of the hotel stages that was returning from a neighboring village.

The vehicle already contained two adult passengers.  One was
a stout, red-faced woman with a baby and an indefinite number of
parcels, and the other was--Ida Mayhew, who was returning from a
brief shopping excursion.

As the latter saw Van Berg enter she colored, bit her lip, half
frowned, and looked steadfastly away from him.  Thus the stage
lumbered on with its oddly assorted inmates, that, although belonging
to the same human family, seemed to have as little in common as if
each had come from a different planet.  That Miss Mayhew looked so
resolutely away from him was rather to Van Berg's advantage, for
it gave him a chance to compare her exquisite profile with the
expanse, slightly diversified, of the broad red face opposite.

The stout woman held her baby as if it were a bundle, and stared
straight before her.  As far as Van Berg could observe, not a trace
of an idea or a change of expression flitted across the wide area
of her sultry visage, and he found himself speculating as to whether
the minds of these two women differed as greatly as their outward
appearance.  Indeed he questioned whether one had any more mind
than the other, and was inclined to think that despite their widely
separated spheres of life they were equally dwarfed.

While he was thus amusing himself with the contrasts, physical
and metaphysical, which the two passengers opposite him presented,
the stout woman suddenly looked out of the window at her side, and
then, in a tone that would startle the quietest nerves, shouted to
the driver:

"Hold on!"

Miss Mayhew half rose from her seat and looked around with something
like dismay; but as she only encountered Van Berg's slightly humorous
expression, she colored more deeply than before, and recalled her
eyes to the farther angle of the stage with a fixedness and rigidity
as great as if it had contained the head of Medusa.

Meantime the driver drew up to a small cottage by the road-side,
and scrambled down from his seat that he might assist the stout
woman with her accumulation of bundles.  She handed him out the
baby, preferring to look after the more precious parcels herself.
Van Berg politely held the door open for her; but just as she was
squeezing through the stage entrance with her arms full and had her
foot on the last step, her cottage door flew open with something
to the effect of an explosion, and out burst three or four children
with a perfect din of cries and shouts.  Two vociferous dogs joined
in the sudden uproar; the hitherto drowsy horses started as if a
bomb-shell had dropped under their noses, and speedily broke into
a mad gallop, leaving the stout woman prostrate upon her bundles
in the road, and the driver helplessly holding her baby.

Miss Mayhew's cold rigidity vanished at once.  Indeed dignity was
impossible in the swaying, bounding vehicle.  There was a momentary
effort to ignore her companion, and then terror overcame all
scruples.  Turning her white face towards him, she exclaimed:

"Are we not in great danger?"

"I admit I would rather be in my chair on Mr. Burleigh's piazza.
With your permission, I will come to your end of the stage and
speak to the horses through the open window."

"Oh, come--do anything under heaven to stop these horrid beasts."

Van Berg edged his way up a little past Miss Mayhew, and began
speaking to the frightened horses in firm, quiet tones.  At first
they paid no heed to him, and as the stage made a sudden and
desperate lurch, the young lady commenced to scream.

"If you do that you will insure the breaking of both our necks,"
said Van Berg, sharply.  "If you will keep quiet I think I can
stop them.  See, we have quite a stretch of level road beyond us,
before we come to a hill.  Give me a chance to quiet them."

The terror-stricken girl kept still for a moment, and then started
up, saying

"I shall spring out."

"No, Miss Mayhew, you must not do that," said Van Berg, decidedly.
"You must be greatly injured, and you would with almost certainty
be disfigured for life if you sprang out upon the stony road.  You
could not help falling on your face."

"Oh, horrible!" she exclaimed.

At the next heavy lurch of the stage she half-rose again to carry
out her rash purpose, but the artist seized her hand and held her
in her place, at the same time speaking kindly and firmly to the
horses.  They now began to heed his voice, and to recover from
their panic.

"See, Miss Mayhew," he said, "you have only to control yourself a
few moments longer, and our danger is over."

"Oh, do stop them, quick," she gasped, clinging to his hand as if
he were her only hope, "and I'll never forget your kind--oh, merciful
heaven!"

At this favorable moment, when the horses were fast coming under
control, a spiteful cur came tearing out after them, renewing their
panic with tenfold intensity.  As the dog barked on one side they
sheered off on the other, until they plunged down the side of the
road.  The stage was nearly overturned, and then it stopped with
a sudden and heavy thump.  Miss Mayhew was precipitated into Mr.
Van Berg's arms, and she clung to him for a moment in a paroxysm of
terror.  His wits had not so far deserted him but that he perceived
that the stage had struck against a tree, that the horses had broken
away, and that he and his companion were perfectly safe.  If the
whole truth must be told, it cannot be said that he endured the
young lady's embrace with only cold and stoical philosophy.  He
found it wholly novel and not a painful experience.  Indeed he was
conscious of a temptation to delay the information of their escape,
but a second's thought taught him that he must at once employ all
his tact in the delicate and difficult task of reconciling the
frightened girl to herself and her own conduct; otherwise her pride,
and also her sense of delicacy, would now receive a new and far
deeper wound, and a more hopeless estrangement follow.  He therefore
promptly lifted her up, and placed her limp form on the opposite
seat.

"I assure you we are now perfectly safe, Miss Mayhew," he said;
"and let me congratulate you that your self-control prevented you
from leaving the stage, for if you had done so you would undoubtedly
have been greatly injured."

"Where--where are--the horses?" she faltered.

"I really do not know!  They have disappeared.  The stage struck
a tree, and the brutes broke away.  They will probably gallop home
to the alarm and excitement of every one about the hotel.  Pray
compose yourself.  The house is not far away, and we can soon reach
it if you are not very much hurt."

"Are you sure the danger is all over?"

"Yes; this is now not the slightest chance of a tragedy."

There must have been a faint twinkle in his eye, for she exclaimed,
passionately:

"The whole thing has been a comedy to you, and I half believe you
brought it all about to annoy me."

"You do me great injustice, Miss Mayhew," said Van Berg, warmly.

"Here we are sitting in this horrid old stage by the roadside,"
she resumed, in tones of strong vexation.  "Was there ever anything
more absurd and ridiculous than it has all been!  I am mortified
beyond expression, and suppose I shall never hear the last of it,"
and she burst into a hysterical passion of tears.

"Miss Mayhew," said Van Berg hastily, "you certainly must realize
that we have passed through very great peril together, and if you
think me capable of saying a word about this episode that is not
to your credit, you were never more mistaken in your life."

At this assurance she became more calm.

"I know you dislike me most heartily," Van Berg continued; "but
you have less reason to do so than you think---"

"I have good reason to dislike you.  You despise me; and now that
I have been such a coward you are comparing me with Miss Burton
who acted so differently yesterday."

"I have not even thought of Miss Burton," protested Van Berg, at
the same time conscious, now that her name had been recalled to his
memory, that she would have acted a much better part.  "I am only
sincerely glad that our necks were not broken, and I hope that you
have not suffered any severe bruises.  As to my despising you, if
you will honor me with your acquaintance you may discover that you
are greatly in error."

"Then you truly think that we have been in danger?" she asked,
wiping her eyes.

"Most assuredly.  When you come to think the matter over calmly,
you will realize that we were in very great danger.  I think the
affair has ended most happily rather than absurdly."

"Really, sir, when I remember how the 'affair,' as you term it,
actually did end, I feel as if I never wished to see you again."

"Miss Mayhew, I appeal to your generosity.  Was I to blame for
that which was so disagreeable to you?  Surely you will not be so
unfair as to punish me for what neither you nor I could help.  I
think fate means we shall be friends, and has employed this unexpected
episode to break the ice between us.  If you are now sufficiently
composed I will assist you to alight, in order that the driver,
who is approaching, may be relieved of all fears on our account."

"Oh, certainly.  As it is, I suppose he will have a ridiculous
story to tell."

"There is nothing that he, or the others who are following him can
tell, save that the horses ran away and that we most fortunately
escaped all injury.  Ah!  I see that you are a little lame.  Please
take my arm; the hotel is but a quarter of a mile away.  Or perhaps
you would prefer that I should send the driver for a carriage.  You
could wait in yonder cottage, or here, in the shade of the trees."

"I am not very lame, and if I were I would not mind it.  My wish is
that the horrid affair may occasion as little remark as possible.
I can reach my room by a side entrance, and so come quietly down
to dinner.  I suppose that I must take your arm since I cannot walk
very well without it."

They therefore turned their backs on the breathless driver and his
eager questions, and proceeded slowly towards the hotel.  After a
brief examination of the shattered stage, the man ran panting past
them in search of his horses; and they were again left alone.





Chapter X.  Phrases too Suggestive.




For a few moments Miss Mayhew and Van Berg walked on in silence,
each very doubtful of the other.  At last the artist began:

"I am well aware, Miss Mayhew, that this unexpected episode and
this enforced companionship give me no rights whatever.  I do not
propose to annoy you, after seeing you safely to the hotel, by
assuming that we are acquainted, nor do I intend to subject myself
to the mortification of being informed publicly, by your manner,
that we are not on speaking terms.  I would be glad to have this
question settled now.  I ask your pardon for anything that I may
have said or done to hurt your feelings, and having thus gone more
than half-way it would be ungenerous on your part not to respond
in like spirit."

"You apologize, then?"

"No; I ask your pardon for anything that may have hurt your feelings."

"You have said very disagreeable things about me, Mr. Van Berg."

"I did not know you then."

"I do not think you have changed your opinion of me in the least."

"I evidently have a much higher opinion of you than you of me, and
I am seeking your acquaintance with a persistence such as I never
manifested in the case of any other lady.  Thus the odds are all
in your favor.  Having been so unexpectedly thrown together---"

"'Thrown together,' indeed--Mr. Van Berg, you ARE mocking me," and
her eyes again filled with tears of vexation.

"I assure you I am not," said Van Berg earnestly.  "I could not be
so mean as to twit you with an accident which you could not help,
and with an act which was wholly involuntary on your part.  Can we
not both let by-gones by by-gones and commence anew?"

Miss Mayhew bit her lip and hesitated a few moments.

"I think that will be the better way," she said.  "We will both let
by-gones, especially this ridiculous episode in the stage.  I'll
put you on your good behavior."

"Thank you, Miss Mayhew.  I would take our late risk twenty times
for such a result."

"I would not take it again on any account whatever.  Please refer
to it no more.  I declare, there comes Cousin Ik and Mr. Burleigh
to meet us.  Was one's fortune ever so exasperating!  Ik will teaze
me out of all comfort for weeks to come."

"Say little and leave all to my discretion," said Van Berg, reassuringly;
"and, by the way, you might limp a little more decidedly," which
she immediately did.

"My dear Miss Mayhew, I trust you are not seriously hurt," began
Mr.  Burleigh while still several yards off.

Stanton's face was a study as he approached.  Indeed he seemed half
ready to explode with suppressed merriment, but before he could
speak a warning glance from Van Berg checked him.

"Miss Mayhew might have been seriously and possibly fatally injured,"
said the artist gravely, "had it not been for her self-control.
Although it seemed that the stage would be dashed to pieces every
moment, I told her that in my judgement it would be safer to remain
within it than to spring out upon the hard and stony road, and I
am very glad that the final event confirmed my opinion."

As they were by this time near to the hotel, others who had been
alarmed by seeing the horses tearing up to the stable door, now
hastily joined them; and last, but not least, Mrs. Mayhew came
panting upon the scene.  Van Berg felt the hand of the young lady
trembling in nervous apprehension upon his arm, from which, in her
embarrassment, she forgot to remove it.  But the artist did not
fail her, and in answer to Mr. Burleigh's eager questions as to
the cause of the accident, explained all so plausibly, and in such
a matter-of-fact manner as left little more even to be surmised.
His brief and prosaic history of the affair concluded with the
following implied tribute to his companion, which still further
relieved her from fear of ridicule:

"Miss Mayhew," he said, "instead of jumping out, after the frantic
terror-blinded manner of most people, remained in the stage and
so has escaped, I trust, with nothing worse than a slight lameness
caused by the violent motion of the vehicle.  I will now resign her
to your care, Mr. Stanton, and I am glad to believe that the occasion
will require the services of the wheelwright and harness-maker only,
and not those of a surgeon," and lifting his hat to Mrs. Mayhew
and her daughter he bowed himself off the scene.

Ida, leaning on the arm of her cousin, limped appropriately to her
room, whither she had her dinner sent to her, more for the purpose
of gaining time to compose her nerves than for any other reason.

The impression that she had behaved courageously in peril was
rapidly increased as the story was repeated by one and another, and
she received several congratulatory visits in the afternoon from
her lady acquaintances; and when she came down to supper she found
that she was even a greater heroine than Miss Burton had been.  In
answer to many sympathetic inquiries, she said that she "felt as
well as ever," and she tried to prove it by her gayety and careful
toilet.

But she was decidedly ill at ease.  Her old self-complacency was
ebbing away faster than ever.  From the time that it had first been
disturbed by the artist's frown in the concert garden, she had been
conscious of a secret and growing self-dissatisfaction.

It seemed to be this stranger's mission to break the spell vanity
and flattery had woven about her.  The congratulations she was now
receiving were secured by a fraudulent impression, if not by actual
falsehood, and she permitted this impression to remain and grow.
The one, who above all others she most feared and disliked, knew
this.  In smilingly accepting the compliments showered upon her
from all sides she felt that she must appear to him as if receiving
stolen goods, and she believed that in his heart he despised her
more thoroughly than ever.

To the degree that he caused her disquietude and secret humiliation,
her desire to retaliate increased, and she resolved, before the
day closed, to use her beauty as a weapon to inflict upon him the
severest wound possible.  If it were within the power of her art
she would bring him to her feet and keep him there until she could,
in the most decided and public manner, spurn his abject homage.
She would have no scruple in doing this in any case, but, in this
instance, success would give her the keenest satisfaction.

His very desire for her acquaintance, as she understood it, was
humiliating, and, in a certain sense, demoralizing.  Her other
suitors had imagined that she had good traits back of her beauty,
and hitherto she had been carelessly content to believe that she
could display such traits in abundance should the occasion require
them.  Here was one, however, who, while despising the woman, was
apparently seeking her for the sake of her beauty merely; and her
woman's soul, warped and dwarfed as it was, resented an homage that
was seemingly sensuous and superficial, and would, of necessity,
be transient.  In her ignorance of Van Berg's motives, and in the
utter impossibility of surmising them, she could scarcely come to
any other conclusion; and she determined to punish him to the utmost
extent of her ability.

Thus it came to pass that Miss Mayhew had designs against Van Berg
that were not quite as amiable as those of the artist in regard to
herself.

Stanton, in a low tone, remarked to her at the supper table, "Now
that fate has throw you and Van Berg together in such a remarkable
manner" (the young lady colored deeply at this unfortunate expression
and looked at him keenly), "I trust that you will yield gracefully
to destiny and treat him with ordinary courtesy when you meet.
Otherwise you may occasion surmises that will not be agreeable to
you."

"Has he been telling you anything about this morning?" she asked
quickly.

"Nothing more than he said in your presence.  Why, was there anything
more to tell?"

"Certainly not, but he made ill-natured remarks about me once--that
is, you said he did--and why should he not again?"

"Well, he has not.  I think he spoke very handsomely of you this
morning.  I hope he didn't exaggerate your good behavior."

"If you prefer to believe ill of me you are welcome to do so.  For
my part, I believe you exaggerate what Mr. Van Berg said at the
concert, and that he never meant to be so rude.  As far as I can
judge, he has shown no such unmannerly disposition since coming
here."

"Indeed, you are right.  I think his disposition has compared
favorably with your own."

"Well," she replied, with a peculiar smile, "we are on speaking
terms for the present."

"That smile bodes no good-will towards my friend, but for once you
will find a man who will not fall helplessly in love with your mere
beauty."

"If you will glance at yonder table you can see that Miss Burton
has already so absorbed him that he has eyes for no one else."

"They have jolly good times at that table.  I wish we were there."

"Indeed! are you bewitched also?  I can't see what it is that people
find so attractive in that plain-looking girl."

"Well, for one thing, she has a mind.  Beauty without mind is like
salad without dressing."

"And do you mean to say that I have no mind?" Ida asked, with a
sudden flush.

"My dear Coz, we were speaking solely of Miss Burton.  Indeed, I
think you have a very decided will of your own."

"I understand you.  Well, in what other respects is Miss Burton my
superior?"

"I doubt if Miss Burton ever thinks of herself as superior to any
one, and that's another very amiable trait in her."

"Can you not sum up her perfections a little more rapidly?  Life
is short," remarked Ida, acidly.

"Come, Coz, let me get you some sweet-oil before you finish your
supper.  You know you are the handsomest girl in the State, and
that's distinction enough for one woman.  To you, Miss Burton is
only a plain school-teacher.  Why should you envy her?"

"I do not envy her, nor can I see why people are so carried away
with her."

"It IS remarkable to see what an impression she has made in two
brief days.  Of course her courage in saving the child served as
a general and favorable introduction, but it does not by any means
explain her growing popularity.  For some reason or other those
about her always seem to be having a good time.  See how animated
and pleased is the expression of all the faces at her table yonder.
It was the same on the croquet-ground this morning.  She effervesced
like champagne, and before we knew it we were all in a state of
exhilaration and the morning had gone."

"I hate these bold, forward women who are quick to become acquainted
with every one.  A man of this type is bad enough, but a woman is
unendurable."

"I agree with you in the abstract most heartily; but the only bold
thing that I have seen Miss Burton do was to run under the feet
of my horses.  You might as well call a ray of sunshine bold and
forward; and people like sunshine when it is as nicely tempered as
her manner is.  I confess that when I first learned who she was, and
before I had met her personally, I was greatly prejudiced against
her, but one would have to be a churl indeed to remain proof against
her genial good-nature.  For my part I intend to enjoy it, as I do
all the other good things the gods throw in my way."

"The gods would indeed be careless to leave any good things within
your reach, unless they were meant for you," snapped Ida.

"Good for you, Coz; your ride with Van Berg has already brightened
you up.  There is no telling what you might not become if you
would only associate with men who had sufficient brains not to grow
spooney over your pretty face."

As Ida and her mother passed out on the piazza, Van Berg joined
them and said:

"I am glad to see that you have so fully recovered, Miss Mayhew.
You prove again that you possess good strong nerves."

"Thank you," said the young lady, laconically, and with a sudden
accession of color.

"Mr. Van Berg," began Mrs. Mayhew with great animation, "I'm
excessively thankful that you happened to be on the road, and that
the stage overtook you this morning.  It was so fortunate that
I almost think it providential.  How dreadful it would have been
if Ida had been alone in such frightful peril!  I cannot tell you
also how delighted I am that my daughter behaved so beautifully.
Indeed, I must confess that I am agreeably surprised, for Ida was
never famous for her courage.  Your own manner must have inspired
confidence in her; and now that you have been so fortunately THROWN
TOGETHER, I trust you may be better friends in the future."

Miss Mayhew's rising color deepened into an intense scarlet, and,
as she turned away to hide her confusion, she could not forbear
shooting a wrathful glance at the artist.  He had sufficient
self-control not to change a muscle, or to appear in the slightest
degree aware of the embarrassment caused by her mother's words,
and especially the use of the phrase--grown to be most hateful from
its associations--that so vividly recalled to the incensed maiden
the anomalous position in which she found herself at the end of
her perilous morning ride.

"You ladies differ favorably from us men," said Van Berg, quietly.
"You rise to meet an emergency by an innate quality of your sex,
whereas, in our case, if our native strength is not equal to the
occasion we fall below it as a matter of course."

"Oh, that accounts for Ida's coming off with such flying colors--she
rose to meet the emergency.  I hope, however, she will EMBRACE
no more such opportunities of showing her courage--why! Ida, what
IS the matter? what have I said?" but the young lady, with face
inflamed, vanished in the direction of her room.

"Well, this IS strange," remarked the lady with a sharp glance of
inquiry at the artist, who still managed to maintain an expression
of lamb-like innocence.  "I do believe the poor child is ill, and,
now I think of it, she has not acted like herself for several days;"
and she sought her daughter with hasty steps.

But the young lady did not go to her room, being well aware that
her mother would soon follow for the explanation which she could
not give.  Therefore, taking a side corridor, she joined some
acquaintances on another piazza.





Chapter XI.  A "Tableau Vivant."




"Miss Mayhew, will you please step here?" said a very fashionably
dressed lady.

Turning, Ida saw near her the mother of the child that had been
rescued the previous day.  She, with her husband, had been talking
very earnestly to Mr. Burleigh, the proprietor of the house, who
seemed in rather a dubious state of mind over some proposition of
theirs.

"Miss Mayhew, we want your opinion in regard to a certain matter,"
began the lady volubly.  "Of course I and my husband feel very
grateful to the young woman who saved our child from your cousin's
horses yesterday.  Indeed, my husband feels so deeply indebted that
he wishes to make some return and I have suggested that he present
her with a check for five hundred dollars.  I learn from Mr. Burleigh
that she is a teacher, and therefore, of course, she must be poor.
Now, in my view, if my husband or some other gentleman should present
this check in the parlor, with an appropriate little speech, it
would be a nice acknowledgment of her act.  Don't you think so?"

"I do not think I am qualified to give an opinion," said Ida, "as
I have no acquaintance with the lady whatever."

"I'm sure it will be just the thing to do," said the lady, becoming
more infatuated with her project every moment.  "Do you think your
cousin would be willing to make the speech?"

At this suggestion Ida laughed outright.  "The idea," she said,
"of my cousin making a speech of any kind, or in any circumstances!"

"Now I think of it," persisted the lady, "Miss Burton and Mr. Van
Berg sit at the same table, and he seems better acquainted with her
than any of the gentlemen.  He's the one to make the speech, only
I do not feel that I know him well enough to ask him.  Do you, Miss
Mayhew?"

"Indeed I do not," said the young lady, decisively; "I am the last
one in the house to ask any favors of Mr. Van Berg."

"Well, then, Mr. Burleigh can explain everything and ask him."

"Really now, Mrs. Chints"--for such was the lady's name--"I don't
quite believe that Mr. Van Berg would approve of giving Miss Burton
money in public, and before anything further is done I would like
to ask his judgement.  It all may be eminently proper, as you
say, and I would not like to stand in the way of the young lady's
receiving so handsome a present, and would not for the world if I
thought it would be agreeable to her; but there is something about
her that---"

"I have it," interrupted the positive-minded lady, unheeding and
scarcely hearing Mr. Burleigh's dubious circumlocution, and she put
her finger to her forehead for a moment in an affected stage-like
manner, as if her ideas of the "eternal fitness of things" had
been obtained from the sensational drama.  "I have it:  the child
himself shall hand her the gift from his own little hand, and you,
Mr. Chints, can say all that need be said.  It will be a pretty
scene, a 'tableau vivant.'  Mr. Chints, come with me before the
young woman leaves her present favorable position near the parlor
door.  Mr. Burleigh, your scruples are sentimental and groundless.
Of course the young woman will be delighted to receive in one
evening as much, and perhaps more, than her whole year's salary
amounts to.  Come, Mr. Chints, Mr.  Burleigh, if you wish, you may
group some of your friends near;" and away she rustled, sweeping
the floor with her silken train.

Mr. Chints lumbered after her with a perplexed and martyr-like
expression.  He was a mighty man in Washington Market, but in a
matter like this he was as helpless as a stranded whale.  The gift
of five hundred dollars did not trouble him in the least; he could
soon make that up; but taking part in a "tableau vivant" under the
auspices of his dramatic wife was like being impaled.

"Well," said Mr. Burleigh, shaking his head, "I wash my hands of
the whole matter.  Five hundred dollars is a snug sum, but I doubt
if that little woman takes it.  I'm more afraid she'll be offended
and hurt.  What do you think, Miss Mayhew?"

"I've no opinion to offer, Mr. Burleigh.  These people are all
comparative strangers to me.  Mrs. Chints is determined to have
her own way, and nothing that you or I can say would make any
difference.  My rule is to let people alone, and if they get into
scrapes it sometimes does them good;" and she left him that she
might witness the Chints' tableau.

"That's just the difference between you and Miss Burton," muttered
Mr. Burleigh, nodding his head significantly after her.  "She'd
help a fellow out of a scrape and you'd help him into one.  Well,
if the old saying's true, 'Handsome is that handsome does,' the
little school-teacher would be the girl for me were I looking for
my mate."

On her way to the entrance of the main parlor, Ida stopped a moment
at an open window near the corner where Stanton and Van Berg were
smoking.

"Cousin Ik," she said, 'sotto voce.'

He rose and joined her.

"If you wish to see a rich scene, hover near the entrance of the
main parlor."

"What do you mean?"

"I've learned that Mr. and Mrs. Chints, and possibly your favorite
new performer, Miss Burton, are going to act a little comedy
together: come and see;" and she vanished.

"Van," said Stanton in a vexed tone, "there's some mischief on foot;"
and he mentioned what his cousin had said, adding:  "Can Ida have
been putting that brassy Mrs. Chints up to some absurd performance
that will hurt Miss Burton's feelings?"

They rose and sauntered down the piazza, Van Berg trying to imagine
what was about to take place and how he could shield the young lady
from any annoyance.

She sat inside the entrance of the main parlor facing the open
windows, and a little group had gathered around her, including
the ladies who sat at her table, with whom she had already become
a favorite.  Ida had demurely entered by one of the open windows
and was apparently reading a novel under one of the gas jets not
far away.  Groups of people were chatting near or were seated around
card-tables; others were quietly promenading in the hall-ways and
on the piazza.  There was not an indication of any expected or
unexpected "scene."  Only Ida's conscious, observant expression
and the absence of Mrs. Chints foreboded mischief.

"What enormity can that odious family be about to perpetrate?"
whispered Stanton.

"I cannot surmise," answered Van Berg; "something in reference to
the rescue of her child, I suppose.  I wish I could thwart them,
for Miss Burton's position will place her full in the public eye,
and I do not wish her to be the victim of their vulgarity."

After a little further hesitation and thought he stepped in, and
approaching Miss Burton, said:

"Pardon me for interrupting you, but I wish to show you something
on the piazza that will interest you."

She rose to follow him, but before she could take a step Mrs. Chints
swept in on the arm of her husband, followed by the nurse--who had
been retained at Miss Burton's intercession--bearing in her arms
the little boy, that stared at the lights and people with the round
eyes of childish wonder.

Every one looked up in surprise at the sudden appearance of the
little group, that suggested a christening more than anything else.

Planting themselves before Miss Burton, thus barring all egress,
Mr.  Chints fumbled a moment in his pocket and drew out an envelope,
and with a loud, prefatory "Ahem!" began:

"My dear Miss Burton--that is the way Mrs. Chints says I should address
you, thought it strikes me as a trifle familiar and affectionate;
but I mean no harm--we're under pecul--very great obligations to
YOU.  We learn--my wife has--that you are engaged--engaged--in--I
mean that you--teach.  I'm sure that's a lawful calling--I mean
a laudable one, and no one can deny that it's useful.  In my view
it's to your credit that you are engaged--in--that you teach.
I work myself, and always mean to.  In fact I enjoy it more than
making speeches.  But feeling that we were under wonderful obligations
to YOU, and learning--my wife did--that you were dependent on--on
your own labor, we thought that if this little fellow that you saved
so handsomely should hand you this check for five hundred dollars
it wouldn't be amiss."  And here, according to rehearsal, the nurse
with great parade handed the child to Mrs. Chints, who now, with
much 'empressement,' advanced to a position immediately before Miss
Burton; meanwhile the poor, perspiring Mr. Chints put the envelope
into the child's chubby hand, saying:

"Give it to the lady, Augustus."

But the small Augustus, on the contrary, stared at the lady and
put the envelope in his mouth, to the great mortification of Mrs.
Chints, who had been so preoccupied with the Chints side of the
affair, and the impression they were making on the extemporized
audience, that she had no eyes for Miss Burton.

And that young lady's face was, in truth, a study.  An expression
of surprise was followed quickly by one of resentment.  Even Stanton
was obliged to admit that for a moment the little "school-ma'am"
looked formidable.  But as Mr. Chints floundered on in his speech,
as some poor wretch who could not swim might struggle to get out
of the deep water into which he had been thrown, the expression
of her face softened, and one might imagine the thought passing
through her mind--"They don't know any better;" and when, at last,
the child, instead of carrying out the climax that Mrs. Chints had
intended, began vigorously to munch the envelope containing the
precious check, there was even a twinkle of humor in the young
lady's eyes.  But she responded gravely:

"Mr. Chints, I was at first inclined to resent this scene, but time
has been given me to perceive that neither you nor your wife wish
to hurt my feelings, and that you are in part, at least, actuated
by feelings of gratitude for the service that I was so fortunate
as to render you.  But I fear you do not quite understand me.  You
are right in one respect, however.  I do labor for my own livelihood,
and it is a source of the deepest satisfaction to me that I can
live from my own work and not from gifts.  If your hearts prompt
this large donation, there are hundreds of poor little waifs in
the city to whom this money will bring a little of the care and
comfort which blesses your child.  As for myself, this is all the
reward that I wish or can receive," and she stooped and kissed
the child on both cheeks.  Then taking Van Berg's arm, she gladly
escaped to the cool and dusky piazza.

Mr. Chints looked at Mrs. Chints in dismay.  Mrs. Chints handed
the baby to the nurse, and beat an undramatic and hasty retreat,
her husband following in a dazed sort of manner, treading on her
train at every other step.

As Van Berg passed out of the parlor, he saw Ida Mayhew vanishing
from its farther side, with Stanton in close pursuit.  When Miss
Burton ended the disagreeable affair by kissing the child, there had
been a slight murmur of applause.  Significant smiles and a rising
him of voices descanting on the affair in a way not at all complimentary
to the crestfallen Chints family, followed the disappearances of
all the actors in the unexpected scene.





Chapter XII.  Miss Mayhew is Puzzled.




"Miss Burton," said Van Berg, as soon as they were alone, "I wish
I could have saved you from this disagreeable experience.  I tried
to do so, but was not quick enough.  I much blame my slow wits that
I was not more prompt."

"I wish it might have been prevented," she replied, "for their
sakes as well as my own."

"I have no compunctions on their account whatever," said Van Berg,
"and feel that you let them off much too kindly.  I think, however,
that they and all others here will understand you much better
hereafter.  I cannot express too strongly to you how thoroughly our
brief acquaintance has taught me to respect you, and if you will
permit me to give an earnest meaning to Mr. Burleigh's jesting offer
to share with me the responsibility of your care, I will esteem it
an honor."

"I sincerely thank you, Mr. Van Berg, and should I ever need the
services of a gentleman,"--she laid a slight emphasis upon the
term--"I shall, without any hesitancy, turn to you.  But I have
long since learned to be my own protectress, as, after all, one
must be, situated as I am."

"You seem to have the ability, not only to take care of yourself,
but of others, Miss Burton.  Nevertheless I shall, with your
permission, establish a sort of protectorate over you which shall
be exceedingly unobtrusive and undemonstrative, and not in the
least like that which some powers make the excuse for exactions,
until the protected party is ready to cry out in desperation to
be delivered from its friends.  I hesitated too long this evening
from the fear of being forward; and yet I did not know what was
coming, and had learned only accidentally but a few moments before
that anything was coming."

"Well," replied Miss Burton with a slight laugh, "it's a comfortable
thought that there's a fort near, to which one can run should an
enemy appear; and a pleasanter thought still, that the fort is strong
and staunch.  but, to change the figure, I have a great fancy for
paddling my own light canoe, and such small craft will often float,
you know, where a ship of the line would strike."

"I will admit, Miss Burton, that ships of the line are often unwieldy
and clumsily deep in the water; but if you ever do need a gunboat
with a howitzer or two on deck, may I hope to be summoned?"

"I could ask for no better champion.  I fairly tremble at the
broadside that would follow."

"Are you thinking of the discharge or the recoil?"

"Both might involve danger," said Miss Burton, laughing; "but I
have concluded to keep on your side through such wars as may rage
at the Lake House during my sojourn.  I cannot help thinking of
poor Mr.  and Mrs. Chints.  I feel almost as sorry for such people
as I do for the blind and deaf.  They seem to lack a certain sense
which, if possessed, would teach them to avoid such scenes."

"I detest such people and like to snub them unmercifully," said
Van Berg, heartily.

"That may be in accordance with a gunboat character; but is it
knightly?"

"Why not?  What does snobbishness and rich vulgarity deserve at
any man's hands?"

"Nothing but sturdy blows.  But what do weak, imperfect, half-educated
men and women, who have never had a tithe of your advantages, NEED
at your hands?  Can we not condemn faults, and at the same time
pity and help the faulty?  The gunboat sends its shot crashing too
much at random.  It seems to me that true knighthood would spare
weakness of any kind."

"I'm glad you have not spared mine.  You have demolished me as a
gunboat, but I would fain be your knight."

"It is Mrs. Chints who needs a knight at present, and not I.  It
troubles me to think of her worriment over this foolish little
episode, and with your permission I will go and try to banish the
cloud."

As she turned she was intercepted by Stanton, who said:

"Miss Burton, let my present to you my cousin, Miss Mayhew."

A ray from a parlor lamp fell upon Ida's face, and Van Berg saw at
once that it was clouded and unamiable in its expression.  Stanton
had evidently been reproaching her severely.

Miss Burton held out her hand cordially and said; "I wish to thank
you for maintaining the credit of our sex this morning.  These
superior men are so fond of portraying us as hysterical, clinging
creatures whose only instinct in peril is to throw themselves on
man's protection, that I always feel a little exultation when one
of the 'weaker and gentler sex,' as we are termed, show the courage
and presence of mind which they coolly appropriate as masculine
qualities."

"Are you an advocate of woman's rights, Miss Burton?" asked Miss
Mayhew, stung by the unconscious sarcasm of the lady's words, to reply
in almost as resentful a manner as if a wound had been intended.

"Not of woman's, particularly," was the quiet answer; "I would be
glad if every one had their rights."

"You philanthropy is very wide, certainly."

"And therefore very thin, perhaps you think, since it covers so much
ground.  I agree with you, Miss Mayhew, that general good-will is
as cold and thin as moonshine.  One ray of sunlight that warms some
particular thing into life is worth it all."

"Indeed! I think I prefer moonlight."

"There are certain absorbing avocations in life to which moonshine
is better adapted then sunlight, is probably the thought in my
cousin's mind," said Stanton, satirically.

"And what are they?" asked Miss Burton.

"Flirtation, for instance."

"My cousin is speaking for himself," said Ida, acidly; "and knows
better what is in his own mind than in mine."

"If some ladies themselves never know their own minds, how can
another know?" Stanton retorted.

"Well," said Miss Burton, with a laugh, "if we accept a practical
philosophy much in vogue--that of taking the world as we find
it--flirting is one of the commonest pursuits of mankind."

"I'm quite sure, Miss Burton," said Van Berg, "that your philosophy
of life is the reverse of taking the world as we find it."

"Indeed, you are mistaken, sir; I am exceedingly prosaic in my views,
and cherish no Utopian dreams and theories.  I do indeed take the
old matter-of-fact world as I find it, and try to make the best of
it."

"Ah, your last is a very saving clause.  Too many are seemingly
trying to make the worst of it, and unfortunately they succeed."

Ida here shot a quick and vengeful glance at the speaker.

"Please do not present me as a general reformer, Mr. Van Berg,"
protested Miss Burton, with a light laugh; "I have my hands full
in mending my own ways."

"And so might we all, no doubt," said Stanton; "only most of us
leave our ways unmended.  but I am curious to know, Miss Burton, how
you would make the best of a flirtation; since this is emphatically
a part of the world as we find it, especially at a summer hotel."

"The best that we can do with many things that exist," she replied,
"is to leave them alone.  Italy is pre-eminently the land of garlic
and art; but fortunately we shall not find it necessary to indulge
in both and in equal proportions when we are so happy as to go
abroad."

"A great many people prefer the garlic," said Stanton.

"Oh, certainly," she answered; "it's a matter of taste."

"So then garlic and flirtation are corresponding terms in your
vocabulary?"

"I cannot say which term outranks the other, but it seems to me that
if a woman regards her love as a sacred thing, she cannot permit
an indefinite number of commonplace people even to attempt to stain
it with their soiling touch."

"I think gentlemen show just as much of a disposition to flirt as
ladies," said Ida, with resentment in her tone.

"I will not dispute that statement," replied Miss Burton, with a
laugh; "indeed, I'm inclined to think they are very human."

"Humane, you mean," interposed Stanton.  "Yes, I often wonder at
our patient endurance."

"Which shall be taxed no longer to-night by me.  Good-evening, Miss
Mayhew.  Good-evening, patient martyrs."

"Humane, indeed!" said Stanton.  "Are you that way inclined, Van?"

"I have no occasion to be otherwise."

"Well, I feel savage enough to scalp some one."

"So I should judge," remarked Ida.

"Perhaps then, as my mood contrasts somewhat favorably with your
cousin's, you will venture to walk with me for awhile?" said Van
Berg.

"Indeed, sir," she replied, taking his arm, "there are times when
any change is a relief."

"I cannot be very greatly elated over that view of the case,
certainly," remarked Van Berg, with a laugh.

She did not reply at once, but after a moment said:  "I suppose
you regard me as a hopeless case at best."

"what suggests that thought to you, Miss Mayhew?"

"You are not so dull as to need to ask that question, and you only
ask it to draw me out.  For one thing, you probably think that
I instigated Mr. and Mrs. Chints to act as they did.  This is not
true."

"I'm very glad to hear it."

"I'm no more to blame than Mr. Burleigh was.  He knew about it as
well as I did, but Mrs. Chints was bound to carry out her project."

"Will you permit a suggestion?"

"I suppose you wish to insinuate that I acted like a heathen,
instead of saying that I am one plainly, as does Cousin Ik?"

"I think you acted a little thoughtlessly.  If Miss Burton had been
in your place, she would have tried to prevent the disagreeable
scene."

"Oh, certainly! she is perfect."

"No; she is kind."

"Would it be possible to speak upon some agreeable subject, Mr.
Van Berg?  I have had enough mortifications for one day."

He was puzzled.  What topic could he introduce that would interest
this spoiled and petulant beauty.

He touched on art, but she was only artful in her small way, and
could not follow him.  He tried literature, and here they had even
less in common.  He would not and indeed could not read the thin
society novels which reflected modes of life as trivial as her
own, and his books might have been written in another language,
so slight was her acquaintance with them.  The various political,
social, or scientific questions of the day had never puzzled her
brain.  Van Berg cautiously felt his way towards his companion's
knowledge of two or three of the most popular of them.  Her answers,
however, were so superficial and irrelevant, and also so evidently
embarrassed, that he saw his only resources to be society chit-chat,
gossip about mutual acquaintances, the latest modes, the attractions
of pleasure resorts in the city, and of summer resorts in the country.
But he gave his mind to these unwonted themes, and labored hard to
be entertaining; for now that he had gained the vantage-ground he
sought, he was determined to discover whether there was a sleeping
mind or a vacuum behind Miss Mayhew's shapely forehead.  Granting
that there was a womanly intelligence there, as yet unquickened,
he was not so irrational as to imagine he could jostle it into
illumining activity in one short hour, or day, or week.  But it
seemed to him that if any mind existed worth the name, it would
give such encouraging signs of life before many days passed as
would promise success of his experiment.  He felt that his first
aim must be to establish an intimacy that would permit as full
and frank an exchange of thought as was possible between people so
dissimilar.

While he tried to bring himself down to the littleness of her daily
life, he determined to show his disapproval of every phrase of its
meanness as far as he could without offending her.  He had made her
feel that he condemned her course towards Miss Burton that evening,
and he had meant to do so.

She resented this disapproval, and at the same time respected him
for it.  Indeed he puzzled her.  He evidently sought and wished
for her society; and yet as they walked back and forth, even though
she did not look at him when the light gave her the opportunity
to do so, she felt intuitively that he did not enjoy her company.
She saw that he was laboring hard to make himself agreeable; but
his small talk had not the familiar flippancy and fluency of one
speaking in his native tongue; nor was his manner that of one who,
infatuated with her beauty, had thrown aside all other considerations.

She felt that the man at her side measured her, and understood her
littleness thoroughly.

And she herself had a growing consciousness of insignificance that
was as painful as it was novel.  Adding to all the humiliations
of this day here was a man, not so very much older than herself,
trying to come down to her level, as he would accommodate his
language to a child.  No labored argument could have revealed her
ignorance to her so clearly, as her conscious inability to follow
him into his ordinary range of thought.  Unwittingly he had demonstrated
his superiority in a way that she could not deny, however much she
might be inclined to resent it.  And yet he treated her with a sort
of respect, and occasionally she saw that he bent his eyes upon
her face as if in search of something.

After a transient effort to ignore everything and talk in her usual
superficial manner, she became more and more silent and oppressed,
and, at last said, somewhat abruptly:

"Mr. Van Berg, I am weary, and I imagine you are too.  I think I
will say good-night."

"I scarcely wonder that you are fatigued.  You have had a trying
day."

"It has been a horrid day," she said, emphatically.

"It might have ended much worse, nevertheless."

"Possibly," she admitted with a shrug.

"You have more reason to congratulate yourself than you imagine,
Miss Mayhew.  Even that disagreeable souvenir of our morning peril,
your lameness, has disappeared, and you might have been maimed for
life."

"My lameness, like my courage, was chiefly a fraud to begin with,
and soon disappeared; but I have other souvenirs of that occasion
that I cannot get rid of so easily."

"If I am one of them, you are right, Miss Mayhew; I shall hold you
to our agreement this morning.  You put me on my good behavior--have
I not behaved well?"

"Yes, better than I have.  I was not referring to you personally,
but to certain memories."

"We agreed to let by-gones be by-gones."

"But others are not parties to this agreement, and every reference
to the affair is odious to me."

"I shall make no further reference to it, and you must be fair
enough not to punish me for the acts of others."

"You also despise me in your heart of my course towards Miss Burton
this evening."

"If I despised you would I have sought your society this evening?"

"I do not know.  I don't understand you, if you will permit my
bluntness."

"Possibly you don't understand yourself, Miss Mayhew."

"I understand that I have had a miserable day, and I hope I may
never see another like it.  Good-night, sir."





Chapter XIII.  Nature's Broken Promise.




Van Berg had been left to himself but a little time before Stanton
and Mr. Burleigh came out upon the piazza, and the three gentlemen
sat down for a quiet chat.

"Well," remarked mine host, with a sigh of relief such as a pilot
might heave after taking his ship round a perilous point; "well,
thanks to Miss Burton's good sense, the affair has ended without any
trouble.  In a house like this, 'Satan is finding mischief still'
whenever my back is turned, and sometimes he threatens to get up
a row right under my nose, as in this instance.  I was a 'blarsted
fool,' as our English friends have it, not to know that Mrs.
Chint's drama, although beginning in comedy, might end in tragedy
of my losing some good paying boarders.  Still further did
I demonstrate the length of my ears by even imagining it possible
that Miss Burton would take five hundred, or five hundred thousand
dollars in any such circumstances.  But the whole thing was done
in a jiffy, and Mrs. Chints was possessed to have her 'tableau
vivant.'  Lively picture wasn't it?  Still, if Miss Mayhew, when
appealed to by Mrs. Chints, had confirmed my doubts, I would have
tried to stop the nonsense at any cost."

"Did Miss Mayhew advise the step?" asked Stanton.

"Oh, no!  She was non-committal.  She acted as if it were none of
her affair, save as it might afford her a little amusement.  But
these rows are no light matters to us poor publicans, who must
please every one and keep the whole menagerie in order.  Mr. Chints
was swearing up and down his room that he had been made a fool of.
Mrs. Chints was for leaving to-morrow morning, declaring that she
would not endure such airs from a school-teacher.  They are rich
and have a number of friends who are coming soon, and so my mind
was full of 'strange oaths' also, at my prospective loss, when this
blessed little woman appears, taps at their door, enters like the
angel into the lion's den, and shuts their mouths by some magic
all her own.  And now they're going to stay; Mr. Chints will give
the five hundred to the Children's Aid Society, all is serene and
I'm happy, so much so that I'll smoke another of your good cigars,
Mr. Stanton."

"Certainly, half-a-dozen if you wish.  How do you imagine she
quieted the unruly beasts?"

"Oh, I suppose she got around them through the child--somewhat as
she won over my wife this afternoon by means of our cross baby.
It's teething, you know--and yet how should you young chaps know
anything about babies!  No matter, your time will come.  This
promenading the piazza with lovely creatures who have been half the
afternoon at their toilets is all very nice; but wait till you have
weathered innumerable squalls in the dead of night--then you'll
learn that teething-time in a household is like going around Cape
Horn.  Well, to return from your future to my present.  When so
good-natured a man as I am gets into a sympathetic mood with old
King Herod, you can imagine what a state the mother's nerves must be
in who has to stand it night and day.  But as Miss Burton had been
commended to my care, I felt that I was in duty bound to introduce
her to my wife and show her some attention.  So I said to my wife,
this afternoon, 'I'm going to bring a young lady in to see you.'
'Do you think I'm in a condition to entertain company?' she asked,
with a faint suggestion of hard cider in her tone.  'Well, my
dear,' I expostulated, 'it was just the same yesterday, and will
be a little more so to-morrow, and I feel that I shall be remiss
if I delay any longer.'  'Oh, very well,' she said, as if it were
a tooth that must come out sooner or later, 'since the matter must
be attended to, let us have it over at once.'  But bless you, it
wasn't over till supper-time.  As I brought the young lady in, the
baby waked out of a five-minutes' nap that had cost about an hour's
rocking, and I thought the roof would come off.  My wife looked
cross and worried--well, it was prose, gentlemen, prose--not the
poetry of life; and I said to myself, 'I suppose I have about made
it certain that this young woman will live and die an old maid by
giving her this glimpse behind the scenes.  I thought the ladies
could get on better without me than with me, so I bowed myself out,
glad to escape the din; and I supposed Miss Burton would say a few
pleasant things in the direction of Mrs. Burleigh, which she, poor
woman, might not be able to hear, and then she would bow herself
out, also glad to escape.  An hour and a half later I went back to
see if I could not coax my wife away for a drive, and what do you
suppose I saw?"

"The baby in convulsions," said Stanton.

"Give it up," added Van Berg.

"Sweet transformation scene; deep hush; my wife asleep in her
rocking-chair, the baby asleep in the arms of Miss Burton, who
held up a warning finger at me to be quiet.  But the mischief was
done; my wife started up and was mortified beyond measure that she
had treated her guest so rudely.  The good fairy, however, was so
genuinely delighted that she had quieted the baby and given the
tired mother a little rest, that we had to come to the conclusion
that she found pleasure in ways that are a trifle uncommon.  By
some miracle or other she kept the baby asleep, and then my wife
and I tried to entertain her a little, but we were the ones that
were entertained.  Before we knew it, the supper-bell rang, and
then I'm blessed if the little chap didn't wake up and grin at us
all.  To think then that I should reward her by letting Mr. Chints
slap her face with a five-hundred-dollar check!  I guess we'll all
know better next time."

"Did she tell you anything further about her history or her
connections?" asked Stanton.

Mr. Burleigh stroked his beard and looked rather blank for a moment.

"Now I think of it," he ejaculated, "I be hanged if she said a word
about herself.  And now I think further of it, she somehow or other
got Mrs. Burleigh and myself a-talking, and seemed so interested
in us and what we said, that I be hanged again if we didn't tell
her all we know about ourselves."

"She impresses every one as being remarkably frank, and yet I
think it will be found that she is peculiarly reticent in regard
to herself," remarked Van Berg musingly.  "Well, it's not often I
take people on trust, but I have given this lady my entire respect
and confidence."

"I assure you that there is no trust in this business," said Mr.
Burleigh, emphatically.  "I can't afford to indulge in sentiment,
gentlemen; besides, it couldn't be any more becoming in me than in
Tom Chints.  I wouldn't take an unprotected, unknown female into
my house if she came with a pair of wings.  But Miss Burton brings
letters that establish her character as a lady as truly as that
of any other woman in the house.  I ought to have prevented this
Chints business, but then five hundred is a nice little plum, and
before I pulled my slow wits together the thing was done."

"By the way, Mr. Burleigh," remarked Stanton, "I hear that the
parties who are now at my friend Van Berg's table are soon to leave
for the sea-shore.  Can you give me three seats there after their
departure?"

"Certainly; put you down right alongside of Miss Burton."

"Perhaps Van Berg feels that he has the first claim to so good a
position?"

"No, Stanton, I shall not place a straw in your way."

"You never were a man of straw, Van.  If I were seeking more than
to enjoy the society of this young lady, who seems to be embodied
sunshine, I would be sorry to have you place yourself in the way."

"Sunshine brought to a focus kindles even green wood," remarked
Van Berg, with a significant nod at his friend.

"Well," said Mr. Burleigh, rising, "if I had not found my mate, I'd
be a burr that that little woman wouldn't get rid of very easily.
Good-night, gentlemen.  I'll give either one of you my blessing."

"Good-night, Van," said Stanton, also.  "I'm not going to stay and
listen to your absurd predictions.  Neither shall I permit you to
enjoy all by yourself the delicate wine of that woman's wit.  When
good things are passing round, I propose to have my share.  My
presence can't hurt your prospects."

"And if it did, Ik, do you think me such a churl as to try to crowd
you away?"

"That's magnanimous.  I suppose you and my cousin can manage to
keep the peace between you."

"I think the change will be far more disagreeable to Miss Mayhew
than to me."

"You are very polite to say so.  Good-night."

"Well," mused Van Berg, when left to himself; "I've made progress
to-day after a fashion.  We have been quite thoroughly introduced--in
fact 'thrown together,' as fate and all her friends will have it.
I might have been weeks in gaining as much insight into her character
as circumstances have given me in a few brief hours.  But what
a miserable revelation she has made of herself--cowardice this
morning--fraud this afternoon, and cold selfishness, that can
amuse itself with the mortification and misfortunes of others, this
evening.  This is the moral side of the picture.  But when I came
to 'speer' around to see whether she had any mind or real culture,
the exhibition was still more pitiable.  Ye gods! that a girl can
live to her age and know so little that is worth knowing!  She
knows how to dress--that is, how to enhance her physical beauty;
and that, I admit, is a great deal.  As far as it goes it is well.
But of the taste of a beautiful and, at the same time, intellectual
and highly cultivated woman, she has no conception; with her it is
a question of flesh and blood only."

"I wonder if it will ever be otherwise?  I wonder if her marvellous
beauty, which is now like a budding rose, that partly conceals the
worm in its heart, will soon, like the overblown flower, reveal
so clearly what mars its life that scarcely anything else will be
noticed.  What a fate for a man--to be tied for life to a woman
who will, with sure gradation, pass from at least outward beauty
to utter hideousness!  Beauty, in a case like this, is but a mask
which time or the loathsome fingers of disease would surely strip
off; and then what an object would confront the disenchanted lover!
It would be like marrying a disguised death's-head.  Never before
did I realize how essential is mental and moral culture to give
value to mere external beauty.

"And yet she seems to have a kind of quickness and aptness.  She is
not wanting in womanly intuition.  I still am inclined to believe
she has been dwarfed by circumstances and her wretched associations.
Her mind has been given no better means of development than
the knowledge of her beauty, the general and superficial homage
that it always receives, the little round of thought that centres
about self, and the daily question of dress.  That's narrowing the
world down to a cage large enough only for a poll-parrot.  If the
bird within has a parrot's nature, what is the use of opening the
door and showing it larks singing in the sky?  I fear that's what
I'm trying to do, and that I shall go back to my fall work with a
meagre portfolio and a grudge against nature, for mocking me with
the fairest broken promise ever made."





Chapter XIV.  A Revelation.




The next day threatened to be a dreary one, for the rain fell so
steadily as to make all sunny, out-of-door pleasures impossible.
Many looked abroad with faces as dismal and cloudy as the sky;
for the number of those who rise above their circumstances with a
cheery courage are but few.  Human faces can shine, although the
sun be clouded; but, as a rule, the shadow falls on the face also,
and the regal spirit succumbs like a clod of earth.

The people came straggling down late to breakfast in the dark
morning, and, with a childish egotism that considers only self and
immediate desires, the lowering weather which meant renewed beauty
and wealth to all the land, was berated as if it were a small spite
against the handful of people at the Lake House.  Van Berg heard
Ida Mayhew exclaiming against the clouds as if this spite were
aimed at herself only.

"Some of her friends might not venture from the city," she said.

"They youths are not venturesome, then," remarked Stanton, who
never lost an opportunity to tease.

"Of course they don't wish to get wet," she pouted.

"And yet I'll wager any amount that they are not of the 'salt of
the earth' in any scriptural sense.  Well, they had better stay
in town, for this would be an instance of 'much ventured, nothing
gained.'"

"You remind me of a certain fox who could not say enough hard things
about the grapes that were out of reach.  But mark my words, Mr.
Sibley will come, if it pours."

"He wouldn't risk the spoiling of his clothes for any woman living."

"You judge him by yourself.  Oh, dear, how shall I get through this
long, horrible day!  You men can smoke like bad chimneys through
a storm, but for me there is no resource to-day, but a dull novel
that I've read once before.  Let me see, I'll read an hour and
sleep three, and then it will be time to dress for dinner.  Oh,
good-morning, Mr.  Van Berg," she says to the artist who had been
listening to her while apparently giving close attention to Mrs.
Mayhew's interminable tirade against rainy days; "I have just been
envying you gentlemen who can kill stupid hours by smoking."

"I admit that it is almost as bad as sleeping."

"I see that you have a homily prepared on improving the time, so
I shall escape at once."

On the stairs she met Miss Burton, who was descending with a breezy
swiftness as if she were making a charge on the general gloom and
sullenness of the day.

"Good-morning, Miss Mayhew," she said; "I'm glad to see you looking
so well after the severe shaking up you had yesterday.  You would
almost tempt one to believe that rough usage is sometimes good for
us."

"I have no such belief, I assure you.  Yesterday was bad enough,
but to-day promises to be worse.  I was going to make up a boating
party, but what can one do when the water is overhead instead of
under the keel?"

"Scores of things," was the cheery reply.  "I'm going to have a
good time."

"I'm going to sleep," said Ida, passing on.

"Miss Burton," said Stanton, joining her at the foot of the stairs,
"I perceive, even from your manner of descending to our lower world,
that you are destined to vanquish the dullness of this rainy day.
Don't you wish an ally?"

"Would you be an ally, Mr. Stanton, if you saw I was destined to
be vanquished?"

"Of course I would."

"Look in the parlor then.  There are at least a dozen ladies
already vanquished.  They are oppressed by the foul-fiend

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