Bressant Part 15

he _has_ such a profound knowledge of medicine and surgery--all those things--so prudent, so careful! Still, a woman is a treasure, you know--a good, sensible, efficient woman is a _host_--oh, yes, in a sick-room. This boarding-house keeper, now--she's just such a person, I _dare_ say--elderly, sober, experienced--a married woman, probably, with a large family, no doubt? Abbie, Abbie! what _did_ you say her last name was, my love?"

Cornelia was so much amused at the idea of Abbie's being a married woman with a large family that she did not observe how Aunt Margaret, awaiting her answer, was all in a tremble. If she had not been laughing, she could scarcely have helped seeing how the ear-trumpet shook as it was presented to her.

"Oh, no," said she, "she's not married, Aunt Margaret--at least not now, though I believe she's a widow, or something of that kind, you know--and she hasn't any children at all! As to her other name, I don't know it, and I believe hardly any one does. You see, she's one of that queer sort of people; she's very quiet, and always grave, and n.o.body knows much about her, except that she's very good, and has lived in the village for twenty years and more. I believe, though, papa has met her before, or knows something about her in some way; but he never says any thing to us on the subject."

This was all that could be got out of Cornelia upon the topic of Abbie, and Mrs. Vanderplauck was obliged to swallow whatever uneasiness, curiosity, or misgiving she may have felt. In the midst of an exhortation to her young guest to repeat her visit daily to the boudoir, and regale her auntie with anecdotes of the dear old, interesting people in the village, Abbie and all, some one of the young ladies knocked at the door, and hurried Miss Valeyon off, without her having asked, as she had intended, for an explanation of the puzzling, metaphorical allusions.

Mrs. Vanderplanck, left to herself, rocked backward and forward in her chair, with her hands clasped over her forehead, much in the way that an insane person might have done.

"Who'd have thought it! who'd have thought it! In the very village--in the very house--of all places in the world!--in the very house!--and he laid up--can't be moved--can't be taken away. Why didn't I know?--why didn't I find out?--careless--stupid--thoughtless! Curse the woman! couldn't I have imagined that she'd never be far away from her dear professor--and we sent him there--we hid him away--we disguised his name--college was too public for him--let him finish his education in the country--and then we could escape away--to Germany--France--anywhere--and carry all the money with us--all the money!--half for me, and half for him!--and what'll become of it now?

Curse the woman! I knew she couldn't be dead. But she sha'n't have the money--no! she sha'n't, she sha'n't!

"Is it possible, now?--could it be that that girl was deceiving me? Did she know the woman's name, after all?--no, no! she hasn't the face for it--no hypocrite in her yet--not yet, not yet! Well, but what if it's all a mistake?--Why not a mistake? why not?--tell me that! Plenty of women called Abbie, aren't there? Why shouldn't this be one of them--one of the others? No, but the professor had known her before--oh, yes!--known her before! and there's only one Abbie that the professor knew before! Curse her--curse her!

"Well, what if she is there? how will she know _him_? The professor won't tell her--he can't--he dare not tell her!--for I made him promise he wouldn't, and I've got his promise, written down--written down!--Ah!

that was smart--that was smart! Yes, but the boy looks like his father!--that'll betray him!--she'll know him by that--know him? well, just as bad--yes, and worse too, in the end--worse! Oh! curse her!

"Never mind. I know how to manage. If the worst comes to the worst, I know what to do! And I must write to him--not now--as soon as he's well--he must come away. Even if it should turn out all a mistake, he must come away!--I'll write to him, as soon as he's well, that he must come away. And I'll question Cornelia again--ah! she's a handsome girl!--it's well I got her up here, out of the way!--I'll find out more from her. It may be a mistake, after all--it may, it may!"

While Aunt Margaret, sitting in her boudoir, thus took doubtful and disconnected counsel with herself, Cornelia was left to manage her little difficulties as best she might. Being tolerably quick in observing, and putting things together, and unwilling to trust to intuitive judgments of what was safe or unsafe in the moral atmosphere, she set to work with all her wits, and not without some measure of success, to fathom the secrets of the tantalizing freemasonry which piqued her curiosity. By listening to all that was said, laughing when others laughed, keeping silent when she was puzzled, comparing results and drawing deductions, she presently began to understand a good deal more than she had bargained for, was considerably shocked and disgusted, and perhaps felt desirous to unlearn what she had learned.

But this was not so easy. Things she would willingly have forgotten seemed, for that very reason, to stick in her memory--nay, in some moods of mind, to appear less entirely objectionable than in others. She had little opportunity for solitude--to bethink herself where she stood, and how she came there. During the daytime, there were the young ladies, here, there, and everywhere; there could be no seclusion. In the afternoons and evenings some admiring, soft-voiced young gentleman was always at her side, offering her his arm on the faintest pretext, or attempting to put it round her waist on no pretext at all; who always found it more convenient to murmur in her ear, than to speak out from a reasonable distance; whose hands were always getting into proximity with hers, and often attempting to clasp them; whose eyes were forever expressing something earnest or arch, pleading or romantic--though precisely what, his lingering utterance scarcely tried to define; who never could "see the harm" of these and many other peculiarities of behavior; and, indeed it was not very easy to argue about them, although the young gentlemen never shrank from the dispute, and never failed to have on hand an inexhaustible a.s.sortment of syllogisms to combat any remonstrance that might be advanced withal; while at the worst they could always be surprised and hurt if their conduct were called into question. Well, they appeared to be refined and high-bred. Compare them with Bill Reynolds! And the flattery of their attention, and the preference they gave her over the other girls, were not entirely lost upon Cornelia.

In the absence of both gentlemen and ladies, there, on an easily-accessible shelf in the library, were those works of Dumas, Feval, and the rest, to which Cornelia's attention had been indirectly invited. She had a sound knowledge of the French language, and an ardent love of fiction, and beyond question the books were of absorbing interest.

At first, indeed, Cornelia, as she read, would ever and anon blush, and look around apprehensively, for fear there should be an observer somewhere; and this, too, at pa.s.sages which a week before she would have pa.s.sed over without noticing, because not understanding them. If any one appeared, she hid the book away in the folds of her dress, or under the sofa-cus.h.i.+on, and put on the air of having just awakened from a nap.

By-and-by, however, when she had become a little used to the tone of the works, and had asked herself, what were the books put there for, unless to be read, she plucked up courage, as her young friends would have said--albeit angels might have wept at it--and overcame her notions so far as to be able to take down from its shelf and become deeply interested in one of the Frenchiest of the set, while three or four people were sitting in the library!

A triumph that! Howbeit, when she went to bed that night there was a persistent pain of dry unhappiness in her heart, and a self-contemptuous feeling, which she tried to get the better of by calling it _ennui_. But in time a kind of hardness, at once flexible and impenetrable, began to encase her, rendering her course more easy, less liable to embarra.s.sment, more self-confident than before.

At length a crisis was brought on by the attempt of the boldest of her admirers to kiss her. She repelled him pa.s.sionately, facing him with gleaming eyes, and lips white with anger and disgust. He was surprised, at first--then angry; but she spoke to him in a way that cowed, and finally almost made him ashamed of himself. He even went so far, afterward, as to try to knock a fellow down for speaking disrespectfully of "Neelie." For her own part, she locked herself into her room, and cried tempestuously for half an hour; then she spent a still longer time in lying with her heated face upon the pillow, reviewing the incidents of her life since Bressant had entered into it. He was the superior of any man she had met before or since: she was sure of it now; it could no longer be called the infatuation of inexperience. She took herself well to task for the recent laxity and imprudence of her conduct; did not spare to cut where the flesh was tender; and resolved never again to lay herself open to blame.

This was very well, but the mood was too strained and exalted to be depended upon. Cornelia got up from the disordered bed, put it to rights again, washed her stained face carefully, rearranged her hair, and went down-stairs. All that afternoon she was cold, grave, and reserved; inquiries after her health met with a chilling answer, and her friends wisely concluded to leave her malady, whatever it were, to the cure of time. As dinner progressed, Cornelia began to thaw: when Mr. Grumblow, the member of Congress, requested her, with solemn and oppressive courtesy, to do him the honor of taking a gla.s.s of wine with him, she responded graciously; and as the toasts circulated, she first looked upon her ideal resolves with good-humored tolerance, and then they escaped her memory altogether. She became once more lively and sparkling, and carried on what she imagined was a very brilliant conversation with two or three people at once. By the time she was ready to retire, she had practised anew the whole list of her lately-abrogated accomplishments; and she wound up by picking the French novel out of the corner into which she had disdainfully thrown it twelve hours before, reading it in bed until she fell asleep, and dreaming that she was its heroine. And yet she had not forgotten to wind up Bressant's watch, and put it in its usual place under her pillow.

It might seem strange that his memory should not have kept her beyond the reach of deleterious influences. But a young girl's love is any thing but a preservative, if it shall yield her, in any aspect, other than such pure and delicate thoughts as she would not scruple to whisper in her mother's ear, or to ask G.o.d's blessing on at night. Should there be any circ.u.mstance or incident, however seemingly trifling and unimportant, in her reminiscences, which nevertheless keeps recurring to the mind with a slight twinge of regret--a feeling that it would have been just as well had it never happened--then is love a dangerous companion. Gradually does the trifling spot grow upon her; in trying to justify it, she succeeds only in lowering the whole idea of love to its level; and this once accomplished, in all future intercourse with her lover she must be undefended by the s.h.i.+eld of her maidenly integrity.

And not all men are great enough not to presume on woman's weakness, even though it be that woman, to a.s.sert whose honor and purity they would risk their lives against the world.

Some such quality of earthiness Cornelia may have felt in the course of her acquaintance with Bressant, preventing her love from enn.o.bling and elevating her. Alas! if it were so. If she cannot draw a high inspiration from the affection which must be her loftiest sentiment, what shall be her safeguard, and who her champion?

In the course of ten days or a fortnight, Aunt Margaret announced that the condition of her head would admit of traveling, and the long-expected tour began. But the more important consequences of Cornelia's fas.h.i.+onable experiences had already taken place.

CHAPTER XVII.

SOPHIE'S CONFESSION.

Sophie did not stay long in the invalid's room after the awakening they had undergone with respect to one another. She went instinctively to her father's study, and, entering the open door, kissed the old man ere he was well aware of her presence. He took her affectionately upon his knee, and hugged her up to him with homely tenderness.

"My precious little daughter!" quoth he; "what would your old father do without you?"

"Am I so much to you, papa?" asked she, with her cheek resting upon his shoulder.

"Very much--very much, Sophie: too much, perhaps; for I don't see how I could bear to lose you."

"Do you mean to have me die, papa?"

"How is your sick boy getting along?" returned the professor, clearing his throat, and not seeming to hear his daughter's words.

Sophie caught a breath, and paled a little at the thought of the news she had to tell about the sick boy. Her father had just told her she was precious to him, and she felt that to be married might involve a separation virtually as complete as that of death, and perhaps harder to bear. But, again, she needed his sympathy and approval: and, sooner or later, he must hear the truth. She was not, perhaps, aware that etiquette should have closed her lips upon the subject until after Bressant had spoken to the professor; at all events, she had no intention of delegating or postponing her confidence.

"He seemed quite well when I left him. I have been having a--talk with him, papa."

"He begins to show the effects of being talked to by you, my dear.

You're a wise little woman in some ways, that's certain! and have done him good in more ways than one," said papa, with parental complacency.

Sophie shrank at this, remembering how lately she had fed herself with the same idea. She had learned a great deal about herself since discovering how little of herself she knew.

"He is a--man!" said she, trying to throw into the word an expression of its best and loftiest meaning. "I can do very little to help him."

"Hope to see him a man some day, my dear," returned the professor, gathering his eyebrows. "Has a great many faults at present. Why, in some respects, he's as ignorant and inexperienced as a child. Very one-sided affair still, I fear, that soul of his!"

"One-sided, papa?"

"Yes: don't believe it would carry him very far toward heaven, as it is now," said the old gentleman, whose severity of judgment was cultivated in this instance as a preservative against possible disappointment. "He needs melting in a crucible."

"What does that mean?"

"If you weren't a wise little woman, as I said, I shouldn't be talking about my pupil's character and management with you, my dear. But I can trust you as well as if you were forty;" and here he gave her another little hug, which made Sophie feel like a receiver of stolen goods.

"Well, now, theorizing won't do a young fellow like that much good. He needs something real--that he can take hold of, and that'll take hold of him. You and I can't give it him--not more than an impetus in the right direction, at any rate. But the only thing that can make his future tolerably secure--make it safe to count upon him (or upon any other man, for that matter), is for him to fall heartily and soundly in love, in the old-fas.h.i.+oned way, and with a strong-hearted, worthy woman."

"O papa! do you really think marriage will help him to be greater and better?"

"It's the only thing for him, my dear," said Professor Valeyon; and, although he was looking his guilty little daughter straight in the face, and at such short range, too, this would-be sharp-sighted old man of wisdom never thought to ask himself why she blushed so. "As soon as he gets well again, I must see to getting him somewhere where he can have a chance to profit by what we have done for him."

"Papa," said Sophie, sitting up, and stroking the old gentleman's white beard, "you don't know how happy it makes me to hear you think that to love and to be loved will be good for him."

"So anxious to get rid of him, eh?"

"No; oh! papa, don't you see? it's because--because I _never_ want to get rid of him!" and Sophie, catching her father suddenly around the neck, hid her face in his linen coat-collar.

The professor, his features discharged of all expression, sat stone-still, looking straight before him. Had Death been embracing him, instead of his daughter, he could hardly have been struck more motionless. Existence, spiritual as well as physical, seemed for a s.p.a.ce to have come to a stand-still.

By-and-by, startled at his silence, Sophie raised her head and looked at him with alarmed eyes. With an effort, he turned his face toward her, and smiled as naturally as though his mouth had been frozen.

"I'm an old man, you see, my dear: a surprise like this makes me feel it," he made s.h.i.+ft to say, in an uncertain voice. "So--you're engaged to each other?"