A Mortal Antipathy Part 22

The Society has justified its name of Pansophian of late as never before. Lurida has stirred up our little community and its neighbors, so that we get essays on all sorts of subjects, poems and stories in large numbers. I know all about it, for she often consults me as to the merits of a particular contribution.

What is to be the fate of Lurida? I often think, with no little interest and some degree of anxiety, about her future. Her body is so frail and her mind so excessively and constantly active that I am afraid one or the other will give way. I do not suppose she thinks seriously of ever being married. She grows more and more zealous in behalf of her own s.e.x, and sterner in her judgment of the other. She declares that she never would marry any man who was not an advocate of female suffrage, and as these gentlemen are not very common hereabouts the chance is against her capturing any one of the hostile s.e.x.

What do you think? I happened, just as I was writing the last sentence, to look out of my window, and whom should I see but Lurida, with a young man in tow, listening very eagerly to her conversation, according to all appearance! I think he must be a friend of the rector, as I have seen a young man like this one in his company. Who knows?

Affectionately yours, etc.

DR. b.u.t.tS TO MRS. b.u.t.tS.

MY BELOVED WIFE,--This letter will tell you more news than you would have thought could have been got together in this little village during the short time you have been staying away from it.

Lurida Vincent is engaged! He is a clergyman with a mathematical turn. The story is that he put a difficult problem into one of the mathematical journals, and that Lurida presented such a neat solution that the young man fell in love with her on the strength of it. I don't think the story is literally true, nor do I believe that other report that he offered himself to her in the form of an equation chalked on the blackboard; but that it was an intellectual rather than a sentimental courts.h.i.+p I do not doubt. Lurida has given up the idea of becoming a professional lecturer,--so she tells me,--thinking that her future husband's parish will find her work enough to do. A certain amount of daily domestic drudgery and unexciting intercourse with simple-minded people will be the best thing in the world for that brain of hers, always simmering with some new project in its least fervid condition.

All our summer visitors have arrived. Euthymia Mrs. Maurice Kirkwood and her husband and little Maurice are here in their beautiful house looking out on the lake. They gave a grand party the other evening. You ought to have been there, but I suppose you could not very well have left your sister in the middle of your visit: All the grand folks were there, of course. Lurida and her young man--Gabriel is what she calls him--were naturally the objects of special attention. Paolo acted as major-domo, and looked as if he ought to be a major-general. Nothing could be pleasanter than the way in which Mr. and Mrs. Kirkwood received their plain country neighbors; that is, just as they did the others of more pretensions, as if they were really glad to see them, as I am sure they were. The old landlord and his wife had two arm-chairs to themselves, and I saw Miranda with the servants of the household looking in at the dancers and out at the little groups in the garden, and evidently enjoying it as much as her old employers. It was a most charming and successful party. We had two sensations in the course of the evening.

One was pleasant and somewhat exciting, the other was thrilling and of strange and startling interest.

You remember how emaciated poor Maurice Kirkwood was left after his fever, in that first season when he was among us. He was out in a boat one day, when a ring slipped off his thin finger and sunk in a place where the water was rather shallow. "Jake"--you know Jake,--everybody knows Jake--was rowing him. He promised to come to the spot and fish up the ring if he could possibly find it. He was seen poking about with fish-hooks at the end of a pole, but nothing was ever heard from him about the ring. It was an antique intaglio stone in an Etruscan setting,--a wild goose flying over the Campagna. Mr. Kirkwood valued it highly, and regretted its loss very much.

While we were in the garden, who should appear at the gate but Jake, with a great basket, inquiring for Mr. Kirkwood. "Come," said Maurice to me, "let us see what our old friend the fisherman has brought us. What have you got there, Jake?"

"What I 've got? Wall, I 'll tell y' what I've got: I 've got the biggest pickerel that's been ketched in this pond for these ten year.

An' I 've got somethin' else besides the pickerel. When I come to cut him open, what do you think I faound in his insides but this here ring o' yourn,"--and he showed the one Maurice had lost so long before. There it was, as good as new, after having tried Jonah's style of housekeeping for all that time. There are those who discredit Jake's story about finding the ring in the fish; anyhow, there was the ring and there was the pickerel. I need not say that Jake went off well paid for his pickerel and the precious contents of its stomach. Now comes the chief event of the evening. I went early by special invitation. Maurice took me into his library, and we sat down together.

"I have something of great importance," he said, "to say to you. I learned within a few days that my cousin Laura is staying with a friend in the next town to this. You know, doctor, that we have never met since the last, almost fatal, experience of my early years. I have determined to defy the strength of that deadly chain of a.s.sociations connected with her presence, and I have begged her to come this evening with the friends with whom she is staying. Several letters pa.s.sed between us, for it was hard to persuade her that there was no longer any risk in my meeting her. Her imagination was almost as deeply impressed as mine had been at those alarming interviews, and I had to explain to her fully that I had become quite indifferent to the disturbing impressions of former years. So, as the result of our correspondence, Laura is coming this evening, and I wish you to be present at our meeting. There is another reason why I wish you to be here. My little boy is not far from the--age at which I received my terrifying, almost disorganizing shock.

I mean to have little Maurice brought into the presence of Laura, who is said to be still a very handsome woman, and see if he betrays any hint of that peculiar sensitiveness which showed itself in my threatening seizure. It seemed to me not impossible that he might inherit some tendency of that nature, and I wanted you to be at hand if any sign of danger should declare itself. For myself I have no fear. Some radical change has taken place in my nervous system. I have been born again, as it were, in my susceptibilities, and am in certain respects a new man.

But I must know how it is with my little Maurice."

Imagine with what interest I looked forward to this experiment; for experiment it was, and not without its sources of anxiety, as it seemed to me. The evening wore along; friends and neighbors came in, but no Laura as yet. At last I heard the sound of wheels, and a carriage stopped at the door. Two ladies and a gentleman got out, and soon entered the drawing room.

"My cousin Laura!" whispered Maurice to me, and went forward to meet her. A very handsome woman, who might well have been in the thirties,--one of those women so thoroughly const.i.tuted that they cannot help being handsome at every period of life. I watched them both as they approached each other. Both looked pale at first, but Maurice soon recovered his usual color, and Laura's natural, rich bloom came back by degrees. Their emotion at meeting was not to be wondered at, but there was no trace in it of the paralyzing influence on the great centres of life which had once acted upon its fated victim like the fabled head which turned the looker-on into a stone.

"Is the boy still awake?" said Maurice to Paolo, who, as they used to say of Pushee at the old Anchor Tavern, was everywhere at once on that gay and busy evening.

"What! Mahser Maurice asleep an' all this racket going on? I hear him crowing like young c.o.c.kerel when he fus' smell daylight."

"Tell the nurse to bring him down quietly to the little room that leads out of the library."

The child was brought down in his night-clothes, wide awake, wondering apparently at the noise he heard, which he seemed to think was for his special amus.e.m.e.nt.

"See if he will go to that lady," said his father. Both of us held our breath as Laura stretched her arms towards little Maurice.

The child looked for an instant searchingly, but fearlessly, at her glowing cheeks, her bright eyes, her welcoming smile, and met her embrace as she clasped him to her bosom as if he had known her all his days.

The mortal antipathy had died out of the soul and the blood of Maurice Kirkwood at that supreme moment when he found himself s.n.a.t.c.hed from the grasp of death and cradled in the arms of Euthymia.

In closing the New Portfolio I remember that it began with a prefix which the reader may by this time have forgotten, namely, the First Opening. It was perhaps presumptuous to thus imply the probability of a second opening.

I am reminded from time to time by the correspondents who ask a certain small favor of me that, as I can only expect to be with my surviving contemporaries a very little while longer, they would be much obliged if I would hurry up my answer before it is too late. They are right, these delicious unknown friends of mine, in reminding me of a fact which I cannot gainsay and might suffer to pa.s.s from my recollection. I thank them for recalling my attention to a truth which I shall be wiser, if not more hilarious, for remembering.

No, I had no right to say the First Opening. How do I know that I shall have a chance to open it again? How do I know that anybody will want it to be opened a second time? How do I know that I shall feel like opening it? It is safest neither to promise to open the New Portfolio once more, nor yet to pledge myself to keep it closed hereafter. There are many papers potentially existent in it, some of which might interest a reader here and there. The Records of the Pansophian Society contain a considerable number of essays, poems, stories, and hints capable of being expanded into presentable dimensions. In the mean time I will say with Prospero, addressing my old readers, and my new ones, if such I have,

"If you be pleased, retire into my cell And there repose: a turn or two I'll walk, To still my beating mind."

When it has got quiet I may take up the New Portfolio again, and consider whether it is worth while to open it consider whether it is worth while to open it.