Malbone Part 10

"And leave you?" said Philip, hesitatingly.

"Anything, anything," said she. "If I do not see you for a month, I can bear it. Only promise me two things. First, that you will go to her this very day. She dines with Mrs. Ingleside."

Philip agreed.

"Then," said Hope, with saddened tones, "you must not say it was I who sent you. Indeed you must not. That would spoil all. Let her think that your own impulse leads you, and then she will yield. I know Emilia enough for that."

Malbone paused, half in ecstasy, half in dismay. Were all the events of life combining to ruin or to save him? This young girl, whom he so pa.s.sionately loved, was she to be thrust back into his arms, and was he to be told to clasp her and be silent? And that by Hope, and in the name of duty?

It seemed a strange position, even for him who was so eager for fresh experiences and difficult combinations. At Hope's appeal he was to risk Hope's peace forever; he was to make her sweet sisterly affection its own executioner. In obedience to her love he must revive Emilia's. The tender intercourse which he had been trying to renounce as a crime must be rebaptized as a duty. Was ever a man placed, he thought, in a position so inextricable, so disastrous? What could he offer Emilia? How could he explain to her his position? He could not even tell her that it was at Hope's command he sought her.

He who is summoned to rescue a drowning man, knowing that he himself may go down with that inevitable clutch around his neck, is placed in some such situation as Philip's. Yet Hope had appealed to him so simply, had trusted him so n.o.bly! Suppose that, by any self-control, or wisdom, or unexpected aid of Heaven, he could serve both her and Emilia, was it not his duty? What if it should prove that he was right in loving them both, and had only erred when he cursed himself for tampering with their destinies? Perhaps, after all, the Divine Love had been guiding him, and at some appointed signal all these complications were to be cleared, and he and his various loves were somehow to be ingeniously provided for, and all be made happy ever after.

He really grew quite tender and devout over these meditations. Phil was not a conceited fellow, by any means, but he had been so often told by women that their love for him had been a blessing to their souls, that he quite acquiesced in being a providential agent in that particular direction. Considered as a form of self-sacrifice, it was not without its pleasures.

Malbone drove that afternoon to Mrs. Ingleside's charming abode, whither a few ladies were wont to resort, and a great many gentlemen. He timed his call between the hours of dining and driving, and made sure that Emilia had not yet emerged. Two or three equipages beside his own were in waiting at the gate, and gay voices resounded from the house. A servant received him at the door, and taking him for a tardy guest, ushered him at once into the dining-room. He was indifferent to this, for he had been too often sought as a guest by Mrs. Ingleside to stand on any ceremony beneath her roof.

That fair hostess, in all the beauty of her shoulders, rose to greet him, from a table where six or eight guests yet lingered over flowers and wine. The gentlemen were smoking, and some of the ladies were trying to look at ease with cigarettes. Malbone knew the whole company, and greeted them with his accustomed ease. He would not have been embarra.s.sed if they had been the Forty Thieves. Some of them, indeed, were not so far removed from that fabled band, only it was their fortunes, instead of themselves, that lay in the jars of oil.

"You find us all here," said Mrs. Ingleside, sweetly. "We will wait till the gentlemen finish their cigars, before driving."

"Count me in, please," said Blanche, in her usual vein of frankness.

"Unless mamma wishes me to conclude my weed on the Avenue. It would be fun, though. Fancy the dismay of the Frenchmen and the dowagers!"

"And old Lambert," said one of the other girls, delightedly.

"Yes," said Blanche. "The elderly party from the rural districts, who talks to us about the domestic virtues of the wife of his youth."

"Thinks women should cruise with a broom at their mast-heads, like Admiral somebody in England," said another damsel, who was rolling a cigarette for a mids.h.i.+pman.

"You see we do not follow the English style," said the smooth hostess to Philip. "Ladies retiring after dinner! After all, it is a coa.r.s.e practice. You agree with me, Mr. Malbone?"

"Speak your mind," said Blanche, coolly. "Don't say yes if you'd rather not. Because we find a thing a bore, you've no call to say so."

"I always say," continued the matron, "that the presence of woman is needed as a refining influence."

Malbone looked round for the refining influences. Blanche was tilted back in her chair, with one foot on the rung of the chair before her, resuming a loud-toned discourse with Count Posen as to his projected work on American society. She was trying to extort a promise that she should appear in its pages, which, as we all remember, she did. One of her attendant nymphs sat leaning her elbows on the table, "talking horse" with a gentleman who had an undoubted professional claim to a knowledge of that commodity. Another, having finished her manufactured cigarette, was making the grinning mids.h.i.+pman open his lips wider and wider to receive it. Mrs. Ingleside was talking in her mincing way with a Jew broker, whose English was as imperfect as his morals, and who needed nothing to make him a millionnaire but a turn of bad luck for somebody else. Half the men in the room would have felt quite ill at ease in any circle of refined women, but there was not one who did not feel perfectly unembarra.s.sed around Mrs. Ingleside's board.

"Upon my word," thought Malbone, "I never fancied the English after-dinner practice, any more than did Napoleon. But if this goes on, it is the gentlemen who ought to withdraw. Cannot somebody lead the way to the drawing-room, and leave the ladies to finish their cigars?"

Till now he had hardly dared to look at Emilia. He saw with a thrill of love that she was the one person in the room who appeared out of place or ill at ease. She did not glance at him, but held her cigarette in silence and refused to light it. She had boasted to him once of having learned to smoke at school.

"What's the matter, Emmy?" suddenly exclaimed Blanche. "Are you under a cloud, that you don't blow one?"

"Blanche, Blanche," said her mother, in sweet reproof. "Mr. Malbone, what shall I do with this wild girl? Such a light way of talking! But I can a.s.sure you that she is really very fond of the society of intellectual, superior men. I often tell her that they are, after all, her most congenial a.s.sociates. More so than the young and giddy."

"You'd better believe it," said the unabashed damsel. "Take notice that whenever I go to a dinner-party I look round for a clergyman to drink wine with."

"Incorrigible!" said the caressing mother. "Mr. Malbone would hardly imagine you had been bred in a Christian land."

"I have, though," retorted Blanche. "My esteemed parent always accustomed me to give up something during Lent,--champagne, or the New York Herald, or something."

The young men roared, and, had time and cosmetics made it possible, Mrs.

Ingleside would have blushed becomingly. After all, the daughter was the better of the two. Her bluntness was refres.h.i.+ng beside the mother's suavity; she had a certain generosity, too, and in a case of real dest.i.tution would have lent her best ear-rings to a friend.

By this time Malbone had edged himself to Emilia's side. "Will you drive with me?" he murmured in an undertone.

She nodded slightly, abruptly, and he withdrew again.

"It seems barbarous," said he aloud, "to break up the party. But I must claim my promised drive with Miss Emilia."

Blanche looked up, for once amazed, having heard a different programme arranged. Count Posen looked up also. But he thought he must have misunderstood Emilia's acceptance of his previous offer to drive her; and as he prided himself even more on his English than on his gallantry, he said no more. It was no great matter. Young Jones's dog-cart was at the door, and always opened eagerly its arms to anybody with a t.i.tle.

XII. A NEW ENGAGEMENT.

TEN days later Philip came into Aunt Jane's parlor, looking excited and gloomy, with a letter in his hand. He put it down on her table without its envelope,--a thing that always particularly annoyed her. A letter without its envelope, she was wont to say, was like a man without a face, or a key without a string,--something incomplete, preposterous.

As usual, however, he strode across her prejudices, and said, "I have something to tell you. It is a fact."

"Is it?" said Aunt Jane, curtly. "That is refres.h.i.+ng in these times."

"A good beginning," said Kate. "Go on. You have prepared us for something incredible."

"You will think it so," said Malbone. "Emilia is engaged to Mr. John Lambert." And he went out of the room.

"Good Heavens!" said Aunt Jane, taking off her spectacles. "What a man!

He is ugly enough to frighten the neighboring crows. His face looks as if it had fallen together out of chaos, and the features had come where it had pleased Fate. There is a look of industrious nothingness about him, such as busy dogs have. I know the whole family. They used to bake our bread."

"I suppose they are good and sensible," said Kate.

"Like boiled potatoes, my dear," was the response,--"wholesome but perfectly uninteresting."

"Is he of that sort?" asked Kate.

"No," said her aunt; "not uninteresting, but ungracious. But I like an ungracious man better than one like Philip, who hangs over young girls like a soft-hearted avalanche. This Lambert will govern Emilia, which is what she needs."

"She will never love him," said Kate, "which is the one thing she needs.

There is nothing that could not be done with Emilia by any person with whom she was in love; and nothing can ever be done with her by anybody else. No good will ever come of this, and I hope she will never marry him."

With this unusual burst, Kate retreated to Hope. Hope took the news more patiently than any one, but with deep solicitude. A worldly marriage seemed the natural result of the Ingleside influence, but it had not occurred to anybody that it would come so soon. It had not seemed Emilia's peculiar temptation; and yet n.o.body could suppose that she looked at John Lambert through any glamour of the affections.

Mr. John Lambert was a millionnaire, a politician, and a widower. The late Mrs. Lambert had been a specimen of that cheerful hopelessness of temperament that one finds abundantly developed among the middle-aged women of country towns. She enjoyed her daily murders in the newspapers, and wept profusely at the funerals of strangers. On every occasion, however felicitous, she offered her condolences in a feeble voice, that seemed to have been washed a great many times and to have faded. But she was a good manager, a devoted wife, and was more cheerful at home than elsewhere, for she had there plenty of trials to exercise her eloquence, and not enough joy to make it her duty to be doleful. At last her poor, meek, fatiguing voice faded out altogether, and her husband mourned her as heartily as she would have bemoaned the demise of the most insignificant neighbor. After her death, being left childless, he had nothing to do but to make money, and he naturally made it. Having taken his primary financial education in New England, he graduated at that great business university, Chicago, and then entered on the public practice of wealth in New York.

Aunt Jane had perhaps done injustice to the personal appearance of Mr.

John Lambert. His features were irregular, but not insignificant, and there was a certain air of slow command about him, which made some persons call him handsome. He was heavily built, with a large, well-shaped head, light whiskers tinged with gray, and a sort of dusty complexion. His face was full of little curved wrinkles, as if it were a slate just ruled for sums in long division, and his small blue eyes winked anxiously a dozen different ways, as if they were doing the sums.

He seemed to bristle with memorandum-books, and kept drawing them from every pocket, to put something down. He was slow of speech, and his very heaviness of look added to the impression of reserved power about the man.