A Face Illumined Part 6

"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 finis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sing, 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 appet.i.te 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 rea.s.serting 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 n.o.ble 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 a.s.sociations grew stronger every hour.

Instead, therefore, of going off upon solitary rambles, as he had done hitherto, he mingled more frequently in the amus.e.m.e.nts 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.