Part 15 (1/2)
”I have never been so near to you before.”
Then a flood of feeling swept over her, and she would have knelt to him, her other self; but he was already at her feet, moved by that same instinct to do homage to the human form which held his counter soul, and on her white feet he laid a reverent embrace.
Strengthened and uplifted by that mystic union whose memory should never leave her, whose bonds should ever bind her, was Millicent. In every existence comes one supreme, all-important moment, which thenceforth is the landmark by which life is measured; the climacteric point to which the past merely served to lead, the future availing only to enshrine its memory. To some men and women the significance of that moment is known only when it has long pa.s.sed; to Millicent, the knowledge that her whole after life should be controlled by that hour was not wanting. And her lover,--would he be faithful to that unspoken vow? The thought never crossed her mind; she was irrevocably bound to him; priest and rite could but make a poor, earthy contract between what was mortal in them both; the spiritual union was not for this world, and might not be broken by either.
CHAPTER XIV.
”Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.
The soul, doubtless, is immortal--where a soul can be discerned.”
It was a pitiful story which the little journal had made known to John Graham,--the story of a woman grievously wronged, cruelly deceived.
Millicent Almsford's life had not been a happy one. Her childhood had been lonely, and she had none of those early recollections which are so comforting in after years to people more fortunately bred. Her father was an invalid and a bookworm, and looked upon his only daughter as a creature to be fed, clothed, educated, and kept quiet. Her feeding he intrusted to her faithful nurse, who had promised her dying mother never to leave the child till she should be grown to womanhood. Her wardrobe was ordered by a relative who lived in Paris, and who twice a year overlooked the making and packing of her clothes, from her first baby wrappings to the ball dress in which she was presented at the court of St. James. Her education he left very much to chance and her own taste, simply locking up the _livres defendus_ of his library, and telling her English governess to order any necessary volumes from Mudie's. The young woman in whose charge Millicent was placed, was more eager to learn Italian than to teach English; to explore the literature of Dante than to familiarize her pupil with the British authors. When Millicent was sixteen years old, the feeble protection of this governess was taken from her; the woman returning to England to keep a long protracted marriage engagement with her own cousin. The same year old Nina died; and then it was that the lonely girl fell under the influence which was to darken her destiny and turn aside the natural current of her life.
Millicent Almsford, at that age, was a very peculiar and interesting study. Her mind had eagerly grasped much more material than it could master. Her vivid imagination and great talent for music were, with a love of beauty, the most strongly developed traits in her nature, whose intellectual growth was destined to be slow and late; whose spiritual existence had not yet begun. An exquisite native refinement and a perfect taste were among her most interesting qualities. Singularly attractive and strangely incomplete, she had formed few relations; and her friends.h.i.+p with Edward Holworthy, the man whose influence so marred her life, was the first strong feeling which she had known. He was her opposite in character, and knew life only through people, while she had lived purely in ideas. Her complex nature, unfathomable to herself, was to him a novel and engrossing study, and it was through him that she learned to understand one side of it. The man found a great heart which had never loved; a strong power for working good or evil; a bold mind, that feared not to grapple with the deepest problems of life; and a possibility of absolute devotion to a resolution once formed, which is rarely found among young women. He became her mental guide, and directed her readings; with a certain clever intuition bringing her under the influence of minds as sophistical and frivolous as his own.
Sympathetic to an extreme degree, her nature quickly took from his the color of an exaggerated cynicism, which was sometimes strongly shaken by the inner spirit which still slept under the untouched heart.
Platonics, where the man is of the world wise, and the woman foolish with the innocence of childhood, are dangerous things, as he knew full well, and she did not. In pointing out the forces which mould the lives of men and women, what theme is so often upon the lips of two life students of opposite s.e.xes as that of love? To the girl it seemed a strange, rather interesting force, whose power it would not be unpleasant to test; and when one day her mentor confessed to her that she had bound him irrevocably by those bonds which he had taught her were but ropes of sand, she smiled half sadly, but in her heart laughed with childish merriment. She now should see the actual workings of that strange hallucination; she should learn something of what love was. She was as unfeeling as a young lioness, and learned the lesson of making him turn pale and red by turns, as quickly as she had learned the knack of touching the chords of her mandolin. She looked upon her quondam friend in the light of an invalid, suffering from a dangerous but non-contagious malady. And so things went on; the man gaining every day a firmer hold over the girl, intoxicated by the new power in herself and a growing consciousness of her beauty and charms. During the long mornings at the Palazzo Fortunio, the two friends read and talked together, while the Italian governess, understanding no word of their intercourse, sat sewing patiently beside them. In the cool afternoons, when they were rowed by the strong-armed gondolier, Girolomo, out into the glory of the sunset, the same stolid companion always accompanied them. One day, Mr. Almsford, selfish old epicurean, perceived for the first time that his daughter had grown to a tall and fair womanhood.
His attention had, perhaps, been first called to the fact by the increasing size of the half-yearly coffer which found its way from Fas.h.i.+on's capital to the Fortunio Palace, and by the proportionate lengthening of the account which accompanied it. Yes, Millicent was certainly grown to be a young lady. They were beginning to send her little, demure bonnets, and close-fitting, simple woollen dresses, made with more of an idea of displaying her graceful figure than heretofore.
The girl was heiress to her mother's fortune; and it behooved him to see about finding a suitable husband for her. Whom should he consult in this matter, but their most intimate friend; the man who seemed at once his contemporary and hers; the handsome, clever fellow-countryman, who had been on the most intimate footing in his house for the last ten years? Edward Holworthy had started unaccountably when, in the midst of one of the solemn pauses of their game of chess, Mr. Almsford had propounded the unexpected question to him:--
”How shall I find Millicent a husband?”
The elder gentleman, for the first time in many months, checkmated his adversary in two moves, and won the game in an unprecedentedly short s.p.a.ce of time.
Holworthy's advice was given after a week's deliberation. It was in favor of sending Miss Almsford to her father's sister, who lived in London, in order that she might be presented at court and introduced to English society. Mr. Almsford thought over the advice, which appeared to him wise. He consulted Millicent, who eagerly accepted the chance to see something of the world; and finally, after six months' exchange of letters upon the subject, the girl was taken to London by her father, and comfortably established, with her aunt, in a pretty Kensington villa, for which her poorly circ.u.mstanced relative gladly forsook a small house in an unfas.h.i.+onable quarter of the town. Having married a younger son of a great house, with no portion but debts on his part and beauty on hers, Millicent's aunt, with the matchless tact of our countrywomen, had secured herself a prominent and agreeable position in London society. In mere worldly advantages the young girl could have had no better chaperone than the pretty young woman, still occupied with bets, beaux, and bon-bons. She took her niece to all the best houses; and soon Millicent's extreme beauty, and the widely noised, somewhat exaggerated accounts of her worldly goods, brought her scores of invitations and admirers on her own account.
Six months after her departure, Millicent Almsford returned to the Palazzo Fortunio, where the report of her great social success had preceded her and tickled the ears of her parent, proud of the child for whose sake he had never sacrificed a whim of his own. Edward Holworthy, who had accompanied the father and daughter to London, and remained there during the period of the latter's stay, did not return to Venice, but sailed for Australia, from whence he never returned either to his native or to his adopted country. The change which her half year's absence had wrought in Millicent, her father attributed to her social experience. She had left him half a child, with a thousand absurd, whimsical ways, which had amused him, and endeared her to him more than any other trait in her character. Few things diverted him; and he counted every laugh which Millicent provoked from him as a positive good, which he set down to her credit in their joint account. Her stay in London had given Millicent a certain poise and manner which suited her marvellously well; but all the sparkle and freshness seemed to have left her. She was like a fresh, white lily which has been broken and wilted by a violent storm of wind and rain. For months she never smiled. Her life seemed to have come to a standstill; she suffered dumbly, hopelessly, with sad, deep eyes, made more beautiful by the trouble in them. A sceptic and a materialist, she found nothing in this world worth suffering for, and smiled incredulously when the old cure, her Latin teacher, tried to help her from the slough of earthly despair by promises of a glorious future, for whose attainment the life-battle should be bravely fought. She was conscious of no ethereal essence which should outlive the graceful body, whose beauty she sometimes cursed.
Did it not reduce her to the level of all hunted creatures? Was she not a thing to be pursued by men, like a tall deer or a fleet, timid hare?
”Something had come to the Signorina,” said Girolomo, the gondolier; ”and the Signor Holworthy, where was he?” And he shook his head gravely, the wise old creature, guessing, as did no other soul, that Edward Holworthy was in some way connected with Millicent's changed face and listless demeanor.
Something had come to her; but she never confided to priest or friend the trouble which robbed her young face of its childish curves, which killed the youth in her, and made her a woman in grief, while she was still a child in years. Only one confidant had she,--the little journal; the gold-clasped tome which all those years after had fallen into John Graham's hands. The story of the first pa.s.sion she had ever roused, read by the only man she had ever loved.
It was the pitiful story of a grievous wrong which had darkened more than one life. The miserable consequences of a wicked act are infinite; its influence spreads wider and wider every day, like the broadening rings which circle on the surface of a still pool disturbed by a stone which a careless hand has tossed. The black deed may be hidden from the sight of men, but its baleful effects are felt afar off in the lives of those who have known nought of its perpetration. Let not the sinner comfort himself in that his soul alone is d.a.m.ned for his crime. It darkens innocent lives with its evil; and in sinning against himself he sins against mankind.
In the strange country whither Millicent had gone, Holworthy was the only link which bound her to her home, the one being who understood and cared for her. The dominion which he had always held over her was now strengthened into a powerful magnetic force. The little journal told how that influence had been exerted in compelling her to a secret marriage against her own will and judgment. She had been tricked into an elopement,--it might better be called an abduction,--and all unwillingly became his wife. Then all too soon, ere a week had pa.s.sed, came the terrible discovery that the marriage was no marriage. For then came to her the mother of the man whom she was striving to love with wifely duty, an old woman, bowed with grief and years. She had come very far, across half a continent, to break to the girl whose name she had heard linked with that of her only son, the news that he was not free to marry, that she must give him up. When the tall girl with the childish, flower face fell stricken to the earth like a broken lily, at the feet of the older woman, she had made no cry; in the hours that followed, she said no word. When the man who had wrecked her life came and knelt beside her, prayed her to be patient and her wrongs should be righted, spoke of his remorse, told her of his terrible mad wife from whom the law would set him free, and make him really hers, prayed, besought, and wors.h.i.+pped at her feet, she answered him with one terrible word only. She rose and stood before him white and cruel in her agony, relentless as Fate.
”Go!” was the one syllable which her frozen lips uttered; and with a gesture of command, majestic and beautiful, she had banished him from her presence. The secret was kept, even from the old woman, grown more sorrowful at the sight of the girl's dumb agony and of her son's grief, which she could not soothe. The secret was kept; and that very night Millicent's face, pale and clouded, shone out amidst a group of fair women who sat languidly chatting through the music of _Faust_ at the opera. He kept her secret, poor wretch, and s.h.i.+elded her as best he might, forcing her to speak to him and see him before others, that no sudden breaking of their relations might be remarked. Save in the world, she never saw him again. That one word of command was the last syllable which he ever heard her speak to him directly. Not without a struggle did he give her up, but she was implacable. She yielded to him, and played her part in the little comedy which the world thought it understood. The beautiful Miss Almsford had found Holworthy a pleasant admirer, but her delicate American beauty and her solid American fortune would certainly win her a higher place in the world than that of the wife of Mr. Edward Holworthy, her countryman and old friend.
Youth and health are great physicians; and as the years pa.s.sed, Millicent recovered something of her old spring and elasticity. She was infinitely more interesting, if something colder and harder, than she had been in the old days. Her unquenchable vigor of temperament came to her help, and gave her a keen pleasure in her studies and in the work and thought of the people about her. Always self-reliant, she grew to live entirely without support from man or woman. She was a friend to many people, but was herself friendless. The Palazzo Fortunio, under her reign, grew to be the centre of a charming social circle. Musicians and painters were made welcome by the young hostess. At once an artist and a patron of the arts, she stood in a peculiar relation to the men who frequented her _salon_. If she had been without fortune she would have made music her profession. As it was, she studied it as faithfully as if self-support had been her aim; and she claimed that sympathy from her artistic friends which a mere connoisseur, be he ever so enthusiastic, can never arouse. To her small world she was all-important. Her sympathy helped many a timid _debutante_, and her counsel cheered the black days of more than one disheartened artist.
Always gracious and kind, she had drawn about her a group of people, to all of whom she was a sort of exalted fellow-worker, who knew but the poetry of art, and helped them to forget its prose. Her heart was quite empty, but her mind was keenly interested and fully occupied by the men and women among whom she lived. Happiness she had forgotten to look for, but in enjoyment her days were not wanting. It was a terrible blow to her when this pleasant, quiet life was suddenly broken up by her father's marriage. To her imperious nature the presence of the inferior woman whom Mr. Almsford had brought home to the Palazzo was intolerable.
Where could she go? For the first time in her life she felt the power which her fortune gave her. She could establish herself wherever she liked. Her father's sister proposed a repet.i.tion of their joint establishment in London, but at the very mention of her returning to England Millicent's face blanched. She would never again set foot in that country. It was while she was in a state of doubt concerning her future movements that her half-brother wrote her a long and affectionate letter, urging her to come and dwell for a time among his people, to visit her mother's country before she decided the important question of where she should establish herself for life. The idea seemed a just one to her; and acting on a tender impulse roused by the loving words of her unknown brother, she had telegraphed her departure, and forthwith started on her long journey accompanied by her capable French maid. The Abigail discharged her trust faithfully, as far as San Francisco, from which city she turned her face on the very day of her arrival, unwilling to remain longer in what she called ”_le plus triste pays du monde_.”
If the truth could have been known, Millicent would have signed away ten years of her life to have gone back with the woman to the Old World, the only home she had ever known.
Graham had not been mistaken when he predicted to Millicent that she would grow more in sympathy with the race from which she drew her inheritance of character and temperament than at first seemed possible.
Nature is stronger than habit, well called second nature; and as the surface roughness became familiar to her, she began to feel the strong life and vigor of the young Western land quickening her pulses and stimulating her whole being. The poverty of intellectual intercourse was more than compensated by the tremendous power of work, the electrical force which accomplishes so rapidly in this new land what in other countries has been the slow growth of centuries.