Volume I Part 6 (1/2)
All will be right,” she added more calmly, with great sweetness.
Verena wondered afterward why she had not been more afraid of her--why, indeed, she had not turned and saved herself by darting out of the room.
But it was not in this young woman's nature to be either timid or cautious; she had as yet to make acquaintance with the sentiment of fear. She knew too little of the world to have learned to mistrust sudden enthusiasms, and if she had had a suspicion it would have been (in accordance with common worldly knowledge) the wrong one--the suspicion that such a whimsical liking would burn itself out. She could not have that one, for there was a light in Miss Chancellor's magnified face which seemed to say that a sentiment, with her, might consume its object, might consume Miss Chancellor, but would never consume itself.
Verena, as yet, had no sense of being scorched; she was only agreeably warmed. She also had dreamed of a friends.h.i.+p, though it was not what she had dreamed of most, and it came over her that this was the one which fortune might have been keeping. She never held back.
”Do you live here all alone?” she asked of Olive.
”I shouldn't if you would come and live with me!”
Even this really pa.s.sionate rejoinder failed to make Verena shrink; she thought it so possible that in the wealthy cla.s.s people made each other such easy proposals. It was a part of the romance, the luxury, of wealth; it belonged to the world of invitations, in which she had had so little share. But it seemed almost a mockery when she thought of the little house in Cambridge, where the boards were loose in the steps of the porch.
”I must stay with my father and mother,” she said. ”And then I have my work, you know. That's the way I must live now.”
”Your work?” Olive repeated, not quite understanding.
”My gift,” said Verena, smiling.
”Oh yes, you must use it. That's what I mean; you must move the world with it; it's divine.”
It was so much what she meant that she had lain awake all night thinking of it, and the substance of her thought was that if she could only rescue the girl from the danger of vulgar exploitation, could only const.i.tute herself her protectress and devotee, the two, between them, might achieve the great result. Verena's genius was a mystery, and it might remain a mystery; it was impossible to see how this charming, blooming, simple creature, all youth and grace and innocence, got her extraordinary powers of reflexion. When her gift was not in exercise she appeared anything but reflective, and as she sat there now, for instance, you would never have dreamed that she had had a vivid revelation. Olive had to content herself, provisionally, with saying that her precious faculty had come to her just as her beauty and distinction (to Olive she was full of that quality) had come; it had dropped straight from heaven, without filtering through her parents, whom Miss Chancellor decidedly did not fancy. Even among reformers she discriminated; she thought all wise people wanted great changes, but the votaries of change were not necessarily wise. She remained silent a little, after her last remark, and then she repeated again, as if it were the solution of everything, as if it represented with absolute certainty some immense happiness in the future--”We must wait, we must wait!” Verena was perfectly willing to wait, though she did not exactly know what they were to wait for, and the aspiring frankness of her a.s.sent shone out of her face, and seemed to pacify their mutual gaze.
Olive asked her innumerable questions; she wanted to enter into her life. It was one of those talks which people remember afterwards, in which every word has been given and taken, and in which they see the signs of a beginning that was to be justified. The more Olive learnt of her visitor's life the more she wanted to enter into it, the more it took her out of herself. Such strange lives are led in America, she always knew that; but this was queerer than anything she had dreamed of, and the queerest part was that the girl herself didn't appear to think it queer. She had been nursed in darkened rooms, and suckled in the midst of manifestations; she had begun to ”attend lectures,” as she said, when she was quite an infant, because her mother had no one to leave her with at home. She had sat on the knees of somnambulists, and had been pa.s.sed from hand to hand by trance-speakers; she was familiar with every kind of ”cure,” and had grown up among lady-editors of newspapers advocating new religions, and people who disapproved of the marriage-tie. Verena talked of the marriage-tie as she would have talked of the last novel--as if she had heard it as frequently discussed; and at certain times, listening to the answers she made to her questions, Olive Chancellor closed her eyes in the manner of a person waiting till giddiness pa.s.sed. Her young friend's revelations actually gave her a vertigo; they made her perceive everything from which she should have rescued her. Verena was perfectly uncontaminated, and she would never be touched by evil; but though Olive had no views about the marriage-tie except that she should hate it for herself--that particular reform she did not propose to consider--she didn't like the ”atmosphere” of circles in which such inst.i.tutions were called into question. She had no wish now to enter into an examination of that particular one; nevertheless, to make sure, she would just ask Verena whether she disapproved of it.
”Well, I must say,” said Miss Tarrant, ”I prefer free unions.”
Olive held her breath an instant; such an idea was so disagreeable to her. Then, for all answer, she murmured, irresolutely, ”I wish you would let me help you!” Yet it seemed, at the same time, that Verena needed little help, for it was more and more clear that her eloquence, when she stood up that way before a roomful of people, was literally inspiration.
She answered all her friend's questions with a good-nature which evidently took no pains to make things plausible, an effort to oblige, not to please; but, after all, she could give very little account of herself. This was very visible when Olive asked her where she had got her ”intense realisation” of the suffering of women; for her address at Miss Birdseye's showed that she, too (like Olive herself), had had that vision in the watches of the night. Verena thought a moment, as if to understand what her companion referred to, and then she inquired, always smiling, where Joan of Arc had got her idea of the suffering of France.
This was so prettily said that Olive could scarcely keep from kissing her; she looked at the moment as if, like Joan, she might have had visits from the saints. Olive, of course, remembered afterwards that it had not literally answered the question; and she also reflected on something that made an answer seem more difficult--the fact that the girl had grown up among lady-doctors, lady-mediums, lady-editors, lady-preachers, lady-healers, women who, having rescued themselves from a pa.s.sive existence, could ill.u.s.trate only partially the misery of the s.e.x at large. It was true that they might have ill.u.s.trated it by their talk, by all they had ”been through” and all they could tell a younger sister; but Olive was sure that Verena's prophetic impulse had not been stirred by the chatter of women (Miss Chancellor knew that sound as well as any one); it had proceeded rather out of their silence. She said to her visitor that whether or no the angels came down to her in glittering armour, she struck her as the only person she had yet encountered who had exactly the same tenderness, the same pity, for women that she herself had. Miss Birdseye had something of it, but Miss Birdseye wanted pa.s.sion, wanted keenness, was capable of the weakest concessions. Mrs.
Farrinder was not weak, of course, and she brought a great intellect to the matter; but she was not personal enough--she was too abstract.
Verena was not abstract; she seemed to have lived in imagination through all the ages. Verena said she _did_ think she had a certain amount of imagination; she supposed she couldn't be so effective on the platform if she hadn't a rich fancy. Then Olive said to her, taking her hand again, that she wanted her to a.s.sure her of this--that it was the only thing in all the world she cared for, the redemption of women, the thing she hoped under Providence to give her life to. Verena flushed a little at this appeal, and the deeper glow of her eyes was the first sign of exaltation she had offered. ”Oh yes--I want to give my life!” she exclaimed, with a vibrating voice; and then she added gravely, ”I want to do something great!”
”You will, you will, we both will!” Olive Chancellor cried, in rapture.
But after a little she went on: ”I wonder if you know what it means, young and lovely as you are--giving your life!”
Verena looked down for a moment in meditation.
”Well,” she replied, ”I guess I have thought more than I appear.”
”Do you understand German? Do you know 'Faust'?” said Olive. ”'_Entsagen sollst du, sollst entsagen!_'”
”I don't know German; I should like so to study it; I want to know everything.”
”We will work at it together--we will study everything.” Olive almost panted; and while she spoke the peaceful picture hung before her of still winter evenings under the lamp, with falling snow outside, and tea on a little table, and successful renderings, with a chosen companion, of Goethe, almost the only foreign author she cared about; for she hated the writing of the French, in spite of the importance they have given to women. Such a vision as this was the highest indulgence she could offer herself; she had it only at considerable intervals. It seemed as if Verena caught a glimpse of it too, for her face kindled still more, and she said she should like that ever so much. At the same time she asked the meaning of the German words.
”'Thou shalt renounce, refrain, abstain!' That's the way Bayard Taylor has translated them,” Olive answered.
”Oh, well, I guess I can abstain!” Verena exclaimed, with a laugh. And she got up rather quickly, as if by taking leave she might give a proof of what she meant. Olive put out her hands to hold her, and at this moment one of the _portieres_ of the room was pushed aside, while a gentleman was ushered in by Miss Chancellor's little parlour-maid.