Volume I Part 10 (1/2)
”Yes, I am dreadful; I know it. But promise.” And Olive drew the girl nearer to her, flinging over her with one hand the fold of a cloak that hung ample upon her own meagre person, and holding her there with the other, while she looked at her, suppliant but half hesitating.
”Promise!” she repeated.
”Is it something terrible?”
”Never to listen to one of them, never to be bribed----”
At this moment the house-door was opened again, and the light of the hall projected itself across the little piazza. Matthias Pardon stood in the aperture, and Tarrant and his wife, with the two other visitors, appeared to have come forward as well, to see what detained Verena.
”You seem to have started a kind of lecture out here,” Mr. Pardon said.
”You ladies had better look out, or you'll freeze together!”
Verena was reminded by her mother that she would catch her death, but she had already heard sharply, low as they were spoken, five last words from Olive, who now abruptly released her and pa.s.sed swiftly over the path from the porch to her waiting carriage. Tarrant creaked along, in pursuit, to a.s.sist Miss Chancellor; the others drew Verena into the house. ”Promise me not to marry!”--that was what echoed in her startled mind, and repeated itself there when Mr. Burrage returned to the charge, asking her if she wouldn't at least appoint some evening when they might listen to her. She knew that Olive's injunction ought not to have surprised her; she had already felt it in the air; she would have said at any time, if she had been asked, that she didn't suppose Miss Chancellor would want her to marry. But the idea, uttered as her friend had uttered it, had a new solemnity, and the effect of that quick, violent colloquy was to make her nervous and impatient, as if she had had a sudden glimpse of futurity. That was rather awful, even if it represented the fate one would like.
When the two young men from the College pressed their pet.i.tion, she asked, with a laugh that surprised them, whether they wished to ”mock and muddle” her. They went away, a.s.senting to Mrs. Tarrant's last remark: ”I am afraid you'll feel that you don't quite understand us yet.” Matthias Pardon remained; her father and mother, expressing their perfect confidence that he would excuse them, went to bed and left him sitting there. He stayed a good while longer, nearly an hour, and said things that made Verena think that _he_, perhaps, would like to marry her. But while she listened to him, more abstractedly than her custom was, she remarked to herself that there could be no difficulty in promising Olive so far as he was concerned. He was very pleasant, and he knew an immense deal about everything, or, rather, about every one, and he would take her right into the midst of life. But she didn't wish to marry him, all the same, and after he had gone she reflected that, once she came to think of it, she didn't want to marry any one. So it would be easy, after all, to make Olive that promise, and it would give her so much pleasure!
XVII
The next time Verena saw Olive she said to her that she was ready to make the promise she had asked the other night; but, to her great surprise, this young woman answered her by a question intended to check such rashness. Miss Chancellor raised a warning finger; she had an air of dissuasion almost as solemn as her former pressure; her pa.s.sionate impatience appeared to have given way to other considerations, to be replaced by the resignation that comes with deeper reflexion. It was tinged in this case, indeed, by such bitterness as might be permitted to a young lady who cultivated the brightness of a great faith.
”Don't you want any promise at present?” Verena asked. ”Why, Olive, how you change!”
”My dear child, you are so young--so strangely young. I am a thousand years old; I have lived through generations--through centuries. I know what I know by experience; you know it by imagination. That is consistent with your being the fresh, bright creature that you are. I am constantly forgetting the difference between us--that you are a mere child as yet, though a child destined for great things. I forgot it the other night, but I have remembered it since. You must pa.s.s through a certain phase, and it would be very wrong in me to pretend to suppress it. That is all clear to me now; I see it was my jealousy that spoke--my restless, hungry jealousy. I have far too much of that; I oughtn't to give any one the right to say that it's a woman's quality. I don't want your signature; I only want your confidence--only what springs from that. I hope with all my soul that you won't marry; but if you don't it must not be because you have promised me. You know what I think--that there is something n.o.ble done when one makes a sacrifice for a great good. Priests--when they were real priests--never married, and what you and I dream of doing demands of us a kind of priesthood. It seems to me very poor, when friends.h.i.+p and faith and charity and the most interesting occupation in the world--when such a combination as this doesn't seem, by itself, enough to live for. No man that I have ever seen cares a straw in his heart for what we are trying to accomplish.
They hate it; they scorn it; they will try to stamp it out whenever they can. Oh yes, I know there are men who pretend to care for it; but they are not really men, and I wouldn't be sure even of them! Any man that one would look at--with him, as a matter of course, it is war upon us to the knife. I don't mean to say there are not some male beings who are willing to patronise us a little; to pat us on the back and recommend a few moderate concessions; to say that there _are_ two or three little points in which society has not been quite just to us. But any man who pretends to accept our programme _in toto_, as you and I understand it, of his own free will, before he is forced to--such a person simply schemes to betray us. There are gentlemen in plenty who would be glad to stop your mouth by kissing you! If you become dangerous some day to their selfishness, to their vested interests, to their immorality--as I pray heaven every day, my dear friend, that you may!--it will be a grand thing for one of them if he can persuade you that he loves you. Then you will see what he will do with you, and how far his love will take him!
It would be a sad day for you and for me and for all of us if you were to believe something of that kind. You see I am very calm now; I have thought it all out.”
Verena had listened with earnest eyes. ”Why, Olive, you are quite a speaker yourself!” she exclaimed. ”You would far surpa.s.s me if you would let yourself go.”
Miss Chancellor shook her head with a melancholy that was not devoid of sweetness. ”I can speak to _you_; but that is no proof. The very stones of the street--all the dumb things of nature--might find a voice to talk to you. I have no facility; I am awkward and embarra.s.sed and dry.” When this young lady, after a struggle with the winds and waves of emotion, emerged into the quiet stream of a certain high reasonableness, she presented her most graceful aspect; she had a tone of softness and sympathy, a gentle dignity, a serenity of wisdom, which sealed the appreciation of those who knew her well enough to like her, and which always impressed Verena as something almost august. Such moods, however, were not often revealed to the public at large; they belonged to Miss Chancellor's very private life. One of them had possession of her at present, and she went on to explain the inconsequence which had puzzled her friend with the same quiet clearness, the detachment from error, of a woman whose self-scrutiny has been as sharp as her deflexion.
”Don't think me capricious if I say I would rather trust you without a pledge. I owe you, I owe every one, an apology for my rudeness and fierceness at your mother's. It came over me--just seeing those young men--how exposed you are; and the idea made me (for the moment) frantic.
I see your danger still, but I see other things too, and I have recovered my balance. You must be safe, Verena--you must be saved; but your safety must not come from your having tied your hands. It must come from the growth of your perception; from your seeing things, of yourself, sincerely and with conviction, in the light in which I see them; from your feeling that for your work your freedom is essential, and that there is no freedom for you and me save in religiously _not_ doing what you will often be asked to do--and I never!” Miss Chancellor brought out these last words with a proud jerk which was not without its pathos. ”Don't promise, don't promise!” she went on. ”I would far rather you didn't. But don't fail me--don't fail me, or I shall die!”
Her manner of repairing her inconsistency was altogether feminine: she wished to extract a certainty at the same time that she wished to deprecate a pledge, and she would have been delighted to put Verena into the enjoyment of that freedom which was so important for her by preventing her exercising it in a particular direction. The girl was now completely under her influence; she had latent curiosities and distractions--left to herself, she was not always thinking of the unhappiness of women; but the touch of Olive's tone worked a spell, and she found something to which at least a portion of her nature turned with eagerness in her companion's wider knowledge, her elevation of view. Miss Chancellor was historic and philosophic; or, at any rate, she appeared so to Verena, who felt that through such an a.s.sociation one might at last intellectually command all life. And there was a simpler impulse; Verena wished to please her if only because she had such a dread of displeasing her. Olive's displeasures, disappointments, disapprovals were tragic, truly memorable; she grew white under them, not shedding many tears, as a general thing, like inferior women (she cried when she was angry, not when she was hurt), but limping and panting, morally, as if she had received a wound that she would carry for life. On the other hand, her commendations, her satisfactions were as soft as a west wind; and she had this sign, the rarest of all, of generosity, that she liked obligations of grat.i.tude when they were not laid upon her by men. Then, indeed, she scarcely recognised them. She considered men in general as so much in the debt of the opposite s.e.x that any individual woman had an unlimited credit with them; she could not possibly overdraw the general feminine account. The unexpected temperance of her speech on this subject of Verena's accessibility to matrimonial error seemed to the girl to have an antique beauty, a wisdom purged of worldly elements; it reminded her of qualities that she believed to have been proper to Electra or Antigone. This made her wish the more to do something that would gratify Olive; and in spite of her friend's dissuasion she declared that she should like to promise. ”I will promise, at any rate, not to marry any of those gentlemen that were at the house,” she said. ”Those seemed to be the ones you were princ.i.p.ally afraid of.”
”You will promise not to marry any one you don't like,” said Olive.
”That would be a great comfort!”
”But I do like Mr. Burrage and Mr. Gracie.”
”And Mr. Matthias Pardon? What a name!”
”Well, he knows how to make himself agreeable. He can tell you everything you want to know.”
”You mean everything you don't! Well, if you like every one, I haven't the least objection. It would only be preferences that I should find alarming. I am not the least afraid of your marrying a repulsive man; your danger would come from an attractive one.”
”I'm glad to hear you admit that some _are_ attractive!” Verena exclaimed, with the light laugh which her reverence for Miss Chancellor had not yet quenched. ”It sometimes seems as if there weren't any you could like!”