Part 2 (2/2)

”MARIE MUSIN, _born April_ 24, 1868.”

And the second:

”MARY ANN MUSIN, _born April_ 24, 1868.”

After fifteen years the matter was settled, as were most family matters, by the child herself.

”I will be both,” she said, decisively. ”I will be Mariana.”

And Mariana she became.

In the same high-handed fas.h.i.+on the theological disputes of the parents were reduced to trifles as light as air.

”I will be a Presbyterian one Sunday and a Catholic the next,” she concluded, with amiable acquiescence; ”only on fast-days and lecture-nights I'll be a heathen.”

For a time these regulations were observed with uncompromising impartiality, but, upon moving to a smaller town, she foresaw a diplomatic stroke.

”I think it better,” she announced, sweetly, ”for one of us to become an Episcopalian. I have noticed that most of the society people here are Episcopalians--and in that way the family will be so evenly distributed.

I see that it will be easier for me to make the sacrifice than for either of you. Of course, I should love to go with you, mamma, but incense makes me sneeze; and you know, papa, I can't stand congregational singing. It grates upon my nerves. And I must be something, for I have so much religious feeling. I will be an Episcopalian.”

She cast herself into the arms of the Church with all the zeal of a convert. From an artistic stand-point she repudiated insincerity, and, though cultivated, her professions were as fertile as the most natural product. Even to herself she scorned to admit that her alliance with a particular creed was the result of aught but a moral tendency in that direction. And the burden of the truth was with her. She was as changeable as wind and as impressionable as wax, and the swelling tide of sentiment had taken an ecclesiastical turn.

She dressed in sober grays, and attended service with the regularity of the s.e.xton; she decorated her walls with Madonnas; and she undertook, by way of the Sunday-school room, to lead a cla.s.s of eight small boys into the path of righteousness. She read Christina Rossetti and George Herbert, and she placed tiny silver crosses, suspended from purple ribbons, in her school-books.

At the age of sixteen she attached herself to a society whose mission it was to cultivate, by frequent calls, the religious poor, and she neglected social observances to r.e.t.a.r.d by her presence the domestic duties of the indigent members of the community. She descended in a special detachment upon a series of beer saloons, enforcing the pledge upon a number of helpless gentlemen, and thereby multiplying the sin of intemperance by that of perjury. While her mother mended the rents in her garments, Mariana promoted a circle of stocking-darners for the inhabitants of the almshouse.

At that period her expression was in perfect harmony with the tenor of her mind. The dramatic effect was always good.

In the daily school, which she attended when the fancy seized her, she ruled as a popular fetish. Between the younger children, whom she terrorized, and the elder, whom she mesmerized, there was an intermediate cla.s.s with whom she was in high favor. As a tiny child she had caught the street songs quicker than any other, and had sung them better; and to the accompaniment of a hand-organ she could render a marvellous ballet.

During her tenth year she fell into a pa.s.sionate friends.h.i.+p for one of the scholars--a stately girl with phlegmatic eyes of gray. For six months she paid her lover-like attentions in surrept.i.tious ways, and expended her pocket-money in nosegays, with which to adorn the desk of her divinity. She wore a photograph of the gray-eyed girl above her heart, and lingered for an hour to walk home with her upon Fridays.

The friends.h.i.+p was sundered at last by visits exchanged between them, and Mariana's emotions became theological.

But this pa.s.sed also. Vague amatory impulses of old racial meaning were born. At sixteen she was precipitated into a sentiment for the photograph, printed by the daily press, of a young fellow who was at that time in the custody of the State, preparatory to responding to a charge of highway-robbery. The photograph was romantic, the crime was also. It was a nineteenth-century attempt at a revival of the part of Claude Duval.

Mariana attended missions less and meditated more. She divided her time between her journal and the piano, showing a preference for songs of riotous sentiment. Without apparent trouble to herself, she grew wan and mysteriously poetic. She wore picturesque gowns with romantic draperies.

Her hair possessed a charming disorder, the expression of her face pa.s.sed from the placid into the intense. The dramatic effect was as good as ever. Her journal of that year contains a declaration of undying constancy. The object of this avowal is nominally the young highwayman--in reality the creation of an over-fertile brain craving the intoxicant of a great pa.s.sion. The highwayman was but a picturesque nucleus round which her dreams cl.u.s.tered and from which they gathered color. She existed in a maze of the imagination, feasting upon the unsubstantial food of idealism. Her longings for fame and for love were so closely interwoven that even in her own mind it was impossible to disa.s.sociate them. If she bedewed her pillow with tears of anguish for the sake of a man whom she had never seen, and whom, seeing, she would have pa.s.sed with averted eyes, the tears were often dried by ecstatic visions of artistic aspirations. And yet this romance of straw was not the less intense because it was the creation of overwrought susceptibilities; perhaps the more so. If real troubles were the only troubles, how many tortured hearts would be uplifted to the hills. And Mariana's mystical romance was a _daemon_ that lured her in a dozen different disguises towards the quicksands of life.

But this pa.s.sed also and was done with.

Her mother died, and her father married an early love. Mariana, who had been first, declined to become last. Dissensions followed swiftly, and the domestic atmosphere only cleared when Mariana departed from the paternal dwelling-place.

From the small Southern village, under the protection of an elderly female relation, she had flown to New York in search of theatrical employment. Failing in her object, she turned desperately to the culture of her voice, living meanwhile upon a meagre allowance donated by her father. The elderly female relation had remained with her for a time, but finding Mariana intractable in minor ways, and foreseeing a future in which she would serve as cat's-paw for the girl's vagaries, she had blessed her young relative and departed.

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