Part 10 (1/2)
”Take care, my dear brother! you will pinch me!” those near heard her say, and she twisted the golden circlet that the clasp might be uppermost.
Rosa's alert ear caught the hurried murmur which succeeded, and was m.u.f.fled, so to speak, by her affectionate smile of grat.i.tude.
”What were you about to say? Will you never learn prudence?”
”The dove has talons, then?” mused the eavesdropper, ”But what was he in danger of revealing?”
If the interdicted revelation had connection, close or remote, with the famous quartette club, he kept well away from it after this reminder, beginning, when he resumed his seat, to discourse upon the comparative excellence of wood and coal fires, of open chimney-places and stoves.
Mrs. Aylett smiled an engaging and regretful ”au revoir” to the circle, and pa.s.sed on to look after the comfort and pleasure of her elder visitors, and Rosa soon discovered that her awakened curiosity would be in no wise appeased by listening to the steady, pattering drone of Mr. Dorrance's oration. Oratorical he was to a degree that excited the secret amus.e.m.e.nt of the facile Southern youths about him. With them, the art of light conversation had been a study from boyhood, the topics suitable for and pleasing to ladies' ears carefully culled and adroitly handled. To amuse and entertain was their main object. Erudite dissertations upon science and literature; abstruse arguments--whatever resembled a moral thesis, a political, religious, or philosophical lecture met with the sure ban of ridicule from them, as from the fair whose devoted cavaliers they were. If they laughed, when it was safe and not impolitic to do so, at the ponderous elocution of the Northern barrister, they marvelled exceedingly more at Mabel's indulgence of his attentions. That a girl, who, in virtue of her snug fortune and attractive face, her blood and her breeding, might, as they put it, have the ”pick of the county,” if she wanted a husband, should lend a willing ear to the pompous plat.i.tudes, the heavy rolling periods of this alien to her native State--a man without grace of manner or beauty--in their nomenclature, ”a solemn prig,” defied all ingenuity of explanation, was an increasing wonder outlasting the prescribed nine days. He rode with the ill a.s.surance of one who, accustomed to the sawdust floor, treadmill round, and enclosing walls of a city riding-school, was bewildered by the unequal roads and free air of the breezy country. He talked learnedly of hunting, quoting written authorities upon this or that point, of whom the unenlightened Virginians had never heard, much less read; equipped himself for the sport in a bewildering a.r.s.enal of new-fangled guns, game-bags, shot-pouches, and powder-horns, with numerous belts, diagonal, perpendicular, and horizontal, and in the field carried his gun a la Winkle; never, by any happy accident, brought down his bird, but was continually outraging sporting rules by firing out of time, and flus.h.i.+ng coveys prematurely by unseasonable talking and precipitate strides in advance of his disgusted companions.
Yet he was not a fool. In the discussion of graver matters--politics, law, and history--that arose in the smoking-room, he was not to be put down by more fluent tongues; demolished sophistry by solid reasoning, impregnable a.s.sertions, and an array of facts that might be prolix, but was always formidable--in short, sustained fully the character ascribed to him by his brother-in-law, of a ”thoroughly sensible fellow.”
”No genius, I allow!” Mr. Aylett would add, in speaking of his wife's bantling among his compatriots, ”but a man whose industry and sound practical knowledge of every branch of his profession will make for him the fortune and name genius rarely wins.”
With the younger ladies, his society was, it is superfluous to observe, at the lowest premium civility and native kindliness of disposition would permit them to declare by the nameless and innumerable methods in which the dear creatures are proficient. To Rosa Tazewell he could not be anything better than a target for the arrows of her satire, or the whetstone, upon the unyielding surface of which she sharpened them. But she showed her prudential foresight in never laughing at him when out of his sight, and in Mabel's. At long ago as the night of Mr. Aylett's wedding-party at Ridgeley, her sharp eyes had seen, or she fancied they did, that the hum-drum groomsman was mightily captivated by the daughter of the house, and she had divined that Mrs. Aylett's clever ruses for throwing the two together were the outworks of her design for uniting, by a double bond, the houses of Dorrance and Aylett. She knew, furthermore, that Herbert Dorrance had travelled with the Ridgeley family for three weeks in October, and that he had now been domesticated at the homestead for ten days. Mrs. Aylett's show of fondness for him was laughable, considering what an uninteresting specimen of masculinity he was; but the handsome dame was too worldly-wise, too sage a judge of quid pro quo, to entice him to waste so much of the time he was addicted to announcing was money to him, for the sake of a good so intangible as sisterly sentimentality.
Unless there were some substantial and remunerative ulterior object to be gained by his tarrying in the neighborhood, cunning Rosa believed that ”dear Bertie” would have been packed off to Buffalo, or whatever outlandish place he lived in, so soon as the bridal festivities were over, and not showed his straw-colored whiskers again in Virginia in three years, at least, instead of running down to the plantation every three months.
”If such an ingredient as the compound, double-distilled essence of flatness is to be infused into the wa.s.sail-cup, it is he who will supply it!” thought the spicy damsel, with a bewitching shrug of the plump shoulder nearest him, while engaged in a lively play of words with a gentleman on her other hand. ”What can possess Mabel to encourage him systematically in her decorous style, pa.s.ses my powers of divination.
Maybe she means to use him as a poultice for her bruised heart. In that case, insipidity would be no objection.”
Mabel had not the air of one whose heart is bruised or torn. That she had gained in queenliness within the past year was not evidence of austerity or the callousness that ensues upon the healing of a wound.
The Ayletts were a stately race, and the few who, while she was in her teens, had carped at her lack of pride because of her disposition to choose friends from the walks of life lower than her own, and criticised as unbecoming the playful familiarity that caused underlings and plebeians--the publicans and sinners of the aristocrat's creed--to wors.h.i.+p the ground on which she trod--the censors in the court of etiquette conferred upon her altered demeanor the patent of their approbation, averring, for the thousandth time, that good blood would a.s.sert itself in the long run and bring forth the respectable fruits of refinement, self-appreciation, and condescension. The change had come over her by perceptible, but not violent, stages of progression, dating--Mrs. Sutton saw with pain; Rosa, with enforced respect--from the sunset hour in which she had read her brother's sentence of condemnation upon her then betrothed, now estranged, lover. After that one evening, she had not striven to conceal herself and her hurt in solitude. Neither had she borrowed from desperation a brazen helmet to hide the forehead the cruel letter had, for a brief s.p.a.ce, laid low in the dust of anguished humiliation.
If a whisper of her disappointment and the attendant incidents crept through the ranks of her a.s.sociates, it died away for want of confirmation in her clear level-lidded eyes, elastic footfall and the willingness and frequency with which she appeared and played her part in the various scenes of gayety that made the winter succeeding her brother's marriage one long to be remembered by the pleasure-seekers of the vicinity. She had not disdained the a.s.sistance of her sister-in-law's judgment and experience in the choice of the dresses that were to grace these merry-makings, and, thanks to her own naturally excellent taste, now tacitly disputed the palm of elegant attire with that lady. Her Christmas costume, which, in many others of her age, would have been objected to by critical fas.h.i.+onists, as old-maidish and grave, yet set off her pale complexion--none of the Ayletts were rosy after they reached man's or woman's estate--and heightened her distingue bearing into regal grace. Yet it was only a heavy black silk, rich and glossy as satin, cut, as was then the universal rule of evening dress, tolerably low in the neck, with short sleeves; bunches of pomegranate-blossoms and buds for breast and shoulder-knots, and among the cla.s.sic braids of her dark hair a half-wreath of the same.
She had the valuable gift of sitting still without stiffness, and not fidgetting with fan, bouquet, or hand-kerchief, as she listened or talked. Rosa's mercurial temperament betrayed itself, every instant, in the bird-like turn of her small head, the fluttering or chafing of her brown fingers, and not unfrequently by an impatient stamp, or other movement of her foot that exposed fairy toe and instep. Contemplation of the one rested and refreshed the observer; of the other, amused and excited him. Mr. Dorrance's phlegmatic nature found supreme content in dwelling upon the incarnation of patrician tranquillity at his right hand, and he regarded the actions of his frisky would-be tormentor very much as a placid, well-gorged salmon would survey, from his bed of ease upon the bottom of a stream, the gyrations of a painted dragon fly overhead.
A lull in the general conversation--the reaction after a hearty laugh at a happy repartee--gave others besides Mabel the opportunity of profiting by his learned remarks.
”But does not that seem to you a short-sighted policy,” he was urging upon his auditor, with the a.s.sistance of a thumb and forefinger of one hand, joined as upon a pinch of snuff, and tapping the centre of the other palm; ”does not that appear inexcusable profligacy of extravagance, which fells and consumes whole surface forests of magnificent trees--virgin growth--(I use the term as it is usually applied, although, philosophically considered, it is inaccurate) giants, which centuries will not replace, instead of seeking beneath the superficial covering of mould, nouris.h.i.+ng these, for the exhaustless riches, carboniferous remains of antediluvian woods, hidden in the bowels of your mountains, and underlying your worn-out fields?”
Rosa was shaking with internal laughter--she would give no escape except through her dancing eyes.
Indeed, Mr. Dorrance's was the only staid countenance there, as Mabel said, pleasantly, moving her chair beyond the bounds of the ring, ”I, for one, find the combustion of the upper forest growth too powerful, just at this instant. This is a genuine Christmas-storm--is it not?
Listen to the wind?”
In the stillness enjoined by her gesture, the growl of the blast in the chimney and in the grove; the groaning, tapping, and creaking of the tree branches; the pelting sleet and the rattle of cas.e.m.e.nts all over the house brought to the least imaginative a picture of out-door desolation and fireside comfort that prolonged the hush of attention.
Tom Barksdale's pretty wife slipped her hand covertly into his tight grasp, and their smile was of mutual congratulation that they were brightly and warmly housed and together. Rosa, preternaturally grave and quiet, lapsed into a profound study of the mountain of red-hot embers.
Several young ladies shuddered audibly, as well as visibly, and were rea.s.sured by a whispered word, or the slightest conceivable movement of their gallants' chairs nearer their own.
”I think we have the grandest storms at Ridgeley that visit our continent,” resumed Mabel thoughtfully. ”I suppose because the house stands so high. The wind never sounds to me anywhere else as it does here on winter nights.”
Yielding to the weird attraction of the scene invoked by her fancy, she arose and walked to the window at the eastern extremity of the hall, pulling aside the curtain that she might peer into the wild darkness.
The crimson light of the burning logs and the lamp rays threw a strongly defined shadow of her figure upon the piazza floor, distinct as that projected by a solar microscope upon a sheeted wall; sent long, searching rays into the misty fall of the snow, past the spot from which she had her last glimpse of Frederic Chilton, so many, many months agone, showing the black outline of the gate where he had looked back to lift his hat to her.
What was there in the wintry night and thick tempest to recall the warmth and odor of that moist September morning, the smell of the dripping roses overhead, the balmy humidity of every breath she drew?
What in her present companion that reminded her of the loving clasp that had thrilled her heart into palpitation? the earnest depth of the eyes that held hers during the one sharp, yet sweet moment of parting--eyes that pledged the fealty of her lover's soul, and demanded hers then and forever? His conscience might have been sullied by crimes more heinous than those charged upon him by her brother and his friends; he might--he HAD--let her go easily, as one resigns his careless hold upon a paltry, unprized toy; but when her hand had rested thus in his, and his pa.s.sionate regards penetrated her soul, he loved her, alone and entirely! She would fold this conviction to her torpid heart for a little while before she turned herself away finally from the memories of that love-summer and battle-autumn of her existence. If it aroused in the chilled thing some slight pangs of sentiency, it would do her no hurt to realize through these that it had once been alive.