Harriet Beecher Stowe : Three Novels (258 page)

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Page 1437
But already dark thoughts from the past were beginning to flutter out like ill-omened bats, and dip down on gloomy wing between him and the innocent, bright, confiding face. Tina he could see had idealized him entirely. She had invested him with all her conceptions of knighthood, honor, purity, religion, and made a creation of her own of him; and sometimes he smiled to himself, half amused and half annoyed at the very young and innocent simplicity of the matter. Nobody knew better than himself that what she dreamed he was he neither was nor meant to be,that in fact there could not be a bitterer satire on his real self than her conceptions; but just now, with her brilliant beauty, her piquant earnestness, her perfect freshness, there was an indescribable charm about her that bewitched him.
Would it all pass away and get down to the jog-trot dustiness of ordinary married life, he wondered, and then, ought he not have been a little more fair with her in exchange for the perfect transparence with which she threw open the whole of her past life to him? Had he not played with her as some villain might with a little child, and got away a priceless diamond for a bit of painted glass? He did not allow himself to think in that direction.
"Come, my little sea-gull," he said to her, after they had wandered and rambled over the rocks for a while, "you must come down from that perch, and we must drive on, if we mean to be at home before midnight."
"O Ellery, how glorious it is!"
"Yes, but we cannot build here three tabernacles, and so we must say,
Au revoir.
I will bring you here again";and Ellery half led, half carried her in his arms back to the carriage.
"How beautiful it is!" said Tina, as they were glancing along a turfy road through the woods. The white pines were just putting out their long fingers, the new leaves of the silvery birches were twinkling in the light, the road was fringed on both sides with great patches of the blue violet, and sweet-fern, and bayberry, and growing green tips of young spruce and fir were exhaling a spicy perfume. "It seems as if we two alone were flying through fairy-land." His arm was around her, tightening its clasp of possession as he looked down on her.

 

Page 1438
''Yes," he said, "we two are alone in our world now; none can enter it; none can see into it; none can come between us."
Suddenly the words recalled to Tina her bad dream of the night before. She was on the point of speaking of it, but hesitated to introduce it; she felt a strange shyness in mentioning that subject.
Ellery Davenport turned the conversation upon things in foreign lands, which he would soon show her. He pictured to her the bay of Naples, the rocks of Sorrento, where the blue Mediterranean is overhung with groves of oranges, where they should have a villa some day, and live in a dream of beauty. All things fair and bright and beautiful in foreign lands were evoked, and made to come as a sort of airy pageant around them while they wound through the still, spicy pine-woods.
It was past sunset, and the moon was looking white and sober through the flush of the evening sky, when they entered the grounds of their own future home.
"How different everything looks here from what it did when I was here years ago!" said Tina,"the paths are all cleared, and then it was one wild, dripping tangle. I remember how long we knocked at the door, and could n't make any one hear, and the old black knocker frightened me,it was a black serpent with his tail in his mouth. I wonder if it is there yet."
"O, to be sure it is," said Ellery; "that is quite a fine bit of old bronze, after something in Herculaneum, I think; you know serpents were quite in vogue among the ancients."
"I should think that symbol meant eternal evil," said Tina,"a circle is eternity, and a serpent is evil."
"You are evidently prejudiced against serpents, my love," said Ellery. "The ancients thought better of them; they were emblems of wisdom, and the ladies very appropriately wore them for bracelets and necklaces."
"I would n't have one for the world," said Tina. "I always hated them, they are so bright, and still, and sly."
"Mere prejudice," said Ellery, laughing. "I must cure it by giving you, one of these days, an emerald-green serpent for a

 

Page 1439
bracelet, with ruby crest and diamond eyes; you 've no idea what pretty fellows they are. But here, you see, we are coming to the house; you can smell the roses."
"How lovely and how changed!" said Tina. "O, what a world of white roses over that portico,roses everywhere, and white lilacs. It is a perfect paradise!"
"May you find it so, my little Eve," said Ellery Davenport, as the carriage stopped at the door. Ellery sprang out lightly, and, turning, took Tina in his arms and set her down in the porch.
They stood there a moment in the moonlight, and listened to the fainter patter of the horses feet as they went down the drive.
"Come in, my little wife," said Ellery, opening the door, "and may the black serpent bring you good luck."
The house was brilliantly lighted by wax candles in massive silver candlesticks.
"O, how strangely altered!" said Tina, running about, and looking into the rooms with the delight of a child. "How beautiful everything is!"
The housekeeper, a respectable female, now appeared and offered her services to conduct her young mistress to her rooms. Ellery went with her, almost carrying her up the staircase on his arm. Above, as below, all was light and bright.
"This room is ours," said Ellery, drawing her into that chamber which Tina remembered years before as so weirdly desolate. Now it was all radiant with hangings and furniture of blue and silver; the open windows let in branches of climbing white roses, the vases were full of lilies. The housekeeper paused a moment at the door.
"There is a lady in the little parlor below that has been waiting more than an hour to see you and madam," she said.
"A lady!" said both Tina and Ellery, in tones of surprise. "Did she give her name?" said Ellery.
"She gave no name; but she said that you, sir, would know her."
"I can't imagine who it should be," said Ellery. "Perhaps, Tina, I had better go down and see while you are dressing," said Ellery.

 

Page 1440
"Indeed, that would be a pretty way to do! No, sir, I allow no private interviews," said Tina, with authority,"no, I am all ready and quite dressed enough to go down."
"Well, then, little positive," said Ellery, "be it as you will; let's go together."
"Well, I must confess," said Tina, "I did n't look for wedding callers out here to-night; but never mind, it 's a nice little mystery to see what she wants."
They went down the staircase together, passed across the hall, and entered the little boudoir, where Tina and Harry had spent their first night together. The door of the writing cabinet stood open, and a lady all in black, in a bonnet and cloak, stood in the doorway.
As she came forward, Tina exclaimed, "O Ellery, it is she,the lady in the closet!" and sank down pale and half fainting.
Ellery Davenport turned pale too; his cheeks, his very lips were blanched like marble; he looked utterly thunderstruck and appalled.
"Emily!" he said. "Great God!"
"Yes, Emily!" she said, coming forward slowly and with dignity. "You did not expect to meet ME here and now, Ellery Davenport!"
There was for a moment a silence that was perfectly awful. Tina looked on without power to speak, as in a dreadful dream. The ticking of the little French mantel clock seemed like a voice of doom to her.
The lady walked close up to Ellery Davenport, drew forth a letter, and spoke in that fearfully calm way that comes from the very white-heat of passion.
"Ellery," she said, "here is your letter. You did not
know
meyou could not know meif you thought, after
that letter,
I would accept anything from you! I
I
I live on your bounty! I would sooner work as a servant!"
"Ellery, Ellery!" said Tina, springing up and clasping his arm, "O, tell me who she is! What is she to you? Is sheis she"
"Be quiet, my poor child," said the woman, turning to her with an air of authority. "I have no claims; I come to make none. Such as this man is,
he is your husband,
not mine. You believe in him; so did I,love him; so did I. I gave up all for

 

Page 1441
him,country, home friends, name, reputation,for I thought him such a man that a woman might well sacrifice her whole life to him! He is the father of my child! But fear not. The world, of course, will approve
him
and condemn
me.
They will say he did well to give up his mistress and take a wife; it 's the world's morality. What woman will think the less of him, or smile the less on him, when she hears it? What woman will not feel herself too good even to touch my hand?"
"Emily," said Ellery Davenport, bitterly, "if you thought I deserved this, you might, at least, have spared this poor child."
"
The truth
is the best foundation in married life, Ellery," she said, "and the truth you have small faculty for speaking. I do her a favor in telling it. Let her start fair from the commencement, and then there will be no more to be told. Besides," she added, "I shall not trouble you long.
There,
" she said, putting down a jewel-case,"there are your gifts to me,there are your letters." Then she threw on the table a miniature set in diamonds, ''There is your picture. And now God help me! Farewell."
She turned and glided swiftly from the room.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Readers who remember the former part of this narrative will see at once that it was, after all, Ellery Davenport with whom, years before, Emily Rossiter had fled to France. They had resided there, and subsequently in Switzerland, and she had devoted herself to him, and to his interests, with all the single-hearted fervor of a true wife.
On her part, there was a full and conscientious belief that the choice of the individuals alone constituted a true marriage, and that the laws of human society upon this subject were an oppression which needed to be protested against.
On his part, however, the affair was a simple gratification of passion, and the principles, such as they were, were used by him as he used all principles,simply as convenient machinery for carrying out his own purposes. Ellery Davenport spoke his own convictions when he said that there was no subject which had not its right and its wrong side, each of

 

Page 1442
them capable of being unanswerably sustained. He had played with his own mind in this manner until he had entirely obliterated conscience. He could at any time dazzle and confound his own moral sense with his own reasonings; and it was sometimes amusing, but, in the long run, tedious and vexatious to him, to find that what he maintained merely for convenience and for theory should be regarded by Emily so seriously, and with such an earnest eye to logical consequences. In short, the two came, in the course of their intimacy, precisely to the spot to which many people come who are united by an indissoluble legal tie. Slowly, and through an experience of many incidents, they had come to perceive an entire and irrepressible conflict of natures between them.
Notwithstanding that Emily had taken a course diametrically opposed to the principles of her country and her fathers, she retained largely the Puritan nature. Instances have often been seen in New England of men and women who had renounced every particle of the Puritan theology, and yet retained in their fibre and composition all the moral traits of the Puritanstheir uncompromising conscientiousness, their inflexible truthfulness, and their severe logic in following the convictions of their uncompromising conscientiousness, their inflexible truthfulness, and their severe logic in following the convictions of their understandings. And the fact was, that while Emily had sacrificed for Ellery Davenport her position in society,while she had exposed herself to the very coarsest misconstructions of the commonest minds, and made herself liable to be ranked by her friends in New England among abandoned outcasts,she was really a woman standing on too high a moral plane for Ellery Davenport to consort with her in comfort. He was ambitious, intriguing, unscrupulous, and it was an annoyance to him to be obliged to give an account of himself to her. He was tried of playing the moral hero, the part that he assumed and acted with great success during the time of their early attachment. It annoyed him to be held to any consistency in principles. The very devotion to him which she felt, regarding him, as she always did, in his higher and nobler nature, vexed and annoyed him.
Of late years he had taken long vacations from her society, in excursions to England and America. When the prospect of being ambassador to England dawned upon him, he began seriously to consider the inconvenience of being connected

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