Part 7

Her color mounted higher yet; she had a look of pride, almost of haughtiness. All else seemed forgotten; she had turned away from the child's little bed, as if it had no existence. It flashed upon me that something of the poison of her artificial atmosphere was reaching her already.

Kenmure's step was heard in the hall, and, with fire in her eyes, she hastened to meet him. I found myself actually breathing more freely after the departure of that enchanting woman, in danger of perishing inwardly, I said to myself, in an air too lavishly perfumed. Bending over Marian, I wondered if it were indeed possible that a perfectly healthy life had sprung from that union too intense and too absorbed. Yet I had often noticed that the child seemed to wear the temperaments of both her parents as a kind of playful disguise, and to peep at you, now out of the one, now from the other, showing that she had her own individual life behind.

As if by some infantine instinct, the darling turned in her sleep, and came unconsciously nearer me. With a half-feeling of self-reproach, I drew around my neck, inch by inch, the little arms that tightened with a delicious thrill; and so I half reclined there till I myself dozed, and the watchful Janet, looking in, warned me away. Crossing the entry to my own chamber, I heard Kenmure and Laura down stairs, but I knew that I should be superfluous, and felt that I was sleepy.

I had now, indeed, become always superfluous when they were together, though never when they were apart. Even they must be separated sometimes, and then each sought me, in order to discourse about the other. Kenmure showed me every sketch he had ever made of Laura. There she was, through all the range of her beauty,--there she was in clay, in cameo, in pencil, in water-color, in oils. He showed me also his poems, and, at last, a longer one, for which pencil and graver had alike been laid aside. All these he kept in a great cabinet she had brought with her to their housekeeping; and it seemed to me that he also treasured every flower she had dropped, every slender glove she had worn, every ribbon from her hair. I could not wonder, seeing his passion as it was. Who would not thrill at the touch of some such slight memorial of Mary of Scotland, or of Heloise? and what was all the regal beauty of the past to him? He found every room adorned when she was in it, empty when she had gone,--save that the trace of her was still left on everything, and all appeared but as a garment she had worn. It seemed that even her great mirror must retain, film over film, each reflection of her least movement, the turning of her head, the ungloving of her hand. Strange! that, with all this intoxicating presence, she yet led a life so free from self, so simple, so absorbed, that all trace of consciousness was excluded, and she was as free from vanity as her own child.

As we were once thus employed in the studio, I asked Kenmure, abruptly, if he never shrank from the publicity he was thus giving Laura. "Madame Recamier was not quite pleased," I said, "that Canova had modelled her bust, even from imagination. Do you never shrink from permitting irreverent eyes to look on Laura's beauty? Think of men as you know them. Would you give each of them her miniature, perhaps to go with them into scenes of riot and shame?"

"Would to Heaven I could!" said he, passionately. "What else could save them, if that did not? God lets his sun shine on the evil and on the good, but the evil need it most."

There was a pause; and then I ventured to ask him a question that had been many times upon my lips unspoken.

"Does it never occur to you," I said, "that Laura cannot live on earth forever?"

"You cannot disturb me about that," he answered, not sadly, but with a set, stern look, as if fencing for the hundredth time against an antagonist who was foredoomed to be his master in the end. "Laura will outlive me; she must outlive me. I am so sure of it that, every time I come near her, I pray that I may not be paralyzed, and die outside her arms. Yet, in any event, what can I do but what I am doing,--devote my whole soul to the perpetuation of her beauty? It is my only dream,--to re-create her through art. What else is worth doing? It is for this I have tried-through sculpture, through painting, through verse--to depict her as she is. Thus far I have failed. Why have I failed? Is it because I have not lived a life sufficiently absorbed in her? or is it that there is no permitted way by which, after God has reclaimed her, the tradition of her perfect loveliness may be retained on earth?"

The blinds of the piazza doorway opened, the sweet sea-air came in, the low and level rays of yellow sunset entered as softly as if the breeze were their chariot; and softer and stiller and sweeter than light or air, little Marian stood on the threshold. She had been in the fields with Janet, who had woven for her breeze-blown hair a wreath of the wild gerardia blossoms, whose purple beauty had reminded the good Scotchwoman of her own native heather. In her arms the child bore, like a little gleaner, a great sheaf of graceful golden-rod, as large as her grasp could bear. In all the artist's visions he had seen nothing so aerial, so lovely; in all his passionate portraitures of his idol, he had delineated nothing so like to her. Marian's cheeks mantled with rich and wine-like tints, her hair took a halo from the sunbeams, her lips parted over the little, milk-white teeth; she looked at us with her mother's eyes. I turned to Kenmure to see if he could resist the influence.

He scarcely gave her a glance. "Go, Marian," he said, not impatiently,--for he was too thoroughly courteous ever to be ungracious, even to a child,--but with a steady indifference that cut me with more pain than if he had struck her.

The sun dropped behind the horizon, the halo faded from the shining hair and every ray of light from the childish face. There came in its place that deep, wondering sadness which is more touching than any maturer sorrow,--just as a child's illness melts our hearts more than that of man or woman, it seems so premature and so plaintive. She turned away; it was the very first time I had ever seen the little face drawn down, or the tears gathering in the eyes. By some kind providence, the mother, coming in flushed and beautiful with walking, met Marian on the piazza, and caught the little thing in her arms with unwonted tenderness. It was enough for the elastic child. After one moment of such bliss she could go to Janet, go anywhere; and when the same graceful presence came in to us in the studio, we also could ask no more.

We had music and moonlight, and were happy. The atmosphere seemed more human, less unreal. Going up stairs at last, I looked in at the nursery, and found my pet rather flushed, and I fancied that she stirred uneasily. It passed, whatever it was; for next morning she came in to wake me, looking, as usual, as if a new heaven and earth had been coined purposely for her since she went to sleep. We had our usual long and important discourse,--this time tending to protracted narrative, of the Mother-Goose description,--until, if it had been possible for any human being to be late for breakfast in that house, we should have been the offenders. But she ultimately went downstairs on my shoulder, and, as Kenmure and Laura were already out rowing, the baby put me in her own place, sat in her mother's chair, and ruled me with a rod of iron. How wonderful was the instinct by which this little creature, who so seldom heard one word of parental severity or parental fondness, knew so thoroughly the language of both! Had I been the most depraved of children, or the most angelic, I could not have been more sternly excluded from the sugar-bowl, or more overwhelmed with compensating kisses.

Later on that day, while little Marian was taking the very profoundest nap that ever a baby was blessed with, (she had a pretty way of dropping asleep in unexpected corners of the house, like a kitten,) I somehow strayed into a confidential talk with Janet about her mistress. I was rather troubled to find that all her loyalty was for Laura, with nothing left for Kenmure, whom, indeed, she seemed to regard as a sort of objectionable altar, on which her darlings were being sacrificed. When she came to particulars, certain stray fears of my own were confirmed. It seemed that Laura's constitution was not fit, Janet averred, to bear these irregular hours, early and late; and she plaintively dwelt on the untasted oatmeal in the morning, the insufficient luncheon, the precarious dinner, the excessive walking and boating, the evening damps. There was coming to be a look about Laura such as her mother had, who died at thirty. As for Marian,--but here the complaint suddenly stopped; it would have required far stronger provocation to extract from the faithful soul one word that might seem to reflect on Marian's mother.

Another year, and her forebodings had come true. It is needless to dwell on the interval. Since then I have sometimes felt a regret almost insatiable in the thought that I should have been absent while all that gracious loveliness was fading and dissolving like a cloud; and yet at other times it has appeared a relief to think that Laura would ever remain to me in the fulness of her beauty, not a tint faded, not a lineament changed. With all my efforts, I arrived only in time to accompany Kenmure home at night, after the funeral service. We paused at the door of the empty house,--how empty! I hesitated, but Kenmure motioned to me to follow him in.

We passed through the hall and went up stairs. Janet met us at the head of the stairway, and asked me if I would go in to look at little Marian, who was sleeping. I begged Kenmure to go also but he refused, almost savagely, and went on with heavy step into Laura's deserted room.

Almost the moment I entered the child's chamber, she waked up suddenly, looked at me, and said, "I know you, you are my friend." She never would call me her cousin, I was always her friend. Then she sat up in bed, with her eyes wide open, and said, as if stating a problem which had been put by for my solution, "I should like to see my mother."

How our hearts are rent by the unquestioning faith of children, when they come to test the love that has so often worked what seemed to them miracles,--and ask of it miracles indeed! I tried to explain to her the continued existence of her mother, and she listened to it as if her eyes drank in all that I could say, and more. But the apparent distance between earth and heaven baffled her baby mind, as it so often and so sadly baffles the thoughts of us elders. I wondered what precise change seemed to her to have taken place. This all-fascinating Laura, whom she adored, and who had yet never been to her what other women are to their darlings,--did heaven seem to put her farther off, or bring her more near? I could never know. The healthy child had no morbid questionings; and as she had come into the world to be a sunbeam, she must not fail of that mission. She was kicking about the bed, by this time, in her nightgown, and holding her pink little toes in all sorts of difficult attitudes, when she suddenly said, looking me full in the face: "If my mother was so high up that she had her feet upon a star, do you think that I could see her?"

This astronomical apotheosis startled me for a moment, but I said unhesitatingly, "Yes," feeling sure that the lustrous eyes that looked in mine could certainly see as far as Dante's, when Beatrice was transferred from his side to the highest realm of Paradise. I put my head beside hers upon the pillow, and stayed till I thought she was asleep.

I then followed Kenmure into Laura's chamber. It was dusk, but the after-sunset glow still bathed the room with imperfect light, and he lay upon the bed, his hands clenched over his eyes.

There was a deep bow-window where Laura used to sit and watch us, sometimes, when we put off in the boat. Her aeolian harp was in the casement, breaking its heart in music. A delicate handkerchief was lodged between the cushions of the window-seat,--the very handkerchief she used to wave, in summer days long gone. The white boats went sailing beneath the evening light, children shouted and splashed in the water, a song came from a yacht, a steam-whistle shrilled from the receding steamer; but she for whom alone those little signs of life had been dear and precious would henceforth be as invisible to our eyes as if time and space had never held her; and the young moon and the evening star seemed but empty things unless they could pilot us to some world where the splendor of her loveliness could match their own.

Twilight faded, evening darkened, and still Kenmure lay motionless, until his strong form grew in my moody fancy to be like some carving of Michel Angelo's, more than like a living man. And when he at last startled me by speaking, it was with a voice so far off and so strange, it might almost have come wandering down from the century when Michel Angelo lived.

"You are right," he said. "I have been living in a fruitless dream. It has all vanished. The absurdity of speaking of creative art! With all my life-long devotion, I have created nothing. I have kept no memorial of her presence, nothing to perpetuate the most beautiful of lives."

Before I could answer, the door came softly open, and there stood in the doorway a small white figure, holding aloft a lighted taper of pure alabaster. It was Marian in her little night-dress, with the loose blue wrapper trailing behind her, let go in the effort to hold carefully the doll, Susan Halliday, robed also for the night.

"May I come in?" said the child.

Kenmure was motionless at first: then, looking over his shoulder, said merely, "What?"

"Janet said," continued Marian, in her clear and methodical way, "that my mother was up in heaven, and would help God hear my prayers at any rate; but if I pleased, I could come and say them by you."

A shudder passed over Kenmure; then he turned away, and put his hands over his eyes. She waited for no answer, but, putting down the candlestick, in her wonted careful manner, upon a chair, she began to climb upon the bed, lifting laboriously one little rosy foot, then another, still dragging after her, with great effort, the doll. Nestling at her father's breast, I saw her kneel.