The Bostonians (21 page)

“Mr. Burrage listens even better than he talks,” his companion declared. “We have the habit of attention at lectures, you know. To be lectured by you would be an advantage indeed. We are sunk in ignorance and prejudice.”

“Ah, my prejudices,” Burrage went on; “if you could see them—I assure you they are something monstrous!”

“Give them a regular ducking and make them gasp,” Matthias Pardon cried. “If you want an opportunity to act on Harvard College, now’s your chance. These gentlemen will carry the news; it will be the narrow end of the wedge.”

“I can’t tell what you like,” Verena said, still looking into Olive’s eyes.

“I’m sure Miss Chancellor likes everything here,” Mrs. Tarrant remarked, with a noble confidence.

Selah had reappeared by this time; his lofty, contemplative person was framed by the doorway. “Want to try a little inspiration?” he inquired, looking round on the circle with an encouraging inflection.

“I’ll do it alone, if you prefer,” Verena said, soothingly to her friend. “It might be a good chance to try without father.”

“You don’t mean to say you ain’t going to be supported?” Mrs. Tarrant exclaimed, with dismay.

“Ah, I beseech you, give us the whole programme—don’t omit any leading feature!” Mr. Burrage was heard to plead.

“My only interest is to draw her out,” said Selah, defending his integrity. “I will drop right out if I don’t seem to vitalise. I have no desire to draw attention to my own poor gifts.” This declaration appeared to be addressed to Miss Chancellor.

“Well, there will be more inspiration if you don’t touch her,” Matthias Pardon said to him. “It will seem to come right down from—well, wherever it does come from.”

“Yes, we don’t pretend to say that,” Mrs. Tarrant murmured.

This little discussion had brought the blood to Olive’s face; she felt that every one present was looking at her—Verena most of all—and that here was a chance to take a more complete possession of the girl. Such chances were agitating; moreover, she didn’t like, on any occasion, to be so prominent. But everything that had been said was benighted and vulgar; the place seemed thick with the very atmosphere out of which she wished to lift Verena. They were treating her as a show, as a social resource, and the two young men from the College were laughing at her shamelessly. She was not meant for that, and Olive would save her. Verena was so simple, she couldn’t see herself; she was the only pure spirit in the odious group.

“I want you to address audiences that are worth addressing—to convince people who are serious and sincere.” Olive herself, as she spoke, heard the great shake in her voice. “Your mission is not to exhibit yourself as a pastime for individuals, but to touch the heart of communities, of nations.”

“Dear madam, I’m sure Miss Tarrant will touch my heart!” Mr. Burrage objected, gallantly.

“Well, I don’t know but she judges you young men fairly,” said Mrs. Tarrant, with a sigh.

Verena, diverted a moment from her communion with her friend, considered Mr. Burrage with a smile. “I don’t believe you have got any heart, and I shouldn’t care much if you had!”

“You have no idea how much the way you say that increases my desire to hear you speak.”

“Do as you please, my dear,” said Olive, almost inaudibly. “My carriage must be there—I must leave you, in any case.”

“I can see you don’t want it,” said Verena, wondering. “You would stay if you liked it, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know what I should do. Come out with me!” Olive spoke almost with fierceness.

“Well, you’ll send them away no better than they came,” said Matthias Pardon.

“I guess you had better come round some other night,” Selah suggested pacifically, but with a significance which fell upon Olive’s ear.

Mr. Gracie seemed inclined to make the sturdiest protest. “Look here, Miss Tarrant; do you want to save Harvard College, or do you not?” he demanded, with a humorous frown.

“I didn’t know you were Harvard College!” Verena returned as humorously.

“I am afraid you are rather disappointed in your evening if you expected to obtain some insight into our ideas,” said Mrs. Tarrant, with an air of impotent sympathy, to Mr. Gracie.

“Well, good-night, Miss Chancellor,” she went on; “I hope you’ve got a warm wrap. I suppose you’ll think we go a good deal by what you say in this house. Well, most people don’t object to that. There’s a little hole right there in the porch; it seems as if Doctor Tarrant couldn’t remember to go for the man to fix it. I am afraid you’ll think we’re too much taken up with all these new hopes. Well, we have enjoyed seeing you in our home; it quite raises my appetite for social intercourse. Did you come out on wheels? I can’t stand a sleigh myself; it makes me sick.”

This was her hostess’s response to Miss Chancellor’s very summary farewell, uttered as the three ladies proceeded together to the door of the house. Olive had got herself out of the little parlour with a sort of blind, defiant dash; she had taken no perceptible leave of the rest of the company. When she was calm she had very good manners, but when she was agitated she was guilty of lapses, every one of which came back to her, magnified, in the watches of the night. Sometimes they excited remorse, and sometimes triumph ; in the latter case she felt that she could not have been so justly vindictive in cold blood. Tarrant wished to guide her down the steps, out of the little yard, to her carriage; he reminded her that they had had ashes sprinkled on the planks on purpose. But she begged him to let her alone, she almost pushed him back; she drew Verena out into the dark freshness, closing the door of the house behind her. There was a splendid sky, all blue-black and silver—a sparkling wintry vault, where the stars were like a myriad points of ice. The air was silent and sharp, and the vague snow looked cruel. Olive knew now very definitely what the promise was that she wanted Verena to make; but it was too cold, she could keep her there bareheaded but an instant. Mrs. Tarrant, meanwhile, in the parlour, remarked that it seemed as if she couldn’t trust Verena with her own parents; and Selah intimated that, with a proper invitation, his daughter would be very happy to address Harvard College at large. Mr. Burrage and Mr. Gracie said they would invite her on the spot, in the name of the University; and Matthias Pardon reflected (and asserted) with glee that this would be the newest thing yet. But he added that they would have a high time with Miss Chancellor first, and this was evidently the conviction of the company.

“I can see you are angry at something,” Verena said to Olive, as the two stood there in the starlight. “I hope it isn’t me. What have I done?”

“I am not angry—I am anxious. I am so afraid I shall lose you. Verena, don’t fail me—don’t fail me!” Olive spoke low, with a kind of passion.

“Fail you? How can I fail?” “You can’t, of course you can’t. Your star is above you. But don’t listen to
them.”

“To whom do you mean, Olive? To my parents?”

“Oh no, not your parents,” Miss Chancellor replied, with some sharpness. She paused a moment, and then she said: “I don’t care for your parents. I have told you that before; but now that I have seen them—as they wished, as you wished, and I didn’t—I don’t care for them; I must repeat it, Verena. I should be dishonest if I let you think I did.”

“Why, Olive Chancellor!” Verena murmured, as if she were trying, in spite of the sadness produced by this declaration, to do justice to her friend’s impartiality.

“Yes, I am hard; perhaps I am cruel; but we must be hard if we wish to triumph. Don’t listen to young men when they try to mock and muddle you. They don’t care for you; they don’t care for us. They care only for their pleasure, for what they believe to be the right of the stronger. The stronger? I am not so sure!”

“Some of them care so much—are supposed to care too much—for us,” Verena said, with a smile that looked dim in the darkness.

“Yes, if we will give up everything. I have asked you before—are you prepared to give up?”

“Do you mean, to give you up?”

“No, all our wretched sisters—all our hopes and purposes—all that we think sacred and worth living for!”

“Oh, they don’t want that, Olive.” Verena’s smile became more distinct, and she added: “They don’t want so much as that!”

“Well, then, go in and speak for them—and sing for them—and dance for them!”

“Olive, you are cruel!”

“Yes, I am. But promise me one thing, and I shall be—oh, so tender!”

“What a strange place for promises,” said Verena, with a shiver, looking about her into the night.

“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 passed swiftly over the path from the porch to her waiting carriage. Tarrant creaked along, in pursuit, to assist 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 petition, she asked, with a laugh that surprised them, whether they wished to “mock and muddle” her. They went away, assenting 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!

XVI I

T
he 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 passionate impatience appeared to have given way to other considerations, to be replaced by the resignation that comes with deeper reflection. 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 pass 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 noble 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 friendship 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,
^ai
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.”