The story of Avis

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A LOVELY SKIN,

Chapter I

" And all I saw was on the sunny ground, The flying shadow of an unseen bird."

WHAT was it about her ?

Coy Bishop at the Poetry Club that night, while a theological student with a cold in his head was declaiming from the second canto, sat perversely wondering. It was becoming to Coy to wonder ; she did not very often, — being a blonde, with a small mouth and happy eyes.

She changed the accent of her thoughts as they pursued her ; out of irresistible sympathy, perhaps with the reader, who experienced some elocutionary difficulty in changing his ; though, indeed, she found her own reverie so much more to the purpose just then than her desire for literary culture, that she conceived a distaste for the young gentleman as a tiresome interruption, and hoped that some of the girls would refuse him before the winter was over.

What was it then about her ? There was more sense than syntax in Coy's question ; at least a sense perfectly clear to herself, who, as the only person concerned in this mute discussion, had obvious rhetorical rights therein.

This was in the days when young ladies had not begun to have " opinions " upon the doctrine of evolution, and before feminine friendship and estrangements were founded on the distinctions between protoplasm and bioplasm. Yet, even fifteen years ago, the resemblance of the human face to different types of animals was no novelty to any thoughtful fancy. So, too, the likenesses in the human body to forms of life incident to the vegetable world, were surprising only to people ignorant of the anatomy of the nervous and arterial systems.

Coy was not ignorant. Harmouth girls never were. Her mind was stocked with facts sufficient to bring these correspondences before it. But there she stumbled upon a dense idea across which neither the diploma of the Harmouth Female Seminary, nor the " course of study " in which all Harmouth girls engaged, could strike a light. Had anybody ever said that people resembled metals ? Was it Galileo, or Socrates ? Newton perhaps. Or — or — could it have been John Rose ?

The theological reader at the other end of the room just then, suddenly observing Miss Bishop's averted face, floundered into an acute embarrassment upon seeing that she blushed swiftly, and wondered if he had read from the love-passages too long. His mind gathered an immediate accretion to the conviction that light literary work was unsuitable to the preparation for the gospel ministry.

Coy was not blushing about Tohn Rose : young men are too common in Harmouth to be easily blushed about. She was aware of a certain incongruousness in that fancy about the metals. What was the use of reading-clubs, and suffering such anxiety about the coffee, when one took one's turn, if one could not tell whether one owed an idea to an old Greek, or an evening caller ? That she could have originated it, Coy never for an instant conceived. She left ideas to Avis.

What she meant about the metals was this. All people in their physical natures are akin to some form of inorganic existence. Some, for instance, are clay, sheer clay, mud. Certain metals enter into the composition of certain temperaments : brass or iron, gold, silver, or steel, stratifies in the nature, and gives character to body and soul. " Who knows,'' Coy would have said if she could, — " who knows but a skilful soul-geologist may learn to detect these metallic traces in men and women, and can act upon the character of a soul's topography accordingly, can map it with some accuracy, can fathom its wealth, or measure its barrenness, indicate the presence of its mines, discover its fossils, account for its deluges, prophesy its earthquakes, its volcanoes ? " It was surely in the old creed of the alchemists, that metals were endowed with sense and feeling, and possessed of either masculine or feminine qualities. Then why not the man or the woman with the sense or the trait of the metal ?

Now, Avis was a magnet.

Coy's metallic theory had by this time rather run away with her. But of so much she was sure : when Avis was a baby, mother-earth yielded pure perfect magnet up into her composition. Shrewd Nature, never to be cheated out of her control over her children, held back her gold, her gems, her silver, and her fine, dumb pearl, and wrought into Avis just the one thing more precious than they all.

People, to be sure, were artificially magnetized to a certain extent. Barbara Allen, for instance, turning the exact intellectual pose of her head (there was but one intellectual pose to Barbara's head) towards Philip Ostrander, while he read his paper on Spenserian metres, was a species of electro-magnet.

But Avis was, without alloy, loadstone. In Avis there existed that attribute — no, that quality ; which was it ? Coy remembered hearing one of the Professors say at a supper that there was a difference between these two things ; but she did not remember which was which : she seldom did. At all events, Avis had that one particular coloring about her (Coy decided to call it coloring), which is, in a woman, powerful above all beauty, wit, or genius, — that subtile something which we name charm.

Now, it was true and tender in Coy to sit thinking this about Avis. That was a wise word which said, that, when we have ceased to enjoy the superiority of another, we have ceased to love him. Hence it may be the self-defensive strategy of affection, that we feel our friend's advantage long before we allow ourselves to perceive it ; nay, in proportion to the depth of our feeling under it, are we not apt to have a frost-bite of the intellect, which makes its distinct acknowledgment a matter of hard thawing? And Coy was not by any means a girl of liquid moods. She sometimes felt it proper to judge Avis very severely ; else what was the use in having grown up with her ? For instance, she had reproved her for staying so much by herself since she had come home. Barbara, now, thought that affectation, it was plain to see (and affectation it would have been in Barbara), though, of course, she was too well bred to say so. Coy knew better than that. It was only morbidness. Coy had the glibness of some unaccentuated natures in the use of this convenient word, which is without a rival in its adaptability to cover all forms of character differing from one's own.

There had been a ripple of surprise when Avis came into the club that night. The club met at Chatty Hogarth's. Chatty was the president's daughter, and an invalid. Avis did not like to refuse poor Chatty. It was the first time that Miss Dobell had appeared in Harmouth society since her return from Florence.

At this rate, it was plain that Miss Cora Bishop's Spenserian culture would be very deficient. Coy, with a pretty change of mental attitude, which had a pretty bodily expression down to the very tips of her fingers, tightening, like growing shells, about the covers of her book, brought her intellect to bear severely upon the business of the evening.

" But fly, ah ! fly far hence away, for feare Lest to you hap that happened to me heare. "

A low and singularly musical voice was pronouncing these words as Coy looked up ; not the catarrhal theologue, surely ? He had finished his contribution to the evening's entertainment, thank the Muses ! and Mr. Ostrander was reading, — Philip Ostrander, the new tutor. There was always a new tutor to be considered in Harmouth University : he had not always, however, a musical voice.

" And to this wretched lady, my deare love ; O too deare love, — love bought with death too deare ! "

Clearly Mr. Ostrander was an effective reader; "a cultivated reader," Coy said. Miss Dobell, from her corner opposite the gentleman, sitting a little in the shadow, and giving equable and earnest attention to the performance of each member of the Poetry Club, in turn, said only, " an effective reader," but hesitated at the word, and listened thoughtfully.

" With sudden feare her pitcher downe she threw, And fled away,"

sang on the reader.

" Full fast she (led, ne ever lookt behynd, As if her life upon the wager lay."

Musical was the word assuredly. Mr. Ostrander's voice held rather melody than harmony, but music, beyond a question. There was a modesty and simplicity about its accent not common to young men in those stages of growth in which Harmouth knew them ; perhaps a little uncommon in any young man. It suffused a penetrative sense of pleasure, of unexplained organic joy, like that of Nature in her simpler moods : it had an effect not unlike that of an unseen brook or a flying bird. Though the brook chanted, it ran ; though the bird sang, it flew ; its sweetness was measured by its evanescence. People often noted Mr. Ostrander's voice. Young ladies had been heard to declare that it was " like Mozart."

Avis Dobell, sitting in the shadowed corner of the president's parlor that night, had happened to place herself against some very heavy drapery, which clasped two warm arms of intense color across the chill of a bay-window. The color was that called variously and lawlessly by upholsterers cranberry, garnet, or ponso ; known to artists as carmine. The material held a satin thread, which lent to the curtains the lustre of jewels in a dark setting, or of water under a flaming sky. In the gaslight and firelight of the room, the insensate piece of cloth took on a strange and vivid life, and seemed to throb as if it held some inarticulate passion, like that of a subject soul.

Coy or Barbara would have known better than to have ventured their complexions against this trying background. Avis went to it as straight as a bird to a lighthouse on a dark night. She would have beaten herself against that color, like those very birds against the glowing glass, and been happy, even if she had beaten her soul out with it as they did.

She had a fierce kinship in her for that color, of which she seldom spoke. She did not expect it to be understood ; she did not care that it should be ; perhaps she imperfectly understood it herself : she only knew that it made her happy to be near it. To-night, for instance, though she had felt this Poetry Club rather a bore, a positive wave of pleasure flowed to her from the sight and contact of that curtain, which she felt in every sense of soul and body.

Avis was affected by color as the more sensitive musical temperament is by sound. Color divorced from form, crude and clear, was to her what the musical notation is to the composer, who, without striking a note, reads the score by the hour as other men read printed text.

Besides, she knew perfectly well that the curtain became her. Against this background of the passion of carmine, Avis, sitting silently the evening through, had a solitary look. There was a certain aloofness in her very beauty, if one chose to call by the name of beauty the kindling of her face : it was somehow unlike that of other handsome women. It cannot be said that she was quite without consciousness of it ; no woman could have been : it might be rather that she made no effort to appear unconscious of it. She had nothing of that wide-eyed, infantile look of distraction, which, in a grown woman, indicates the very quintessence of egoism.

She carried about her an indefinable air of having been used to the love, or admiration probably, of men as well as women, which the most exquisitely modest women will sometimes wear, and which is as unmistakable as it is alluring to the eye. Her dress, made in the fashion of the time, fitting closely, and without trimming, was of a negative tint, something toning upon black, else she should not, and so would not, have sat by the carmine curtain. She wore, as all well-dressed women wore at that time, a very full white undersleeve, which completely concealed the outline of the arm. Over her shoulders a shawl of Fayal lace, white, and very delicate, hung like a thistle-down. She had a fresh but fine and restless color, and brown, abundant hair. She had a generous mouth and a delicate ear. Her profile, when the carmine curtain took it, had the harmony of a strong antique.

"Avis," said Mrs. Hogarth, when Mr. Ostiander had finished his canto, and the little party of young people had fallen into that general discussion of the topic of the evening's study, which was usual in Harmouth " Clubs," — "Avis, my dear, are we to hear nothing from you to-night?"

" Oh, yes, Avis ! " urged Chatty.

"You must excuse me," pleaded Avis in a voice more timid than one would have looked to hear from a young lady of so much presence. She spoke faintly, like a shrinking child : indeed it made her feel like one, coming, from the strange changes of her life, suddenly back here among her old playfellows ; being called out by Mrs. Hogarth so, as if she were to recite a lesson. Mrs. Hogarth was one of those people who always made her feel as if she were a little girl, always would : it would not mattcrto Mrs. Hogarth if she had painted the Sistine Mary.

There were others, however, in the Spenser Club, strangers, across whom stirred a visible wave of interest when Avis, speaking for the first time, drew all the eyes in the room towards the carmine curtain. Coy remarked it, and felt proud of her ; for Avis had got into the newspapers. It was seldom that a Harmouth woman got into the papers. It was only men — men at Harmouth : indeed, the University existed, she supposed, for the glorification of men. This was all right and proper. Coy had never been conscious of any depressing aspirations towards the college diploma ; but she took an aromatic enjoyment, after all, in the fact that one of the professor's daughters had adopted "a career." She was glad it was precisely Avis, and not Barbara, or some of the other girls, who had painted a good picture, and sold it in London. She enjoyed having it thoroughly understood in Harmouth that people who knew about such things (Coy was not quite sure who ; but that did not matter) had predicted a " brilliant future " for the modest young lady who made that picture.

" May I not be pardoned," repeated Avis, " if I do not bring my share of the work to-night ? I have been busy in other ways so long, it is not possible that I could find anything to say worth your hearing, on a subject which the rest of you have been studying all winter."

" Avis ! " said Coy suddenly from across the room, " if I had done a real mean thing, should you want to know it ? "

" No," said Avis : " if anybody I cared for could be mean, I should rather never know it.". She spoke in the graceful surface-tone through which the serious instinct of an earnest nature can no more help penetrating than the sun can help shining through ornamented glass.

"You have turned over two leaves, Mr. Ostrander," said Barbara Allen, who was looking up foot-notes with him. " And do you incline to Upton's conjecture ? It seems to me, if we

grant the Henry VIII. theory, then Una "

" It's about Una that I've been mean," said Coy rather loudly. "Avis, I brought your sketch of Una that you gave me. I know you'll let me show it. You never were a bit of a shirk, now, Avis ; and this is just your fair contribution to a Spenser evening. Please, Avis ? "

Avis did not please, that was plain ; but she consented without any fuss ; and the young people gathered about Miss Bishop to see the sketch.

It was a sketch in charcoal, strongly but not roughly laid in, and preserved by a shellac, which lent a soft color, like that of a very old print, to the paper. It bore marks of the artist's peculiar style ; for it was already recognized in art-circles that Miss Dobell had "a style."

The sketch was expressive of the lines :—

" Ere long he came where Una traveild slow, And that champion wayting her besyde.

By his like-seeming shield her knight by name Shee weend it was, and towards him gan ride : Approaching nigh, she wist it was the same ; And with faire fearefull humblesse towards him shee came."

Miss Dobell's Una was a spirited figure ; did not ride the lion like a donkey, neither did she pat him like a dog, in the approved manner ; he followed her in a shadow almost as heavy as that which hides the Jupiter in Correggio's Io, — dark, vague, and inscrutable as fate. She had been walking swiftly : the lethargy of collapse from motion had settled on every limb Arrested in the full light, the woman curved one fine hand inward, like a shell, as if to warn the creature back. It was impossible to look upon this woman, and not say, ' She sees the man she loves." Her eyes leaped to him ; her lips leaned tojiim ; her whole being gravitated to him.

" Pretty girl," said John Rose, who dared say any thing to anybody ; and, besides, he used to know Avis in college, — " very pretty girl; but how she holds her head ! Put her into a Harmouth Senior party now, she'd freeze a fellow into a sherbet."

"Was Una so easily won, my dear?" asked Mrs. Hogarth, with a little matronly smile.

" Easily won ! " A voice behind the young artist repeated these words in a protesting whisper ; then, gathering distinctness, said, —

" My dear Mrs. Hogarth, do you not see ? Every nerve and muscle is tense for flight. She will turn and run before that clumsy knight gets up to her— if she can."

Avis, turning with a grateful look to see who had interpreted her picture, felt Coy's hand laid upon her arm.

"Avis, may I present Mr. Ostrander?"

Avis very ceremoniously bowed. As she did so, there flitted across her eyes, like the shadow of an unseen object, an expression which Coy found it so difficult to understand, that she even made up her mind to ask her afterwards if she had objected to the introduction.

But probably Avis had met far more interesting men in Florence, where it was understood that she had been much sought.

" May I?" urged Ostrander with hesitancy, putting out his hand for the sketch. On the back of it was written, with a, brush dipped in a crimson water-color, these words, —

" She speakes no more Of past : true is that true love hath no power To looken backe ; his eie be fixt before."

" I am glad not to have blundered," he said simply in handing the picture back.

The weight of talk had by this time slipped from the picture, and he and the two young ladies stood slightly apart.

" But, after all, you see," said the young man musingly " your Truth is subject to Love, omnipotently subject.-'

" I am not responsible for Spenser's theology," said Avis, laughing evasively; "and an artist has such gloriously lawless moods ! Why should I trouble myself to think about Una every day ? I had a pretty girl to draw : so I drew her. But I put the lion in, so people shouldn't make a mistake. ' It is better to be dumb than to be misunderstood.' "

" Who said that ?" asked Ostrander, with a fine smile. But he was conscious of feeling some curiosity over this superficial little speech of Miss Dobell's. There was not a superficial stroke in the picture, — nor in the speaker, to his mind.

"How do you know that /did not say it?" returned the young lady.

"Mr. Ostrander," said Coy, "Miss Hogarth wants you to bring Miss Dobell the oysters. Do it gracefully. She'll sketch you while you are gone ! "

When Ostrander returned, Coy had been called away, and Avis was alone. As he handed her plate, their eyes met in a long, full, grave look. Avis's eyes were neither brown nor black, yet they were very dark. One sometimes sees in the lining of waves on which the full sun shines, and in which the bright weeds are thick, a color that resembles them.

Philip Ostrander said. —

" I have seen you before."

Avis hesitated : she hesitated perceptibly before she answered.

" Yes."

" Had you forgotten it ? "

Now Ostrander spoke with hesitation : he felt a little alarmed at his own intrepidity. This young lady in the Fayal shawl, with the slightly disturbed carriage to her head, had suddenly acquired throughout her face and figure a beautiful protest, which he felt it would be the easiest thing in the world to mistake.

Should he go on, or stop exactly where he was ? After a moment's silence, he said, with an accent of renewed decision,—

" Had you forgotten it ? "

Avis lifted her eyelids very slowly, and in her honest, even voice, said, —

Chapter II

"We rejoice in hunting Truth in company as in hunting game."— Themistius.

" For mervaille of this knight him to behold, Full besily they waiten, young and old."— Chaucer.

COY and John Rose walked home together in the dear, old, foolish country-fashion, which Harmouth was too full of young people to outgrow.

It was a night of many stars. The two, as they stepped out into the April weather, in deference to the constitution of the Spenser Club, at the stroke of half-past ten, had involuntarily stood for a moment with uplifted faces in the thin, half-frozen snow. Great pulses of light beat before the eyes, where stars that our Northern atmospheres know only in their happiest moods, were aflame that night ; and arteries of fire ran along wastes of space, quivering as they ran : the very ether in which they hung seemed to be crossed with fine lines, shadow drawn on shadow, like the nerves of a mute and infinite organism, whose heart only — beating somewhere, impassioned, imprisoned — was hidden from the sight.

But Coy and John Rose did not talk about the stars : it was not their way. The young man, if he had said any thing, would have wrenched a pun out of them perhaps, or propounded a conundrum, for no better reason than that the sight of them had moved him. And the first thing that Coy said was, —

" Avis wishes us all in Guinea."

"But why?"

" She hasn't seen so much astronomy since she was in Italy. She wants to be by herself, and reduce it to Prussian blue and Naples yellow. I think it must be very uncomfortable to be an artist. You're always looking at Nature with a professional squint: you can't put yourself on any sort of terms with her,

I should say, more than a photographer can with a complexion, or a dentist with front-teeth."

It was true enough, that Avis, coming out of the close room into the freshening April night, had thrilled beneath the sudden throbbing of the stars, with an impulse which those only know whose life in its more poetic stages has been passed under the ardors of a Southern sky. Some slight disturbing element which had entered into the evening for her, served only to make the coolness and calm and vastness more marked and reposeful. She had drawn a deep breath as one does in readjusting one's self to a momentarily suspended action. She would have liked Mr. Ostrander better if he had not exclaimed, " Almost Florence ! " as he turned to take Barbara home. She was glad it was nobody but Barbara's brother, poor fellow ! who was to walk with her, and that he did not expect her to talk about the stars, and that Coy and John Rose seemed so very comfortable together just in front of them. Her mind was pre-occupied in ways to which the little inner life of a Harmouth reading-club was as foreign as — ah, well ! — as foreign as the carmine curtain to the cold north star. She felt no less annoyed than perplexed by the slight pressure of circumstances which seemed to have drawn her to-night into the exact atmosphere of that half-expressed life. She longed for the poise which solitude only can give, and half wished that she had not invited Coy to spend the night with her, and see the Venetian views to-morrow.

Her fancy about the curtain and the lighthouse came, before her with a strange, pictorial vividness, as she walked on, talking common-place to Barbara's brother.

Out beyond the little sheltered town the great sea swept. She could hear the far beating of the tide upon the receptive April air. While the currents of these delicate human lives swept softly on in their elected channels, long waves thundered against the Harbor Light. Miles away through the night, some homeless bird took wing for the burning bosom of the reflector, and straight, straight — led as unerringly as instinct leads, as tenderly as love constrains, as brutally as Nature cheats, with a glad fluttering at the delicate throat, with a trustful quiver of

The Story of Avis. \J

the flashing wings, like the bending of a harebell, like the breath of an arrow — came swaying ; was tossed, was torn, and fell.

She had been out when she was a child, after many a storm, and seen them dead there by hundreds on the rock. The light-keeper gathered them up into a bushel-basket once, for the scientific professor.

They had strewn the shores of her young thought with untold and ungathered suffering, — those birds. No one thing had been more responsible for the attack of universal scepticism which she had successfully weathered at eighteen, in common with the existing senior class of college-boys in her father's lecture-room.

Sometimes in Florence, on a radiant night, when across the roofs, against the setting sun, the sparrows stood twittering in Italian (no New-England sparrow could have rehearsed in that accent if his engagement for the season had depended on it), and the voices of children, whose parents' eyes had never questioned Fate, poured their pliant chirrup into the Arno's monotone beyond the studio window, — then suddenly, like a drop of sleet upon a flower, would fall a vision of the Harbor Light at home, and towards it, through the freezing night, a bird fly to its death.

She had not thought about the light before, since she had come home.

But Coy and John Rose were walking together beneath the April stars. They did not talk of the Spenserian metres, nor the Uptonian theory. They discussed the oysters and the last engagement, the coming concert and the impending battle, the hazing scrape, and the Mission Sunday school.

Then they talked a little about Barbara, and a little of the new tutor, and then about Miss Dobell, and then a little about art and life, and earnestness, and about a man's understanding himself, and about the beauty of high purposes, and the preciousness of sympathy, and the uncertainty of the future, and many other original and impressive themes. And the young man made no conundrums now, and grew so grave, that Coy took fright, and asked him, Was he going on a mission ?

C

But he answered, gravely still, Did she think him fit ? To which she told him promptly, No ; that he would set the cannibals to making bad puns before a week was out ; and then he said he was afraid he should, and that he must be content with some obscure position among educated Americans who read the charades in the religious weeklies Sunday mornings. And by that time they were at the gate of Professor Dobell's old-fashioned silent house, and stopped to wait for Avis.

" Poor Mr. Allen ! " said Coy, turning the curve of her cheek in the starlight.

" I don't know about that," said the young minister perversely.

" But Avis will never, never "

" I wouldn't grant that any woman I cared for would never, never, as long as she allowed me upon terms of friendship at all," persisted the young man.

" But," said Coy hurriedly, " Avis is not like other women. She never was."

" Then you admit " began John Rose.

" I admit that I'm cold, and here she is," shivered Coy. Coy was half frightened. If Mr. Rose had said any more about sympathy and friendship just then, she would have gone into the house without waiting for Avis. The color had heightened in her young face. Her foot tapped the snow sharply in her impatience for Avis to come up. It seemed to her as if she and John Rose, standing there in the professor's snowy, shaded yard, had been left alone, the only two people on the breathing earth.