Harvestings: sketches in prose and verse

Preface

In harvesting these buds of romance, culled during the half-gay, half-sad moments of early gklhood, the writer experiences an earnest hope that friendly glances will discern, beneath the crude and paler vestments which enfold them, the richer coloring, the softer, fragrance of maturer blossoms ; while in the threads drawn from the woof of many a life, which bind these fragile flowers of memory, they may j5nd woven hope and faith in human tenderness and love divine.

In disclaiming the authorship of the Poems with which she has been permitted to embellish her little volume, the writer commends them to the favor of her friends.

Contents

PAGB

MIRANDA, 58

FLORENCE VASSAL ; OR, REMINISCENCES OF MY YOUTH, 59

Chapter III

« I might have known what fruit would spring from such a seed.'*

Byeon.

The fragrance was not all gone from Rosa's bridal bouquet before the gushing love of a heart peculiarly sensitive had been insensibly taught to repress any passionate demonstration of its tenderness ; before the bride had been taught that over that heart, which she had vainly dreamed her own, there fell a frequent sombre cloud, which the light of her smile might never seek to dissipate. But it gave her only a momentary pang, a passing disappointment ; for in society her husband was all that the most craving heart could desire ; and they were in society almost constantly during the gayeties subsequent to their bridal.

Gradually, however, as the excitement of that gay bridal passed away, and his wife's demands upon his affection became more earnest, Mark Allan roused himself with an icy heartlessness no one looking upon him could have believed he possessed, to chill Rosa's petulant, sorrowing heart to silence.

One day he bade her remember that, in becoming a wife, she had voluntarily resigned all girlish affectation and weakness to, — but Rosa broke in upon his words sorrowfully, reproachfully.

"Affectation, Mark!"

" Ay," he answered, irritated by a cause of which his companion was then ignorant ; " are you always so very truthful as to be indignant at the term, Mrs. Allan ? "

Rosa's very brow flushed, as he spoke, with so deep a color as to be painful in its intensity, and at once she left his side.

She did not know that Mark was flushed with an unnatural excitement; that the champagne which, dancing in his glass at dinner, had been of late too freely taken, had robbed his words of courtesy even to her ; but it was so. There were haunting memories in his brain, from which there was no escape but in the blinding cup.

From that day she never again sought to win him by either conciliating attention or reproachful word. " He has no faith in me," she whispered to herself, sadly ; " he loves me not, as I have believed ; " but, too proud to call attention to her grief, she sought oblivion in the whirl of a gay life.

Among numerous other paintings which he had brought with him from Europe, was one but half finished. Whenever that restlessness of spirit, which he could not otherwise assuage, came upon him, shutting himself up in his studio, he would work upon this painting for days without rest. It was a sketch of some picturesque Italian ruins ; and a wandering niinstrel-girl playing on a guitar. But that girl might have sat in state within those palace walls ere they had crumbled into dust, so superbly haughty was the carriage of the head, lifted with its radiant eyes to the heaven above, which, with all its southern hue and splendor, was not half so deliciously soft and sunny as the smile of mingled sweetness and sadness upon her lip.

Rosa had already been a wife many months when the appearance in New York was first announced of the young debutante, with whose success all southern Europe then rung.

Of late she had been but little into society, and the chastened smile which some concealed joyousness woke upon her face had given those soft, blue eyes, those pale, fair lineaments, a new and winning charm. And that dawning hope was reflected in Mark's breast by a gleam of its original brightness. Though he shut himself up more closely in his studio in consequence, he had given up, in a measure, the too free use of wine, in which he had for a season indulged, and his manner had regained all of its old courtesy ; something more of tenderness than he had ever previously manifested towards her, whose old light-heartedness came rushing back with the change, and, at times, won him to a better realization of the indissoluble bond between them.

He had consented, without a question or a comment, when Rosa had requested him to accompany her to the opera in the evening ; and, with a heart unusually light, she had flitted in and out of the studio which had been fitted up for him in their own house, — now with light words striving to win him from his grave mood, and now bending over his shoulder, and launching into warm and passionate encomiums on the beauty which grew at every touch beneath his hand. He scarcely heard her words, he paid her little heed, until, suddenly bending forward, and shading the dark eyes of the girl in the painting from his view, she said,

" You will quite forget your pale little wife in the glory of la belle minstrel's eyes."

With a quick, startled expression, as though he would have detected some deeper meaning than her words expressed, he looked up ; but he met only a smile of pleasant interest, fading into doubt lest she should have angered him.

" Signor Mark, you have kept me waiting these ten minutes past."

The half-gay, half-impatient tones of his wife's voice fell upon the artist's ear, rousing him from a revery, which the rustle of silken drapery had not broken with her entrance. The sun had set as the last touch of his brush fell caressingly upon the canvas before him, and with the shadows of the falling night fell oblivion to the present upon his soul, bringing memories of the olden time.

From the crowded house, with its array of beauty and fashion, the eyes of the wife wandered with furtive glances to the face of her husband. In that bright light she fancied that he looked older than she had ever before thought him ; there was an unusual pallor on his check, and his lip was compressed and stern. He did not look ill in health, but as though oppressed by some great weariness of mind. Perchance, at that moment, he was questioning himself if the sacrifice of his love to the desire to surround himself by the luxurious appurtenances of wealth had, in its consummation, crowned his days with content; if the sacrifice of her whose young heart had been lured into a desolate bondage by the marriage vows, in the echo of which the voice whose low accents had won her forever had forever ceased, was without avail. And one suffering, tortured heart in another's bosom — was that also but a bubble in his path ?

Whatever might have been the questioning which self put to self in that hour, it was broken by the plaudits of the crowd and the rising of the curtain ; and, bending forward, he beheld a woman's form, radiant in her gay robes, her flower-wreathed hair ; and through the lights above the bended heads he met the resplendent eyes of the minstrel-girl.

As it had echoed through his studio at Naples, so floated out that magnificent voice in the very sweetest, saddest cadences of love and despair, while its echoes fell down and mingled with the surging moan of the tumult within his breast, raging as it had done when that low and sad voice had bade him " go." Mechanically he answered in the affirmative, when a gentleman by his side asked if he had seen Signora Beatrice when abroad.

" Was she then upon the stage ? "

" No, she was in San Carlo," was the brief rejoinder ; and liosa heard no more.

But she beheld the sudden flush of intense emotion succeed the late pallor of his cheek ; his burning glance riveted upon the counterpart of that minstrel-girl, whose ideal beauty she had deemed he worshipped but as the finest consummation of his artistic talent ; and the rigidity of despair settled down upon the pale young face by his side»

" Take me home, — I am ill, — I am faint ! " she whispered, 4 hoarsely ; but he heard her not. Beatrice was singing him back to Italy, and lower, lower sank the drooping head, before which the lights, the crowd, were fading into darkness. The confusion attendant on the rising of their party, as Rosa was carried out, drew the attention of the house upon them, and with it the glance of the cantatrice. With his face flushed by tumultuous emotions, Mark Allan stood erect ; and, resting on . his shoulder as he moved out with his unconscious wife, lay the golden head, and still, white face ; and then the rising of the crowd with fresh acclamations, more rapturous applause, died away upon their ears.

" Go back, — it was the heat ; I am better now ! " with a strange self-command over herself, Rosa said to him, as he stood beside the carriage in which he had placed her, entirely restored to consciousness by the cool evening air.

The voice which bade him return trembled not ; but, had the light fallen upon her face, the blanched cheek and look of keen misery would have startled him. The anguish which her voice concealed was but too legibly stamped thereon ; and, drawing back into the furthest corner, she put aside the hand which rested hesitatingly upon the carriage door, and again repeated he had better go. He obeyed her ; but the chill of those icy fingers lay yet upon his own burning hand, long after he stood again in the presence of the cantatrice.

With a rapid step the wife passed from the carriage to the studio of her husband. There was no light therein but that of the candle which she had caught hastily up in the hall ; but even in that dim light, as she held it above the painting, yet damp beneath the lingering caress of Mark Allan's last touch, there was no mistaking the likeness he had there portrayed. Long Rosa gazed, and once she lifted her hand menacingly towards the easel, as though she would have dashed aside the poor canvas, with its rich and glowing beauty mocking her despair; but on the transparent little hand there gleamed a golden circlet, and the angry, passionate impulse was lost in the emotion that drew that hand to her heart.

*' And, with the white hands tightly pressed On a double pulse beneath her breast,"

she stood, with an expression of unutterable woe, looking round on the many ideal creations of the artist ; and that which she had scarcely ever heeded before, struck her very forcibly now, and with keenest pain, — either in feature or expression, in every painting about her was there some trace of that strange beauty which had haunted his every dream.

The engagement of the prima donna was verging to a conclusion. Weeks, months, she had been in New York; but since that first night Kosa had never beheld her. She professed herself unable to go out, and her pale cheek confirmed her words.

Never once did the moan of her misery, since the revelation of that night, make itself known to human ear.

From the time of his marriage, Mark had given up what he called professional servitude ; but he often beguiled the tedium of his hours of leisure, or his days of restlessness, by an occasional portraiture of some chance-attracted face.

Once more, as in his southern atelier, there sat before his easel a presence which thrilled him with its power. But the long lashes drooped not, as in other days, over eyes whose rays would brighten in his presence. The complexion, then vivid or pale with emotion, now neither paled nor deepened beneath the fire which burned at intervals in the glance of Mark.

There was now no tremulous note mingling with the enthusiasm with which she spoke of Italy to the bevy of admirers who followed her to the artist's studio. Had she ceased to remember when, lingering on the shores of Naples, and watching the declining day, with her dark curls shading the rich bloom of her cheek, and the brightness of life's first earnest dream irradiating every corner of that buoyant heart, the setting sun suddenly had fallen upon a blighted spirit, dead hopes, — nature smiling on a wreck of all that makes life beautiful? One had stood by her side, and wooed her, in passionate tones, to love ; but there fell a sudden doubt upon her heart, — a chilling belief, and of that moment's birth, — that a barrier rose between love and honor.

" By the name which hallows and endears affection. Signer?"

He hesitated ; he turned aside, and she gave him no time for subtle, hypocritical answer ; only the burning flush, paling to the hue of death, and the low voice which said " Adieu, forever ! " were given to memory.

Morning after morning a gay group gathered around the artist's easel, and always the same face of haughty repose turned upon him. Again and again she conversed freely of their old acquaintance in Italy ; but never by word or glance could he perceive that the faintest memory of that scene upon the shores of Naples lingered yet in her recollection.

Once only did the color vary upon her cheek ; and then Mark Allan, believing he had discovered the talisman which would throw open to his baffled gaze the heart which pride had closed upon him, brought down upon his wife's bowed head the consummation of that woe which in solitude she vainly shunned.

Beatrice was to give the artist but one more sitting ; the portraiture of that superb face was nearly completed, when all at once upon the gay converse of those surrounding her fell a voice which caused her to rise from her seat, and confront the speaker with an impulse irresistible. Whatever emotion it was that awoke so deep a crimson upon her cheek, and flashed with such bitter scorn upon the gray-haired old man before her, it at once arrested the attention of Mark, by whom she was alone observed ; but the inference which he drew from her sudden emotion was widely at variance with the truth.

In the face of Mr. Evans, she recognized one whose deed had cast the heaviest shadow upon her youth ; in those tones she heard once more the voice which had rung the alarum of deadly despair in her ear.

An impulse which he did not seek to resist led Mark Allan to desire a more distinct recognition of the emotion which the presence of the father of her rival had evidently stung from its repose in the heart of her before him. What mattered it to him that his words of forbidden tenderness stabbed the heart of that proud, unhappy being, whose woman's pride had closed, with an untrembling hand, her wounds from every human eye, so that he but soothed the wound which his love and pride had alike received, in the balm of Beatrice's final retraction of those parting words, that subsequent proud demeanor ?

One after another he dismissed his guests, until, by her side once more, for the first time since they had met he stood alone.

In the mellow light shining from above upon her head sat Beatrice, in the luxurious chamber which he had of late consecrated to his artist life. She was in the act of gathering her shawl about her to depart. He grasped her hand passionately, and the dark beauty of those eyes, which she had taught to droop beneath no human gaze, was upon him, — those eyes beneath which he had felt his spirit quail, the words ebbing to his lip grow cold and mute. But now he was blind to their austerity. A light had penetrated to his brain, which had ignited there all the mad, delirious passion which had been growing with her presence. The weight of his marriage vows lay in his memory but as a cold obligation towards society, which selfishness, in its maturer, unchecked growth, now spurned in the delirium of a will and passibn never conquered.

4^

42 THE OUTCAST AND THE HEIEESS.

" Beatrice, I am with you once more ; the world and its forms no longer divide us ! You would have hidden your soul from my penetration, for in your love there was despair; but the moment's anguish has dispelled the illusion you sought to create, and heart to heart reveals itself in nature's irresistible abandonment to the spirit's impulse. Once you deemed you had cause to doubt my sincerity ; thus I throw aside the bond which binds me to all the man of the world holds of value, and make my world, my heaven, in you ! "

And 'he would have sealed the mad compact of his sin upon the brow of Beatrice ; but she drew back, with a shudder, from the contact of those burning lips, and looking upon him still with those strange bright eyes, she spoke.

" As Beatrice listened to you in silence on the shores of Naples, so has she now. Then this heart beat like the wing of a prisoned bird against my bosom; now there awakens to your words scarce one throbbing pulse. Then the singinggirl of San Carlo loved as Mark Allan has never yet in his wildest dream conceived ; but between herself and the honorable existence of that love rose the world's high barrier — poverty — and a name over which fell the world's shadow ; although that shadow had grown out of that over which she had neither knowledge nor control. Listen, now, Mark Allan, while I tell you I cast back the imputation which you would throw alike upon my truth and my dignity ! Listen, and know, before you charge her again with false accusation, if the woman who stands before you has not true cause and right to that emotion which awoke indignant within her breast, in the presence of her childhood's bitterest oppressor.

" Recall to memory — if, alas! it be not too frequent an occurrence of pleasure to the prosperous and the opulent — a night of midwinter's deepest rigor, when the chiming of vesper bells where the cross guards the sanctuary, and the music of glad voices which arose from the rich man's fireside, commemorated the rising of Gethsemane's star ; when the

THE OUTCAST AND TUE HEIRESS. 43

carriages of rich owners drew up, with their light-hearted occupants, before the long row of brilliant, tempting windows ; when from the most luxuriant of them all stepped forth one whom already life had taught to be mute and deaf to unattractive misery, — how protectingly, how tenderly he led the golden-haired child by his side, from the moan of the starving ! I see your memory aids you to that recollection. Well, Mark Allan, — for all would say it was well for her, — look upon the consummation of that childhood ! Behold the pariah, the outcast, once more, in the prima donna of San Carlo !

" You were charitable to her then ; you are alike charitable to her now ; but," — and she drew herself grandly up before that abashed presence, — " she will not suffer herself to remain to you forever indebted. As Margery spurned your charity then, so Beatrice now spurns the proffer of your dishonorable love ! Thus from your canvas she effaces the personation of a face of which she would counsel you to utter forgetfulness ; " and, lifting a brush by her side, with bitter, reckless haste, which he had no power to interrupt, she obliterated the portraiture of herself from his easel.

She beheld the color come and go, and leave the quivering lips of Mark like marble; and the promptings of a noble heart rose up with a sudden remorse, at leaving so much misery as his countenance portrayed, with but bitterness and added misery in her parting words. " She was but a child, and knew not what she did," she said to herself, as for a . moment she stood with averted face. Then a quick, earnest impulse seized upon her, and she approached Mark.

" Do not think, hereafter, when you recall me, that you robbed a careless, dreamy youth of its sunshine, — a joyous, brilliant womanhood of its peace ; for I would not have you hereafter suffer undue remorse for the wrong which you may think that you have done Beatrice. That youth knew neither sunshine nor dreams, until, for a brief season, you called them into being. Had this womanhood known no memory of those dreams, there would have been but little in its blank existence to be recalled. If you have disenchanted me of love, without you I had never known the enchantment. In His mercy, God has strengthened a weak human heart to resist the temptation of that sin which you have committed ; and you have but the desire, not the deed, to answer for to Him. For any and all wrong in an uncontrolled passion you have done me, I forgive you. To the golden-haired Rosa say Margery forgives, in remembrance of the first words spoken in kindly sympathy to the unhappy outcast, the bitter wrong done in the name which that outcast had blessed in her grateful love. And 0, Mark Allan ! if that gay child has grown into an unhappy wife, go, I beseech thee, and say to her, * I have sinned against thee, in my weakness ; strong in my penitence, I dare make my confession, and seek of thee absolution, next to my God.' "

She had thrown back the clustering hair from her face as she spoke ; and as she now stood, her arms folded mournfully, that beautiful countenance no longer averted, or passionless beneath the control of a proud, strong will, he for the first time saw that those full, white lids crushed great tears beneath them. Humiliation, angry bitterness, were all forgotten by Mark Allan. He roused himself with a sudden effort. The quick movement of his upraised hand was eloquent in its motion ; words could not have better interpreted the giant combat between the earnest resolve for good, and the long ruling passion within his breast. With the expression of sorrow, of commiseration, on the face of her who had suffered so proudly, who forgave so nobly, instantaneously there leaped into his breast that innate nobility always adherent to the human heart; that immortal purity of soul, the transmission from God to his children of virtue, always existing, however unfortunate or pitiable may be its possessor, beneath the accumulation of evil passions, fed into vast strength by that weakness to which all human hearts are prone.

Hark ! ho was speaking, — not as Mark Allan had ever spoken before.

" Beatrice, you have dispelled the curse of my life ; you have taught me the meagreness of that which I have desecrated by the name of affection. There has been no love, for there has been no purity, in my heart. Your resolution is stern, your rebuke is bitter ; but you have divested a life of its pitiable illusions ; self knows its littleness, — its arrogance will never more offend."

" I would not leave you unhappy," said Beatrice, as she gathered her shawl again about her to depart, pressing back the tears which sprung to her eyes ; but with a strange pleasure in the midst of her pain, caused by this evidence of the sacrifice of his pride to truth.

" Leave me not in utter disbelief of my present sincerity ! Add not to the shame which I confess to you the sting of your own contempt, Beatrice ! "

She grasped his arm, in the eagerness of the impulse in which she spoke.

" There was no faith in the past, like the present ; there was no hope in the future, like that I have in thee now."

One sweet, hopeful smile fell cheeringly down upon his heart, and Beatrice was gone.

" Will he never come ? Will he never look upon her ? "

It was a faint and trembling voice which broke upon the silence of that darkened chamber, in which only a woman's form glided about with subdued and cautious step.

" Give me more light to look upon her ! I cannot see her distinctly ; the shadows fall so heavy beneath these curtains."

And, in obedience to that same low voice, the attendant in the chamber suffered a deeper ray of light to penetrate to the dim atmosphere ; and the young mother raised herself feebly from her pillow, gazing rapturously upon the tiny lineaments around which fell her own golden hair. With the increase of ligHt, the child opened its eyes, and Rosa saw that they were large, dark and familiar in their strange beauty, as they fixed themselves wonderingly upon that ray of light. As she gazed, her hand pressed itself in the old way to her heart, and she buried her face languidly in her pillow.

The sun which had risen on the dawning of that -child's life rode high in the meridian, as it, for the first time, was cradled into living rest upon her bosom, and in its little face she strove to solve the enigma of its future destiny. Alas ! unhappy Rosa ! you deemed beauty then love's sovereign seal. If so, where was the glorious smile, the perfect symmetry of Beatrice's matchless face, and her isolated life ? Where the bloom on your own mother's cheek, — her arid, wasted life ? " Give her beauty, that she may be beloved ! " prayed the mother ; but her lip moved not to the burden of " keep her from temptation ! "

" Will he never come ? " she questioned again, as the hour wore on, and still Mark came not ; and they knew then it was better that she should know the truth. He was ill ; he could not come. That was better than if he cared not ; — this last Rosa could not endure. -

Over and over she questioned them if her child was not lovelier in its baby beauty than other children ; and they smiled at what seemed the solicitous pride of the young mother, as they answered in the affirmative. " And if she grows in beauty in his absence, she will be lovelier when Mark sees her," the mother whispered to herself ; and they wondered that her interest in her new-born child should make her so forgetful of her husband's danger.

The day came at last on which father, mother and child, were to be united. Still in the heart of Rosa lay the memory of the charm with which the cantatrice had enthralled her husband's heart ; but a proud, delicious triumph in her child's power vibrated to every thought of Beatrice. The ^.doring worshipper of the beautiful would find himself more and more attracted bj the daily-increasing beauty of his child's being, revenging, as it were, her mother's wrong.

With glistening eyes she beheld those fragile limbs, so rarely-modelled in infancy, robed in the embroidered dress, enveloped in costly laces ; and she laid it caressingly down to rest upon her own wildly-palpitating bosom, as she waited the coming of its father. What to him would be the memory of syren or songstress, when that sunny face nestled to his heart, a shield against all intruders in the sanctuary of mother and child ? Hark ! by the rising flush upon her cheek, he is at hand.

The languor of long illness weighs upon the old firm and buoyant tread ; — or, can it be but Mr. Evans, who seeks her presence, — the gray-haired, tremulous old man, whose hand wanders around the knob of that door, closed yet against them all ? It opens slowly ; he stands upon the threshold, — Mark, her husband ! But a nameless dread paralyzes the form which seeks to rise with its proud burden gathered to its breast ; the rapturous smile of welcome changes to a mute glance of miserable inquiry.

He hears her hurried breath, the bursting sob of terror ; and an expression of unutterable sadness is visible upon his haggard face, as he questions,

" Are you by the window, Rosa ? "

" By the window, in the sunlight. 0, Mark, do you not see me ? "

With a step that vainly spurns at caution, he approaches her; the tall figure, emaciated by long suffering, towering with tenacious stateliness above the wandering, feeble step. He will not yield one inch of that old and haughty carriage of his person ; he will not sufier himself to accept support or aid in his midnight way.

" Mark," sobs the voice at the window ; for a marble form intercepts his passage ; the radiant face of hope smiling up to the poor, blind eyes that see her not. But the warning comes too late ; the cold form of the statue meets his touch, his cheek grows red, his wan lip quivers.