The price of a pearl

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Chapter I On A May Morn

“Pale as a pearl she is; paleness that gives A woman grace, yet not too pale a hue.”

The laburnums were in full flower in a certain shabby, ill-kept little plot of ground known to the inhabitants of Fingall as St. Bridget’s Place.

Among its choked-up borders patches of white narcissi, striped tulips, and other garden flowers struggled feebly for existence with invading and overpowering weeds, and the rank, unmown grass was plentifully besprinkled with daisies, whereof various groups of children, big and little, were busily engaged in weaving chains, their respective nurses and guardians looking on meanwhile from the neighboring benches. It was an exquisite spring day, one of those that obliterate all memory of winter, although reviving in full force the many vague, nameless longings that winter puts to sleep.

A day to be glad in, and rejoice in the bare fact of existence ; a day to be sad in, because existence is, after all, so hemmed in by stern necessity for most of us. The thrushes carolling in the laburnums were giving delicious utterance to the first mood, the young lady singing in one of the neighboring houses with a pathetic note in her voice that made people stop to listen to it was equally successful in expressing the second.

She had a face that matched her voice in the sense that none could fail to notice it. Yet somehow no one ever dreamed of calling Pearl Merryweather either pretty or handsome.

She was made up apparently, of contrasts, not to say violent contradictions. She had fair hair, and very dark eyebrows and eyelashes. The eyes themselves startled you by being’ almost as green as sea-water; and the complexion was as nearly colorless as might consist with the possession of superb health and unflagging energy.

She was not tall, but beside her it sometimes happened that a tall woman looked insignificant and ungraceful. She was not haughty, but most people began by being a little afraid of her ; and, finally, she was still quite young, yet gave a very curious impression to strangers of having had an immense and varied experience.

The best summing-up of her rather unique personality was, in fact, to be found in the twofold nickname bestowed on her by the college undergraduates, of whom one set had christened her “the Baby,” while another faction more respectable dubbed her “ the Queen.” Such was Pearl Merrywcather on this bright May morning, as she sat at the grand piano in her aunt’s drawing-room and let forth her rich trained voice in a plaintive Irish melody.

The windows had been thrown open to the balmy air and glowing sunshine ; and outside one or two of the passers-by stopped to listen to the song, every word of which was plainly audible from where they stood, half-hidden by the wistaria that framed the sashes.

“From the red rose to the apple blossom,

From the apple blossom to the blue sky,

Looking up still in the spring-tide,

When none else is by,

For a love born on a May morn Long ago, love, I sigh.

“From the blue sky to the apple blossom,

And the roses in row,

Looking down still in the spring-tide,

Through my garden I go,

For a love lost in a spring frost,

Singing Heigho, heigho !”

“ It is rather sad, I think, for a spring song,” Pearl’s aunt observed, with a smile.

She was aware that the girl was quite unconscious of having sung for any one but herself, for which reason she had put her whole heart into the song, and made it an exact transcript of her own somewhat melancholy mood.

“ I don’t know why a spring song should be so very joyous. After all, everything has all got to be begun over again.”

ON A MAY MORN

She swung herself round as she spoke, and faced her aunt, whose smile was half sad and half merry, as she asked, quietly :

“ What is it that has to be begun again in your case, Pearl ?”

Mrs. Fursden called herself an old woman, and looked it, too, though she wanted some years yet of the threescore and ten that are supposed to be the normal period of human life.

She was large even to unwieldiness, but it was wonderful what grace remained still in the poise of her small, well-shaped head, and the slope of her drooping shoulders. And her beautiful soft-brown eyes had nothing of age in them, notwithstanding her snowy hair and countless wrinkles. The soul that looked out through these agate windows was young still, if also wise, and wholly unimbittered by the sorrows that had engraven themselves on her sweet face and blanched her hair.

“ What has to be begun over again ?” she persisted, as she met Pearl’s laughing eyes, in which, nevertheless, there was another expression that was scarcely a merry one.

“ Oh, the old round of everything — all the things that one had hoped were safely asleep, all the kicks against the pricks that one had left off in winter, all the unreasonable wishes that will not be starved out — oh, Aunt Emily, you know quite well what I mean, and that is what the song means too. That is why I like it. I’m sick of stories that end well, they’re never true to life.”

“ You had an audience,” said Mrs. Fursden, wisely turning the girl’s petulant thoughts into a less morbid channel.

She knew how easy it is to get up a case against life, merely by a little subjective reflection on its darker side. She knew also that in this particular instance the case was not altogether empty.

“An audience, had I? Do you mean somebody outside?”

“ Two or three people stopped, but one stayed. A young man too. He must have been romantically inclined.”

“What was he like?” and Pearl peeped out rather coquettishly from behind the muslin curtains.

“ Oh, he is gone ! He made off when he saw that he was discovered.”

“A gentleman ?”

“Decidedly; quite young too, and very good-looking.”

“It sounds interesting,” Pearl said, laughingly; “he evidently has good taste. Well, Aunt Emily, will you sing it for me now? I want a lesson in it.”

Mrs. Fursden relinquished her easy-chair and took Pearl’s place at the piano.

The girl listened to her with rapt attention. The voice was a wreck, but the manner was perfect. In her day this woman must have been a magnificent singer. She was, besides, an artist to her finger-tips. Pearl heaved a deep sigh when the song was ended.

“Yes,” she said, moodily, “that is how it ought to be, but I could never make it sound like that, even though the young man outside did stop to listen to me. What is it that makes the difference? I have the voice, and you have taught me to use it properly, and I love singing better than anything in the world, and yet I don’t believe I am an artist.”

“You might be,” Mrs. Fursden hastened to assure her, kindly.

“But I am not, and I want to know why, Aunt Emily.”

“ Well, for one thing, you are much too subjective, if you want to know.”

Pearl knitted her forehead, and looked a little perplexed, as she inquired :

“ Do I want expression ?”

“No, but your expression is too conscious and too personal. There is always too much of you, you yourself, in your singing. The song is swamped in the singer, and so you stop short at being what you want to be — a real artist.”

“ But I still don’t quite understand,” Pearl persisted, though not with any perversity. “Am I not to feel what I sing? I don’t think I can help that.”

“Certainly, you foolish child,” her aunt said, laughingly, “but what I want is that you should not feel yourself feeling. To people who know you as I do, your singing always seems to say, “ Listen to me, Pearl Merry weather.”

“ And to the people who don’t know me?”

“To the people who don’t know, it often speaks in an unknown tongue. You do not give expression to their feelings, and they don’t always understand yours.”

“ How about the young man just now?”

“Ah, exactly; you didn’t know he was there, or you would not have sung nearly so well as you did.”

“Well, I may as well make up my mind that I shall never be an artist;” and Pearl looked vexed as she went over to the piano, and began to collect her scattered music.

Like a great many other people, she was more willing to find fault with herself than to be told exactly what was amiss with her.

Mrs. Fursden looked vexed also, for her criticism had not been

ON A MAY MORN gratuitous. Only for a moment, however, and then her sweet face was unruffled as before.

u Is Stephen coming for you, my child ?”

“ No, Aunt Cecilia will send the carriage. Stephen is hunting up another man for to-night.”

“ Another man ?” repeated her aunt.

“Yes, it sounds absurd, doesn’t it? But you see, Aunt Cecilia is giving one of her big dinners this evening, and at the last moment Lord Bertie Meredith has failed her, so Stephen has gone to hunt up a substitute.”

“And why not Stephen himself?”

“ He was engaged ; at least, he says so. I don’t know that Aunt Cecilia believed him, but you would have laughed if you had heard her directions about the stop-gap. He was not to belong to the college set; he was not to be a doctor; he was not to be a clergyman; he was on no account to be an author. There was really nothing left that he could be, except a soldier, or a sailor, or what Stephen used to call a 1 gentleman at large.’ ”

“ Which is what Master Stephen himself would dearly like to bo, I suspect,” observed Mrs. Fursden, demurely.

Pearl laughed, and then colored a little, and finally said, with some self-consciousness both of tone and manner :

“ You knew, didn’t you, that Mr. Lewis has offered to give him a berth ?”

“ So I heard. It is a capital opening for Stephen.”

There was a little pause after this, during which Pearl kept her face carefully lowered over her music-books. Mrs. Fursden broke the silence by asking, rather meaningly :

“ Is that all, Pearl ?”

“ All what, Aunt Emily ?”

“ All I am to hear to-day.”

“It is all that there is to tell.”

“ It is not all I have heard from others.”

“ People talk such nonsense,” Miss Pearl remarked, rather loftily.

“ But not generally without some little foundation,” replied her aunt. “ However, dear child, I have not listened to any nonsense, as you call it, because I have said to myself that Pearl would certainly tell me before any one if there were really anything to tell.”

This appeal had the desired effect, for the girl came over and knelt down caressingly beside the old lady.

- “ I would indeed tell you, Aunt Emily, first of all, if I knew myself.”

“Do you mean then, my child, that he lias said nothing?”

“No, it is not that, though indeed he has not said anything yet, but — ”

“You think he will, if you let him?”

Pearl waited a moment, and then rushed at her answer, like an inexperienced rider at a fence.

“ It is the old, old story, Aunt Emily, and you will despise me, I dare say, but ... I can’t make up my mind.”

“ I don’t despise you at all, you little goose. A great many women find themselves in that predicament at some time or other in their lives.”

“ But I don’t believe I shall ever be in any other. Sometimes I would give the whole world that the thing could be settled for me as it is in France.”

“ I doubt if that would much mend matters, for you, at least. What is he like, this Mr. Lewis? How much do you think you fancy him ?”

“ I don’t know. I do like him, I think. He is very different from most men I meet.”

“How old?”

“Oh, I suppose people would call him middle-aged. His hair is . rather gray, but he doesn’t seem to want to be considered young.”

“And what does he consist of? Are there any relatives — objectionable or otherwise?”

“None, I believe, except an old uncle, who is fabulously rich and very eccentric, and insists on having deaf-and-dumb maids to wait on him.”

“ He must be rather original, I should think. Well, go on, Pearl ; tell me more about this new admirer.”

“ There is no more, except that he is a great banker, as you know, and that he is going to make Stephen’s fortune, or at least help him to make it himself, and — ”

“And that he is fond of my Pearl?” said Mrs. Fursden, putting her hand under the girl’s shapely chin, and forcing her to meet her searching eyes.

Pearl’s only answer was a- heavy sigh.

“What does he think, and hope, and believe, Pearl? Have you the least idea? That is more to the purpose than the bank, I think.”

“ He is very good, and goes in a great deal for charitable work in London. So I have heard, at least, from people who know him.”

ON A MAY MORN

“ And what does your godmother say?”

“ She says if I don’t take care I shall pick up a crooked stick.”

“Then she would approve of this match for you?”

“Oh yes; she has not said so exactly, but of course one can’t help knowing.”

“A good man,” repeated Mrs. Fnrsden, in a musing tone, “and well off, and next to no relations. It sounds perfect. Now, tell me why you should hesitate, my dear child.”

There was rather a froward flicker in Pearl’s curious green eyes as she answered :

“ Well, perhaps because he is so good. I can’t think of any other reason.”

“You would not care to marry a man who was not good?”

“ No, of course not, but I always feel that Mr. Lewis thinks me better than I am.”

“ So much the better if you try to be what he thinks you.”

For the third time this morning Pearl heaved a profound sigh.

“I wish I knew exactly what to do,” she said, presently. “Do advise me, Aunt Emily.”

“ Will you follow my advice if I give it to you ?”

“ If I can.”

“ From my point of view, it is a case of must rather than can.”

“ What is your point of view ?”

“ If you don’t mean to say ‘ Yes,’ don’t let him put the question, and leave him alone in future.”

“Aunt Emily, you are quite mistaken if you think that I have tried to make him fond of me.”

“I don’t think so, but from what you tell me I am sure that he cares for yon very much, and I am afraid that if you go on making yourself so charming to him he will find it rather hard to leave off caring when the time comes.”

“ I don’t know that I quite want him to leave off,” Pearl said, reflectively.

“Ah, there it is!” exclaimed her aunt, with a little excusable displeasure. “It is women like you who make men cynical. Well, you asked for my advice and I have given it. I don’t think we need sav anything more about the matter;” and the old lady got up rather abruptly, and walked over to the open window.

Pearl followed her after a moment’s hesitation, and said, beseechingly :

“Don’t be angry, Aunt Emily; you know I was only joking.”

“ I am not angry, child, but it is no joke to trifle with a man’s affections. If you ever do, as sure as fate you will be paid back in kind. Be wise, Pearl.”

“Honestly, Aunt Emily, I do want to be wise, but I know quite well that he won’t leave without speaking.”

“Poor fellow ! He deserves a better fate.”

“But if I said ‘Yes’?” hazarded Pearl, a little timidly.

Mrs. Fursden looked at her with keenly penetrating eyes up and down, through and through, till Pearl warded them off at last with a pretty playful gesture, and turned away her face.

“ It would be a worse fate for him than the other,” the old lady said, decisively, after having made this careful scrutiny.

And Pearl was wise enough not to attempt to dispute this judgment.

Chapter II Thinking Aloud

“ ’Tis greatly wise to talk with our past hours,

And ask them what report they bore to heaven.”

Pearl Merryweather was the daughter of the Archdeacon of Fingall. Her mother had died before the little girl was of an age to realize even dimly the irreparable nature of such a loss to any child, to one in her own position most of all.

The tenderest father cannot make up for it, and the archdeacon was scarcely to be called a tender father, although often erring on the side of undue indulgence to both his children.

He was an extremely busy man ; to quote his own expression with regard to the requirements of his position as archdeacon, he was the eye and heart of the bishop, and did everything short of those actually episcopal functions which cannot possibly be delegated to any substitute.

The city may have been the better, perhaps, for his untiring zeal and activity, but it is certain that his own children were not so. Still, it had not yet dawned on him that the relations between himself and them were scarcely desirable if not so unusual iu these days as they ought to be.

He was aware, indeed, that his son Stephen was idle and extravagant even beyond the generality of youthful sinners. It did not occur to him that he had never in his whole life made the smallest attempt to win the boy’s confidence or to educate his will. Stephen had been sent to Eton, and afterwards to Christchurch, where he had narrowly escaped expulsion for some college pranks that savored less, perhaps, of actual vice than of vacancy of mind.

He had also contracted within those reverend walls more than one undesirable intimacy with men above him in social position ; and was, in consequence, at the present moment, at least knee-deep in that deceitful quagmire to which we give the name of debt. Nevertheless, the archdeacon flattered himself that he had done the right thing by Stephen.

With his daughter’s education he had scarcely occupied himself at all. That trouble had been taken off his hands by her godmother, Lady Dalrymple, a first cousin of Mrs. Merryweather, and owner of the largest house in the largest square in the United Kingdom.

For it was a fact on which the inhabitants of Fingall piqued themselves not a little, that Monmouth Square might with ease have enclosed all those of Mayfair and Belgravia put together, still leaving a wide margin over to be planted as a boulevard.

Walking beneath these shady beech-trees with a kindred spirit or a budding lover, one might have fancied one’s self miles away from the great busy city, save for the distant hum of traffic in the crowded streets beyond.

In this square Pearl had skipped and played merrily as a little child, had walked demurely and discontentedly as a growing girl; and here, also, she strolled about later as a dangerously dreamy maiden, looking out on life with restless, unsatisfied eyes, which, alas! possessed also a fatal power of distracting and distorting the outlook of others.

But whether as child, or growing girl, or grown woman, she was ever a stranger to her father, who knew no more of her inner life, or of the motive power that guided it, than if she had been a Malay or a Hottentot.

To be sure, it had happened several times in the past four or five years that he had held unwilling interviews in his study with nervous, awkward, or excited gentlemen of different ages and degrees, but each more or less passionately bent on the same object — that of marrying the archdeacon’s daughter. In nearly all cases the archdeacon’s answer was the same. His daughter was free to choose for herself. It did not enter into his preoccupied brain that this, to begin with, was a most misleading statement, inasmuch as Lady Dairy mple’s influence over her goddaughter was quite notorious.

And so the suitors were severally dismissed with Dr. Merryweather’s blessing to receive their answer from Pearl’s own lips. But why she in her turn dismissed them, sometimes with scant courtesy, and what she had done in the first instance to induce them to risk such treatment, the archdeacon was far too busy to inquire; and Pearl went her own way accordingly, not always to the satisfaction of those most intimately concerned with it.

To the society in which she moved she was an object of ill-natured curiosity, only slightly modified by a sincere yet grudging admiration.

THINKING ALOUD

There were many prettier girls in Fingall than the archdeacon’s daughter, but, apparently without either effort or inclination on her part, she eclipsed them all.

None the less was it necessary that she should be treated with marked consideration.

Lady Dalrymple was the acknowledged ruler of Fingall society: in her house were to be met the' best partis of all the various sets and cliques into which that society was split up. Here alone did cavalry officers, and ecclesiastical dignitaries, and university dons, and leading physicians, and rich manufacturers, and successful engineers, meet on common ground and treat each other with common civility, as all good Christians should.

Therefore it was above all things of importance to keep in with Lady Dalrymple, and on no account to offend’ her, and report said that Miss Merryvveather was to be Lady Dalrymple’s heiress.

Certainly Lady Dalrymple had never said so herself, but neither had she ever cared to contradict what other people were obliging enough to say for her.

And she had superintended the girl’s education from first to last, had presented her at court, had taken her abroad, and finally launched her in society under her own auspices; treating her in all respects as a much-indulged daughter, giving no party herself, large or small, at which Pearl was not prominently brought forward, and sparing neither pains nor expense in setting off her somewhat unusual appearance.

What could she intend therefore by her goddaughter if not to bequeath to her a considerable slice, at least, of that colossal fortune of which the late Sir Roger Dalrymple, mill-owner and iron-master, had left her sole mistress? Curiously enough, no one ever thought of assigning any portion of it to Pearl’s brother. The youth was a general favorite in Fingall society, but his market value was comparatively nowhere. It had got about somehow that Lady Dalrymple had paid her young kinsman’s debts once after he left Oxford, but that she had drawn the line at doing so a second time.

Certain it was that there was no love lost between the imperious dame and the easy-going, pleasant-mannered young scapegrace who had the misfortune to be Pearl’s brother; and it was generally reported in Fingall that Master Stephen would never see a penny of his wealthy relative’s money.

Accordingly, those astute matrons who kept lists of eligible suitors for their grown-up daughters were obliged, however reluctantly, to omit his name therefrom ; and young Merry weather’s social status in the city was that of a detrimental only. His father had private means indeed, but a young man with expensive habits and gambling propensities is apt to exhaust the family exchequer. So reasoned the good people of Fingall, on the whole perhaps wisely, from their own point of view; and such was the environment in which Pearl Merryweather lived and moved and had her being. Possibly it accounted for many warps and excrescences in her character otherwise sadly perplexing to those who, in spite of them, loved her very dearly. Of this number — it was not large — the foremost was Mrs. Fursden, her father’s half-sister, widowed like Lady Dairy tuple, but, unlike her, poor and unworldly, and living contentedly on a miserable pittance in the most unfashionable quarter of Fingall.

Between St. Bridget’s Place, with its dilapidated railings and weedy walks and ill-kept shrubbery and the stately beech avenues of Monmouth Square, where the youth and beauty of the city were wont to congregate on Sunday afternoons, there was a social gulf fixed that very few persons had the temerity to attempt to cross. The foul and turbid river on which the town was built was far more easily bridged.

“One must draw the line somewhere,” Lady Dalrymple would observe, airily, with a delicate inflation of her high-bred nostrils suggestive of an unpleasant whiff from the quays. “ I draw it at St. Bridget’s Place. People who live there really ought not to expect to be visited.” Accordingly, she did not visit Mrs. Fursden more than two or three times in the year, when she would drive in state in her grand barouche, bringing with her a bouquet of costly exotics as a kind of disinfectant against the various diseases supposed to haunt these unfashionable regions.

She sometimes had the grace to leave the flowers behind her, but she never troubled herself to show any other civility to Pearl’s nearest relative. If she could have helped it, Pearl herself should have seen little or nothing of her father’s half-sister.

As it was, the girl’s visits were fewer and farther between than they ought to have been, but she met with no reproach from Mrs. Fursden ; and if there was one human being on earth whom Pearl thoroughly loved and revered it was her aunt Emily. To her sympathetic ear alone did she ever confide her trials, misgivings, and discontents; with her alone did she ever indulge in that curiously seductive, yet sometimes subtly perilous occupation best described as thinking aloud.

THINKING ALOUD

It is a rest, doubtless, to be in company where this is possible, although such repose may occasionally be more narcotic than healthful. One is not always the better for having unburdened one’s heart, and given words to one’s vague perplexities ; but in the present instance Pearl was at least not the worse for having been compelled to look her feminine vanity in the face, and she returned to her home in a mood of greater earnestness than usual.

It was wrong, she said to herself, musingly, to let this man hover about her, and keep him dangling after her, if she did not in the end mean to accept him. On the other hand, was it not quite possible that she might do worse than accept him?

Aunt Emily herself had seemed to wonder at first at her hesitation, but after that long searching scrutiny from Mrs. Fursden’s soft brown eyes, Pearl knew that it would be quite useless to try to deceive her aunt as to her motives, inasmuch as she could no longer deceive herself.

Her cheeks burned a little as she leaned back in the carriage, and gave herself tip to a dreamy retrospect of the past few weeks of her life. For, strange to say, her present difficulty was of no further date ; yet it already seemed quite a long time since she had first seen this lover’s keen glances turned on her, eloquent with that mysterious glow of passion that may either warm or consume the object of it, according as a man fears God or loves himself.

Pearl was not unused to such glances. She had met them before, and they had left her as cold and unmoved as they had found her. These did not indeed move her, but they made her wish greatly that she could be moved. So far, the only result of Mr. Lewis’s devout though silent worship had been, as it were, to break up the fallow ground of the girl’s hitherto untouched heart. She had never known that she was romantic; she had never guessed how fervently she longed for the experience of a grande passion until she found herself beloved by this man whom, as her instinct had told her from the first, she could never love in return. Nay, paradoxical as the sentiment may appear, if she had liked him less she could more easily have married him.

She had spoken the truth when she said that he was not like other men ; neither had he done his wooing after the ordinary manner.

He had never paid her compliments, or talked to her about himself; two of the signs by which men are most wont to testify their feelings for a woman. What he had done was to take it for granted that she was actuated by the same motives and principles which ruled his own life ; and it was the consciousness that he thus judged her which caused Pearl so many painful searchings of heart when confronted, as she very soon was, with the certainty that he desired to make her his wife. She had been in turns coquettish, capricious, and imperious with her other lovers; to him she was always gentle and winning. Naturally, he argued favorably from this marked distinction in her manner of treating him.