AN IDEAL

AN IDEAL

Age comes to some people only like the wider opening of the rose, the gentle drooping of the creamy outer petal; and one must needs think of this in looking at Mrs. Fernalde. “I have had my threescore and ten,” she used to say. “I have had all that nature has to give, and now I am living on grace.” It was a sunny spirit that informed her, a lightsomeness that never let the substance of a tear penetrate beneath the surface that could endure nothing but happiness. Her unfailing good-nature was like a fairy wand that smoothed every trouble out of her way and out of the way of every one about her. If her hair was white, no great sorrow had made it so; and its contrast with the soft brilliancy of a black eye and the velvet flush of a cheek unwritten by many lines, made her perhaps as lovely as one standing in all the full radiance of youth. As for Mr. Fernalde—tall, dark, spare—he was by no means unattractive, and his courtly manners had a unique elegance. He loved his ease; and annoyances, when they chanced to break through the magic circle his wife drew about him, vexed him, as they usually do a nervous person. For the rest, he was one of those men who, having led a singularly fortunate life, maintain to themselves a fancy that they have just missed the last stroke to make the crystal complete, who have a vanishing ideal always just beyond sight and reach.

The Fernaldes were neighbors of ours. Wealth required no exertion of them, and advancing age secluded them in some measure from general society; their home was always cheerful; they were always in it; and if there had been no such person as crabbed old Mrs. Talliafero, who had spent the last six months with them, it would have been hard to see how heaven itself could be much improvement on it. However, she was going at once, and then where would be the crumple in the rose-leaf?

These old people loved young people. “The new generation lends us a part of its freshness,” they used to say. They always welcomed any of us, and indeed made me so particularly conscious of their flattering favor that I spent a good portion of my time with them, threaded the sweet little lady’s needles, read and wrote more or less for Mr. Fernalde, and was gradually taken into their confidence, which I am about to violate.

“Could I imagine a happier old age than this, my child, with my wife, my health, my flowers, our birds and pets and friends?” he said once, repeating my question. “Why, yes, my dear, it was much happier before my wife brought Mrs. Talliafero to stay with us. Some old school-mate or girl friend of hers—I don’t quite know—for the fact is she nettled me so the first day she came that I wouldn’t ask Rosalie a word about her, for fear I should show my displeasure at her having brought her home when she turned up. It is astonishing how an invisibly small thorn will destroy your equanimity. And then this woman has a quality that would turn honey into vinegar, I do believe. She has changed our quiet, peaceful, sunshiny life, that seemed like one long day in June, into a sharp, raw day in November. There is something very rasping about her. I don’t see what my wife invited her to spend such a season with us for. I wonder if she thought that at the end of the time I should press for a continuance? My dear, I have counted the days—it sounds sadly against all hospitable rites—I have counted the days till I should see her consult a railway time-table, as she did yesterday, about going home to-day. I believe she is not in affluent circumstances now. I would be glad to meet the expense of boarding her at Buckingham Palace if that would keep her away! I am speaking strongly. Yes, Rosalie,” looking at his laughing wife, “I know you say too strongly. But it is argument, assertion, contradiction, differing, bickering, finding fault with the servants who have suited us half a lifetime, questioning the expenditure, disordering the arrangements from one day to the next. Think of it, when she comes into my study and inveighs about my wife’s patience in enduring such a den of disorder in her house. She wonders that I do not wear a scratch. She warns me of indigestions, she threatens me with nightmares, she reminds me of my age, she interferes with my pipe! And then she wants so much fresh air! Thank Heaven! her time is up to-day, and my wife will not invite another guest for a half-year without giving me time to arrange a residence elsewhere! And such a voice, too! When one hears it, one longs for the proper infirmities of age that dull the hearing—sharp as a file, piercing as a locust’s whirr! What are you laughing at, Rosalie?”

“Ah, you are not quite just, my love,” said the sweet little old lady. “Mrs. Talliafero has a fine mind. She is really waking us up. She prevents our sinking down into a jelly-like existence, as so many of our age do. She keeps us bubbling.”

“There, there, there, my dear! Don’t say another word about your Mrs. Talliafero! Go and spend a season with her at Saratoga, if you ever want to see her any more. I’ll go to Richfield. Bubble! She’d make sulphuric acid bubble out of the sands of the desert! I’ve no doubt she worried Talliafero, poor man, into the grave! But there, I’ve said too much,” he added, directly. “I beg your pardon, my sweet, if I hurt your feelings about an old friend, but really—Now, Rosalie, my love, if you don’t care to go over these accounts, our young friend will.” And then Mrs. Fernalde tripped off with as light a foot as a girl of seventeen, and I drew up the great folding-screen around our chairs, stirred the fire a little, and took pencil and paper to add up the figures Mr. Fernalde was to read out to me.

But Mr. Fernalde was in a brown-study for a little, and I let him stay.

“It was strange you should have asked me that question, child,” he said at length. “I used, at your time of life, to imagine a very different old age from this, if I may so call that imagination, for, in fact, old age never entered into my calculations. I imagined nothing about the passage of time, only of the continuance of a condition. And that condition was the perpetual paradise of Alicia’s smiles.”

“Rosalie, you mean,” said I.

“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Fernalde, shortly. “I mean Alicia.”

“Alicia?”

“Alicia, who, when I was twenty, was the light of my eyes and the loadstar of my life.”

“I don’t know what you mean, sir.”

“Of course you don’t, of course you don’t. I’ve half the mind to tell you, though. It’s a long time ago—a long time—and no harm done. One is perhaps a fool at seventy,” said Mr. Fernalde presently again. “I’m not quite eighty. One is certainly a fool at twenty. I was, at any rate; but I didn’t know it, and I walked in a fool’s paradise. And to be a fool and not know it! Is there, on the whole, any further paradise? Pretty, pretty as a peach!” he began again, after another pause. “Ah! that would have sounded to me then like profanity. That heavenly fair face! those eyes like the stars in a blue midnight! that smile of exquisite innocence and purity! I used to tremble before her sometimes as before some young saint stepped from a shrine—one that I dared to desecrate by loving. Ah, how I loved her! The sight of certain flowers brings her back to me now! When the apples are in blossom, that pink and white snow, that ineffable delicacy of perfume, calls her before me like a revelation! There are times when this eternal smoothness of things in my life palls on me—times when I cannot bear the sound of evening bells coming across the water. It so renews for me that evening—that evening when I lost her—when I lost her, if I found Rosalie!”

“You lost her, then?” I said, to break the silence that followed.

“I will tell you. The two were inseparable. If I walked or rode or sailed with one, the other was not far away. Rosalie was a little gay, tormenting sprite; Alicia a pensive saint. It was Alicia’s home; her father was a man of wealth, and Rosalie was visiting her. Rosalie had no home, no fortune; she had just finished school and was to be a governess, dreading it as a butterfly might dread being broken to harness, dreading it all the more for this glimpse of luxurious life in her friend’s home since school. I myself had a fortune in my own right, and had been guilty of the follies of most of the jeunesse dorée of that period, which, if comparatively innocent, were troublesome enough to the authorities of my college to need discipline, and I was passing a year of most unhappy rustication in the place adjoining Alicia’s home. Never shall I forget the first moment in which I saw Alicia running down one of the orchard aisles with her white garments fluttering about her, and her fair head bent over the branch of apple-blossoms in her hand. If lightning had fallen, the revolution that seized me could not have come more quickly. I seemed to be changed in a twinkling, to have been borne into another planet. I felt as if sunshine had pierced and penetrated once impenetrable gloom. When I fell asleep in the grass of that orchard, and woke with that heavenly creature bending over me, I rose only to walk on air. The little brown face of Rosalie, with its carnations, with the glint and glance of its great brown eyes, with its flood of brown curls that had a touch of gold on them, with the glittering teeth of its beautiful laugh, was just over her shoulder, but I merely know I saw it by remembering it afterwards. She was only a shadow to me in those days; and as for me, I was only Alicia’s shadow myself. She lived and moved in some exalted atmosphere, to my perception. She does now. Her father wore the front of Jove; I could not say that he did not carry the thunders. I felt myself a mote in the broad beam of their sunshine, as though I were something hardly visible in their large range of vision, as if it required an effort to make myself perceived by them. I hesitated to make the effort—I worshipped from afar. When she spoke to me my heart beat so I had hardly voice to answer; when she touched my hand it thrilled me through and through. And I asked no more. I thought of no more for a while than just to continue so forever; to see her from my window walking under the long aisles of the low-branched orchard, like some mediæval picture; to walk beside her sometimes; now and then to venture reading from the same page with her, now and then to be her partner in the dance. That Rosalie should be about with me, riding here, strolling there, walking to church, reading with the old pastor, in whose charge there was a fiction that I was, and so, in a way, studying with me—that was all a matter of common-place; she was sweet, she was fresh, she was charming. But what was all that when an angel was in the room?

“One night I was on the gallery just outside their drawing-room, looking in at the long window, and Alicia was singing. Ah, how delicious was that voice! The cherubim and seraphim who continually do sing, if I ever hear them, will not sing so sweetly. I wonder to whom that voice is singing now! Beside her, that night, was the scamp who had come to the place more than once—a proud, commanding fellow in his undress uniform, a man whom her father plainly intended she should marry. I can see the scene now—the rich and dimly lighted room full of purple shadows, the air laden with the scent of flowers; Alicia in her white drapery, more mystical, more beautiful, more holy, as she sang, than if revealed in the glow of her beauty; outside, the violet depths of the sky, and the moon just falling, like some great golden flower, low in the west; and as Alicia’s voice became silent, a choir of bell-tones coming far and fine and free across the water, like echoes of her song in heaven. My heart swelled with a fulness of rapture, life seemed too rich, too sweet, too sacred—and then I saw that man stoop and kiss her brow!

“The action turned me to stone for a moment, till he came sauntering to the window, and I knew no more what I was doing than that bronze Perseus in the corner would if he moved. I lifted the hand that had seemed stone, and as he passed me I struck him on the mouth—the mouth that had done the profanation.”

And Mr. Fernalde was quiet a little while.

“And that was the end of all things,” he resumed. “The fellow laughed at me for a mad boy. Her father launched one of the thunderbolts, and forbade me the house. What a stricken day and night of wretchedness! What a week of hopelessness, of annihilation! But perhaps Alicia felt differently from these creatures. Why should I not discover? Why should I suppose she had any other sympathy with that wretch than the sympathy of the star with the worm? And if my glad peradventure were true—why then we could fly from these places that should know us no more; the world was before us, heaven’s gates were open to us. And I wrote—my hand trembling at its sacrilegious daring—just a dozen lines, without address, without signature. She would know what it meant. And I sent it by the parson’s boy. And I waited for her, lying on the grass beneath the orchard trees, in the deep gloom just gilded by the influence of the unseen moon. There came the rustling of garments, the tripping of a foot; my heart beat, my eyes grew dim. Was it she coming up behind me, as I lay lifted on my elbow, kneeling and putting her arms about me, raining swift kisses on my face?—wild sweet kisses in that shadow; wild passionate whispers in that silence! And then a great pang smote me; and I rose and went out with her into the less dim darkness—and it was Rosalie.

“She never knew,” said Mr. Fernalde, “she does not know to-day, that I died that night. I can’t say how I lived through those moments even. They were but moments she had stolen away. She had to return at once. We parted at the foot of the mock-orange walk, and I went to my bed and lay there in a trance of despair. Perhaps sunlight brought some relief. The parson told at the breakfast-table the news that Alicia was betrothed to the army officer I had seen. I wrote a word, saying I was called away. And I was gone a week or more. But in that blank I must have something to love me—to have an interest in. Better Rosalie than the absolute negation of those days. She thought nothing of my absence—after my return. She was as full of romance as a flower of nectar. And, to sum it up, if she was not the rose, she had lived with the rose. One day we married; and here we are. A long life, a happy life, and I have never regretted the day in it that made her my wife. After all, one cannot marry among the angels—clay must mate with clay.

“What do you say? Not love her, my child? You never were more mistaken. I love her tenderly, absorbingly. She is a perfect woman. She has been a perfect wife. She has made me calmly and completely happy. If once in a while the old hope, the old dream of a passion arises and sweeps before me in its bloom and light, it is because it means youth to me—that youth which we do not know till we are old—is itself the ideal that it holds up for worship. Yet, perfect as my wife is, fifty years of this smooth life with her wear something of the common-place, and if across their dead level of same content sometimes gleams the shining of Alicia’s face, it is not in any disloyalty to her. I often wonder what became of the lovely creature. Once I could not have spoken of her. At seldom times, when I sit alone by the fire, she comes and sits beside me, and gleams of light and shadow make a face with her sweetness, her beauty, her pensive and ethereal grace. Dear girl! I suppose she sleeps in her grave by this; but she is a shaft of the light of heaven in my memory!”

And Mr. Fernalde rose, walking to the window, just as the screen began to tremble, and a smothered cough, and then an undisguised one, betrayed to me, if not to him, that Mrs. Fernalde had heard the chief part of the monologue.

“And I had heard it in fragments and sections more than once before,” she afterwards told me with her pleasant smile. “I know it means nothing—that he is just as wholly mine as I am his—that our love is the imperishable sort—that we are welded into one by fifty years together. And perhaps it was ignoble of me to break the pretty bubble, to take away his little ideal, with which he has found comfort whenever I would have my own way too much. Yet I thought it was about time.”

But she said nothing of this at all as she came bustling round the corner of the screen that morning.

“There is such a gale blowing outside,” she said, “that the dust really rises in the house fit to choke one.”

“You haven’t caught cold, Rosalie?” said her husband, turning in concern.

“Not the least. But I shall if the hall-door is open another moment. There she comes now. Make haste, and bid Alicia good-bye, my love. She is just going.”

“Who?” he cried, suddenly opening his eyes like lamps in their deep settings.

“Alicia—Mrs. Talliafero—dear. She married again, you know. Oh, it has been a fine jest,” she cried, with her low laugh, “to think that you should not have recognized Alicia in all these weeks and months!”

Mr. Fernalde was silent for a few moments, looking at the cruel little lady before him, with her color like the half-tarnished rose, with the soft brilliancy of her smile. Then he crossed over the hearth before me, and he took her hands and bent down and kissed her mouth.

“My Rosalie,” said he, “will you not make my adieus to Mrs. Talliafero yourself? Tell her—tell her I have gone to the funeral of an old friend!”