The Belle of Bowling Green
garden gate, ‘Theodosia is dead! If she were not all the prisons in the
world could not keep her from me!’ Well, then, all of you must remember
the loss of Theodosia Burr Alston?”
“I was in New Orleans at the time,” said Leonard. “I heard nothing
there, or if so, have forgotten.”
“I also was in New Orleans,” said Achille. “I do not remember--no, not
at all.”
“I do remember,” said Sappha. “Mother was very sorry for Mr. Burr. We
often spoke of him.”
“You never told me about it, grandmother,” added Annette. “Why did you
not?”
“Good reasons had I. So much was there to say that could not be talked
about. A great many people had yet in mind Catherine Ring’s words, and
so Aaron Burr’s long watch for the child that never came was quietly
and pitifully passed over. Yes, people remember; and if they do not
remember they _feel_--they _feel_, they know not what. I have watched.
One by one, I have seen those that welcomed Aaron Burr home drop away
from him. This day a man stops and greets him, to-morrow he passes him
by. The unlucky, they only stick to him; because for a familiar they
know him. Aaron Burr is a doomed man--haunted by the wraiths of those he
has wronged--a doomed man, and nothing that he does shall ever prosper.”
She ceased speaking with these words, and after some desultory
conversation on the subject, Sappha said, “she must go home.” Then
Annette went upstairs with her, and Achille made an effort to continue
the subject; but neither madame nor yet Leonard were disposed for
discussion; and when Sappha returned to the parlour, cloaked and wrapped
in furs, Leonard hastily assumed his street costume and went out with
her. Then the conversation, the warmth, and the drowsy light, added to
the unusual feeling which the Ring tragedy had evoked, produced an
effect upon madame she did not anticipate--she gradually lost
consciousness, and finally fell asleep. For a while Achille and Annette
spoke in whispers, and Annette tried all her powers to win from her
companion the secret madame made so much of. He dallied with it, but
kept it inviolate; and she dropped her pretty head with a sense of
defeat that the circumstance hardly seemed to warrant. Quiet and
speechless she sat, and Achille held her hand and watched the shadow of
disappointment obliterate the dimples and smiles, not always as becoming
in his eyes as her graver deportment. The glow of the firelight, the
stillness thrilled through and through with that old tragedy of love,
the look of defeat in Annette’s pretty face, and her whole attitude of
submission to it, pleased the young man. He thought her more womanly and
exquisite than ever before; and he kissed the hand he held, and said in
the softest, sweetest voice: “I cannot tell you madame’s secret, but I
will tell you one of my own--Annette, beautiful Annette, I love you.”
And Annette behaved with the most amazing propriety. He felt the little
hand he held tremble to his words, and he saw on her face the
transfiguration of love, though she did not lift it, or answer him in
any other way. But this coy reticence was exactly the conduct Achille
approved; and in that dim room, where only sleep kept vigil, Achille
asked Annette to be his wife, and Annette answered him as he desired.
“I shall speak to madame in the morning,” he said; “to-night it will be
too much.”
“It is too much even for me,” answered Annette; “I never dreamed of
being so happy.”
“Nor I,” answered the fortunate lover. He then surrendered himself to
her charm. He forgot how often he had privately declared he would never
do so; forgot how often he had told himself that Annette de Vries was a
beauty with
a heart like a little glacier. As for Annette, she was satisfied. In the
first days of her acquaintance with Achille St. Ange she had resolved to
be his wife; and her resolve was now in process of accomplishment. And
after all, it had not been a difficult end to attain; a little love, a
little listening, a little patience, a little persistence, and the man
was won. It was only another case of proving the folly of any resistance
to invincible woman. For has not all experience proved that if a woman
seriously determines to marry a certain man she is about as sure to
accomplish her end as if, wishing to reach Washington, she entered a
train bound for that city?
During this scene between Annette and Achille Sappha and Leonard Murray
were walking in the clear, frosty starlight. They were lovers, but their
conversation was too anxious to be loverlike. Sappha was entreating
Leonard to cancel his engagement with Mr. Burr. She was sure if he did
not her father would permit no engagement with his daughter. “You will
have to choose,” she said, “between Mr. Burr and myself. You cannot take
both into your life, Leonard; I am sure it is impossible.” She did not
name the Ring tragedy. She was far less impressed by it than Leonard had
been. It was her father’s opposition she feared.
Not so Leonard. He had inherited from his Scotch ancestors a vivid vein
of supernatural tendency. His own clan had numerous traditions of
posthumous revenge, so vindictive that Leonard’s first unconscious
commentary on madame’s narrative was the whispered exclamation--only
heard by Achille--“The vengeance of the dead is terrible!” But if there
was this latent fear in his heart, mingled with the personal one that
association might include him in that vengeance, the feeling was
strongly combated by another inherited tendency, so vital as to be
almost beyond reasoning with--the sentiment of loyalty to a person or a
cause to which he had once given his allegiance. It had been a kind of
insanity in his clan, for they had always gathered to the last man in
the cause of their exiled kings, though they knew right well that to
stand by the Stuarts was to stand by misfortune and death.
So, tossed between these two horns of a dilemma, Leonard could not make
Sappha the unconditional promise she asked. He had given to Aaron Burr a
fealty founded on an intense admiration for his great abilities and his
great wrongs. The physical charm of the man had also fascinated Leonard,
as it fascinated almost every one who came fairly under its influence;
and thus, though warned by one ancestral strain to retire from some
malignity he could not control, he was urged forward by another
sentiment which put his word, his honour, his friendship, and his
loyalty before all other considerations.
These underlying motives of action were but partially understood by
Leonard, and were not comprehended in any measure by Sappha. But at
eighteen years of age we do not need to know, in order to feel; we can
feel without knowledge; and Sappha was certain that the association of
her lover with a man so unfortunate as Mr. Burr would include both of
them in its inimical proneness to calamity.
The mingling of these elements in Leonard’s nature must be recognised
before we can understand how a lover, earnest and devoted, could
hesitate about casting adrift a friendship so recent when it threatened
a tie still fonder and more personal. But the most invulnerable
sentiments a man has to conquer are those he brings with him from
previous incarnations. Prejudices and opinions planted in his mind
during last year, or the present year, will have a demonstrative
vitality; but there is a stubborn quality about those we bring with us
that is only gained by passing through the grave and tasting of
immortality. If Sappha’s and Leonard’s love for each other was not of
the past, then it was hardly one year old; yet she was demanding for it
a sacrifice of feelings incorporate in Leonard’s nature from unknown
centuries.
They walked together talking only of Mr. Burr for more than an hour;
then Sappha said “she was cold and must go into the house.” She was not
so much cold as weary. We are always weary when we do not understand,
and Sappha could not understand why Mr. Burr should interfere in her
affairs. At the door Leonard spoke to her about the theatre on Friday
night, and she promised to give her father and mother his invitation.
“It is too late to detain you longer, my beloved,” he said; “but I will
call early in the morning for the answer. I hope they will accept my
offer. It will make me very proud and happy.”
Sappha was sure that her mother would do so. “My father is always
uncertain,” she said, “but I think he will go if I ask him.”
In the morning, however, there was no question of naming the subject.
The judge had come home late the previous night, and even then was
suffering all the premonitory symptoms of an attack of gout. Sappha was
accustomed to these evil periods, and quite aware that all Leonard’s
plans were useless. For no one but Mrs. Bloommaert and the two negro men
who nursed the judge were likely to see him; or, if they were wise, to
want to see him; and Sappha was compelled to add disappointment to the
already restless dissatisfaction which had somehow invaded the love
which Leonard really bore her.
The morning interview was, moreover, very hurried. Leonard was going to
court to hear Mr. Burr argue a certain case, and though he did not tell
Sappha this, she felt that Mr. Burr was the cause of her lover’s unusual
haste. Before he knew this objectionable person he had never worried
about time; now he was constantly consulting his watch. She felt as if
their love had been mingled with some element that robbed it of its
immortal beauty and bound it to the slavery of hours and minutes; nay,
she could not have defined her sense of loss, even thus far, accurately;
she was only wistfully conscious of a change that was not a gain.
Leonard came early in the morning, and was bitterly disappointed to find
that his little plan was absolutely abortive. The judge was suffering
much, and the subject had not even been named to him. Mrs. Bloommaert,
indeed, rather fretfully interrupted Sappha in the midst of her delivery
of Leonard’s invitation. “The theatre!” she ejaculated. “If you were in
your father’s room for ten minutes you would not have the courage to
name the place. I am sorry, of course, but theatre-going is out of the
question. Leonard does seem so unfortunate!”
“Do not be unjust, mother; don’t you think it is father that is
unfortunate? And then his misfortune makes you suffer, and I also; for I
did want to go to the theatre on Friday night so much. I suppose Annette
will be disappointed also, for of course she cannot go with Achille
alone. They were, no doubt, calculating on your presence.”
“It cannot be helped, Sappha. Your father must not be left; my place is
with him. I suppose Mrs. Clark will be going. Leonard and you can join
her party.”
But when this proposition was made to Leonard he refused it without
reservation. He was certain that the Clark party was already complete,
and he showed a touch of stubbornness in temper that pained and
astonished Sappha. If he could not have his pleasure exactly as he
wished it, there was no longer any pleasure in it; and he said with an
air of intense chagrin:
“I shall be the only young man of my circle who will not be there with
the girl he loves and the family into which he hopes to be admitted. I
feel it very much.” And with these words he went away.
All morning Sappha sat in a kind of listless grief. She was in a mesh of
circumstances against whose evil influence she was powerless. Nothing
could avail. The morning was damp and cold and full of melancholy, the
house strangely still; she could not sew, she could not read, she could
only suffer. And at eighteen years of age suffering is so acute, it
seems to youth’s dreams of happiness such a wrong; and the reasonable