by Marion Bryce
—MEASURE FOR MEASURE.
Mrs. Sylvester, reclining on the palest of blue couches, in the slanting sunlight of an April afternoon, is a study for a painter. Not that such inspiring loveliness breathed from her person, conspicuous as it was for its rich and indolent grace, but because every attitude of her large and well formed limbs, in every raise of the thick white lids from eyes whose natural brightness was obscured by the mist of aimless fancies, she presented such an embodiment of luxurious ease, one might almost imagine they were gazing upon the favorite Sultana of some eastern court, or, to be for once poetical as the subject demands, a full blown Egyptian lotos floating in hushed enjoyment on the placid waters of its native stream. Indeed for all the blonde character of her beauty, there was certainly something oriental about the physique of this favored child of fortune. Had the tint of her skin been richened to a magnolia bloom instead of reminding you of that description accorded to the complexion of one of Napoleon’s sisters, that it looked like white satin seen through pink glass, she would have passed in any Eastern market, for a rare specimen of Circassian beauty.
But Mr. Sylvester coming home fatigued and harassed, cared little for Circassian beauties or Oriental odalisques. It was a welcome that he desired, and such refreshment as a quick eye and ready hand can bestow when guided by a tender and loving heart; or so thought the watchful Paula as she glided from her room at the sound of his step in the hall, and met him coming weary and disheartened from the side of Ona’s couch. The sight of her revived him at once.
“Well, little one, what have you been doing to-day?”
Instantly a shade fell over her countenance. “I hardly know how to tell you. It has been a day of great experiences to me. I am literally shaken with them. I have been wanting to talk to Ona about what I have seen and heard, but thought I had best wait till you came home, for I could not repeat the story twice.”
“What! you look pale. Nothing has happened to frighten you I hope,” exclaimed he, leading her back to Ona’s side, who stirred a little, and presently deigned to take an upright position.
“I do not know if it is fear or horror,” cried Paula, shuddering; “I have seen a fearful woman—But first I ought to tell you that I took a ride with Miss Stuyvesant in the Park this morning—”
“Yes, and persisted in going for that lady on horseback instead of sending the groom after her, and all starting from the front of our house,” murmured Mrs. Sylvester with lazy chagrin.
Paula smiled, but otherwise took no notice of this standing topic of disagreement.
“It was a beautiful day,” she proceeded, “and we enjoyed it very much, but we were so unfortunate as to run over a little boy, at that place where the equestrian road crosses the foot path; a lame child, Mr. Sylvester, who could not get out of our way; poor too, with a ragged jacket on which seemed to make it all the worse.”
Ona gave a shrug with her white shoulders, that seemed to question this. “Did you injure him very much?” queried she, with a show of interest; not sufficient however to impair her curiosity as to the cut of one of her nails.
“I cannot say; his little arm was struck, and when I went to pick him up, he lay back in my lap and moaned till I thought my heart would break. But that was not the worst that happened. As we went hurrying up the walk to find the child’s father, we were met by a woman wrapped in a black cloak whose long and greasy folds seemed like the symbol of her own untold depravity. Her glance as she encountered the child writhing in pain at my feet, made my heart stand still. It was more than malignant, it was actually fiendish. ‘Is he hurt?’ she asked, and it seemed as if she gloated over the question; she evidently longed to hear that he was, longed to be told that he would die; and when I inquired if she was his mother, she broke into a string of laughter, that seemed to darken the daylight. ‘His mother! O yes, we look alike, don’t we!’ she exclaimed, pointing with a mocking gesture frightful to see, first at his eyes which were very blue and beautiful, and then at her own which were dark as evil thoughts could make them. I never saw anything so dreadful. Malignancy! and towards a little lame child! what could be more horrible!”
Mr. Sylvester and his wife exchanged looks, then the former asked, “Did she follow you, Paula?”
“No; after telling me that I—But I cannot repeat what she said,” exclaimed the young girl with a quick shudder. “Since I came home,” she musingly continued, “I have looked and looked at my face in the glass, but I cannot believe that what she declared is true. There is no similarity between us, could never have been any: I wish not have it that she ever saw in all the days of her life such a picture as that in her glass.” And with a sudden gesture Paula started up and pointed to herself as she stood reflected in, one of the tall mirrors with which Ona’s boudoir abounded.
“And did she dare to make any comparison between you and her own degraded self?” exclaimed Mr. Sylvester, with a glance at the exquisite vision of pure girlhood thus doubly presented to his notice.
“Yes, what I am, she was once, or so she said. And it may be true. I have never suffered sorrow or experienced wrong, and cannot measure their power to carve the human face with such lines as I beheld on that woman’s countenance to-day. But do not let us talk of her any more. She left us at last, and we found the child’s father. Mr. Sylvester,” she suddenly asked, “are there to be found in this city, men occupying honorable positions and as such highly esteemed, who like Damocles of old, may be said to sit under the constant terror of a falling sword in the shape of some possible disclosure, that if made, would ruin their position before the world forever?”
Mr. Sylvester started as if he had been shot. “Paula!” cried he, and instantly was silent again. He did not look at his wife, but if he had, he would have perceived that even her fair skin was capable of blanching to a yet more startling whiteness, and that her sleepy eyes could flash open with something like expression in their lazy depths.
“I mean,” dreamily continued Paula, absorbed in her own remembrance, “that if what we overheard said by the father of that child to-day is true, some one of our prominent men, whose life is not all it appears, is standing on the verge of possible exposure and shame; that a hound is on his track in the form of a starving man; and that sooner or later he will have to pay the price of an unprincipled creature’s silence, or fall into public discredit like some others of whom we have lately read.” Then as silence filled the room, she added, “It makes me tremble to think that a man of means and seeming honor should be placed in such a position, but worse still that we may know such a one and be ignorant of his misery and his shame.”
“It is getting time for me to dress,” murmured Ona, sinking back on her pillow and speaking in her most languid tone of voice. “Could you not hasten your story a little Paula?”
But Mr. Sylvester with a hurried glance at the closing eyes of his wife, requested on the contrary that she would explain herself more definitely. “Ona will pardon the delay,” said he, with a set, strained politeness that called up the least little quiver of suppressed sarcasm about the rosy infantile lips that he evidently did not consider it worth his while to notice.
“But that is all,” said Paula. However she repeated as nearly as she could just what the boy’s father had said. At the conclusion Mr. Sylvester rose.
“What kind of a looking man was he?” said that gentleman as he crossed to the window.
“Well, as nearly as I can describe, he was tall, dark and seedy, with a shock of black hair and a pair of black whiskers that floated on the wind as he walked. He was evidently of the order of decayed gentleman, and his manner of talking, especially in the profuse use he made of his arms and hands, was decidedly foreign. Yet his speech was pure and without accent.”
Mr. Sylvester’s face as he asked the next question was comparatively cheerful. “Was the other man with whom he was talking, as dark and foreign as himself?”
“O no, he was round and jovial, a little too insinuating perhaps, in his way of s
peaking to ladies, but otherwise a well enough appearing man.”
Mr. Sylvester bowed and looked at his watch. (Why do gentlemen always consult their watches even in the face of the clock?) “Ona, you are right,” said he, “it is time you were dressing for dinner.” And concluding with a word or two of sympathy as to the peculiar nature of Paula’s adventures as he called them, he hastened from the room and proceeded to his little refuge above.
“He has not asked me what became of the child,” thought Paula, with a certain pang of surprise. “I expected him to say, ‘Shall we not try and see the little fellow, Paula?’ if only to allow me to explain that the child’s father would not tell me where they lived. But the later affair has evidently put the child out of his head. And indeed it is only natural that a business man should be more interested in such a fact as I have related, than in the sprained arm of a wretched creature’s ‘little feller.’” And she turned to assist Ona, who had arisen from her couch and was now absorbed in the intricacies of an uncommonly elaborate toilet.
“Those men did not mention any names?” suddenly queried that lady, looking with an expression of careful anxiety, at the twist of her back hair, in the small hand-mirror she held over her shoulder.
“No,” said Paula, dropping a red rose into the blonde locks she was so carefully arranging. “He expressly said he did not know the name of the person to whom he alluded. It was a strange conversation for me to overhear, was it not?” she remarked, happy to have interested her cousin in anything out of the domains of fashion.
“I don’t know—certainly—of course—” returned Mrs. Sylvester with some incoherence. “Do you think red looks as well with this black as the lavender would do?” she rambled on in her lightest tone, pulling out a box of feathers.
Paula gave her a little wistful glance of disappointment and decided in favor of the lavender.
“I am bound to look well to-night if I never do so again,” said Ona. They were all going to a public reception at which a foreign lord was expected to be present “How fortunate I am to have a perfect little hairdresser in my own family, without being obliged to send for some gossipy, fussy old Madame with her stories of how such and such a one looked when dressed for the Grand Duke’s ball, or how Mrs. So and So always gave her more than her price because she rolled up puffs so exquisitely.” And stopping to aid the deft girl in substituting the lavender feather for the red rose in her hair—she forgot to ask any more questions.
“Ona,” remarked her husband, coming into the room on his way down to dinner—Mrs. Sylvester never dined when she was going to any grand entertainment—it made her look flushed, she said—“I am not in the habit of troubling you about your family matters, but have you heard from your father of late?”
Mrs. Sylvester turned from her jewel-casket and calmly surveyed his face. It was fixed and formal, the face he turned to his servants and sometimes—to his wife. “No,” said she, with a light little gesture as though she were speaking of the most trivial matter. “In one respect at least, papa is like an angel, his visits are few and far between.”
Mr. Sylvester’s eye-brows drew heavily together. For a man with a smile of strange sweetness, he could sometimes look very forbidding. “When was he here last?” he inquired in a tone more commanding than he knew.
She did not appear to resent it. “Let me see,” mused she. “When was it I lost my diamond ear-ring? O I remember, it was on the eve of New Year’s day a year ago; I recollect because I had to wear pearls with my garnet brocade,” she pettishly sighed. “And papa came the next week, after you had given me the money for a new pair. I have reason to remember that, for not a dollar did he leave me.”
“Ona!” exclaimed her husband, shrinking back in uncontrollable surprise, while his eyes flashed inquiringly to her ears in which two noble diamonds were brilliantly shining.
“O,” she cried, just raising one snowy hand to those sparkling ornaments, while a faint blush, the existence of which he had sometimes doubted, swept over her careless face. “I was enabled to procure them in time; but for a whole two months I had to go without diamonds.” She did not say that she had bartered her wedding jewels to make up the sum she needed, but he may have understood that without being told.
“And that is the last time you have seen him?” He held her eyes with his, she could not look away.
“The very last, sir; strange to say.”
His glance shifted from her face and he turned with a bow towards the door.
“May I ask,” she slowly inquired as he moved across the floor, “what is the reason of this sudden interest in poor papa?”
“Certainly,” said he, pausing and looking back, not without some emotion of pity in his glance. “I am sometimes struck with a sense of the duty I owe you, in helping you to bear the burden of certain secret responsibilities which I fear may sometimes prove too heavy for you.”
She gave a little rippling laugh that only sounded hollow to the image listening in the glass. “You choose strange times in which to be struck,” said she, holding up two dresses for his inspection, with a lift of her brows evidently meant as an inquiry as to which he thought the most becoming.
“Conscience is the chooser, not I,” declared he, for once allowing himself to ignore the weighty question of dress thus propounded.
His wife gave a little toss of her head and he left the room.
“I should like Edward very much,” murmured she in a burst of confidence to her own reflection the glass, “if only he would not bother himself so much about that same disagreeable conscience.”
“You look unhappy,” said Mr. Sylvester to Paula as they came from the dining-room. “Have the adventures of the day made such an impression upon you that you will not be able to enjoy the evening’s festivities?”
She lifted her face and the quick smile came.
“I do not like to see your brow so clouded,” continued he, smoothing his own to meet her searching eye. “Smiles should sit on the lips of youth, or else why are they so rosy.”
“Would you have me smile in face of my first glimpse of wickedness,” asked she, but in a gentle tone that robbed her words of half their reproach. “You must remember that I have had but little experience with the world. I have lived all my life in a town of wholesome virtues, and while here I have been kept from contact with anything low or base. I have never known vice, and now all in a moment I feel as if I have been bathed in it.”
He took her by the hand and drew her gently towards him. “Does your whole being recoil so from evil, my Paula? What will you do in this wicked world? What will you say to the sinner when you meet him—as you must?”
“I don’t know; it’s a problem I have never been brought to consider. I feel as if launched on a dismal sea for which I have neither chart nor compass. Life was so joyous to me this morning—” a flush swept over her cheek but he did not notice it—“I held, or seemed to hold, a cup of white wine in my hand, but suddenly as I looked at it, it turned black and—”
Ah, the outreach, the dismal breaking away of thought into the unfathomable, that lies in the pause of an and!
“And do you refuse to drink a cup across which has fallen a shadow,” murmured Mr. Sylvester, his eyes fixed on her face, “the inevitable shadow of that great mass of human frailty and woe which has been accumulating from the foundation of the world?”
“No, no, I cannot, and retain my humanity. If there is such evil in the world, its pressure must drive it across the path of innocence.”
“And you accept the cup?”
“I must; but oh, my vanished beliefs! This morning the wine of my life was pure and white, now it’s black and befouled. What will make it clean again?”
With a sigh Mr. Sylvester dropped her hand and turned towards the mantle-piece. It was April as I have said, and there was no fire in the grate, but he posed his foot on the fender and looked sadly down at the empty hearthstone.
“Paula,” said he after a space of pregnant sile
nce, “it had to come. The veil of the temple must be rent in every life. Evil is too near us all for us to tread long upon the flowers without starting up the adders that hide beneath them. You had to have your first look into the cells of darkness, and perhaps it is best you had it here and now. The deeps are for men’s eyes as well as the starry heavens.”
“Yes, yes.”
“There are some persons,” he went on slowly, “you know them, who tread the ways of life with their eyelids closed to everything but the strip of velvet lawn on which they choose to walk. Earth’s sighs and deep-drawn groans are nothing to them. The world may swing on in its way to perdition; so long as their pathway feels soft, they neither heed nor care. But you do not desire to be one of these, Paula! With your great soul and your strong heart, you would not ask to sit in a flowery maze, while the rest of the world went sliding on and down into wells of destruction, you might have made pools of healing by the touch of your womanly sympathy.”
“No, no,”
“I cannot tell you, I dare not tell you,” he went on in a strange pleading voice that tore at the very roots of her heart, and rung in her memory forever, “what evil underlies the whole strata of life! At home and abroad, on our hearthstones and within our offices, the mocking devil sits. You can scarcely walk a block, my little one, without encountering a man or brushing against the dress of a woman across whose soul the black shadow lies heavier than any words of his or hers could tell. What the man you saw to-day, said of one unhappy being in this city, is true, God help us all, of many. Dark spots are easier acquired than blotted out, my Paula. In business as in society, one needs to carry the white shield of a noble purpose or a self-forgetting love, to escape the dripping of the deadly upas tree that branches above all humanity. I have walked its ways, my darling, and I know of what I speak. Your white robe is spotless but—”
“O there is where the pain comes in,” she cried; “there, just there, is where the dagger strikes. She says she was once like me. O, could any temptation, any suffering, any wrong or misfortune that might befall me, ever bring me to where she is! If it could—”
