Cecil Dreeme

by Theodore Winthrop

  But there was another reason for my favorable judgment on Mr. Denman. I loved, or thought I loved, or wished that I loved, his daughter.

  Ever since my conversation with Cecil Dreeme, I had encouraged this passion. I had seen Emma Denman frequently, then constantly; it was now every day.

  Her fascination grew in power. There was a certain effort in it; but what man disputes a woman’s right to make effort to please him? With me her manner was anxious, and even agitated. Other men, now that the blackness of first mourning was past, began to be at the house. Them she treated with civil indifference, or indifferent cordiality, as they merited. With me she seemed always eagerly striving that I should not misapprehend her, always protesting against some possibility of a false impression.

  Ah! now that I look back upon it all, how I pity her! No wonder that she grew thin and worn! No wonder that her gayety often struck me as forced or fantastic! When it did so seem, I said to myself that she was determined not to be crushed by that sad tragedy of her sister’s death. I did not dream that her eager moods were tokens of the desperate struggle she was making against the inevitable tragedy of her own life.

  Shall I go through all the history of the progress of my passion? Shall I say how, day by day, my sympathy for this motherless, sisterless girl deepened,—how I sorrowed for her that, amid all the splendor of her life, her heart was sad and empty, and so the life a vain show? how I, dreading what might be the fate of her father’s wealth, pleased myself with the thought that, if disaster befell him, I could offer her the home and the heart of a hopeful working-man? Shall I re-edit such an old, old story, with the new illustrations drawn from my own experience?

  I shrink from the task of opening an ancient wound.

  I shrink, but yet I force myself to the anguish.

  And time has changed that bygone grief into a lesson. I must write. No matter how dark, the story shall be told. Every man’s precious or costly experience belongs to every brother-man. No man may be a miser of the sorrows by which he has bought the power to be strong, to be tender, to pardon the weak and the guilty. Perhaps by some warning I here utter I may persuade a young and hesitating soul to shudder back from the brink of sin. Often a timely trifle of a gentle word of admonition has struck a foully fair temptation dead. I know how the recurring fragrance of a flower that childhood loved, how the far-away sound of breakers on a beach where childhood wandered, how a weft of cloud, how the leap of a sunbeam, how the sudden jubilant carol of a bird, how a portrait of the pure Madonna on the wall, how a chance line on an open page,—how any such momentous trifle will save a wavering soul from a treachery or a crime,—will interpose an instant’s check, and rescue the life from a remorse, guarding it for a repentance. Yes; whatever agony it costs me to revive this old history, I do now, after its lesson is fully thought out, of my sober judgment, revive it,—let who will murmur, “Bad taste!” let who will cry out, “Unhealthy!” let who will sigh, “Alas! have we not our own griefs? why burden us with yours?”

  Did I, or not, love Emma Denman? Why could I not determine this question? I had my friends among men. Closest among these was Cecil Dreeme; his friendship I deemed more precious than the love of women. But among women, no other, none, was at all so charming to me as Emma.

  She was to me far more beautiful than any beauty,—infinitely more beautiful, always, than any of those round, full, red beauties who are steadily supplied to the city market, overt or covert, for wives or mistresses to the men who pay money for either, and have nothing but money to give.

  She was brilliant, frivolously brilliant perhaps; but we pardon a dash of frivolity in a young woman of fashion, all her life flattered and caressed, and untrained by daily contact with men of strong minds and women of strong hearts.

  Emma Denman stood just on the hither brink of genius. It seemed that, if some magnificent emotion, some heart-opening joy or grief, could befall her, she would suddenly be promoted to become herself, and that self a genius. If she could be once in earnest, she would be a noble woman. Such a character has a mighty charm to a lover. He stirs himself with the thought that his love may give the awakening touch; that his passion may supply the ripening flame, and win the bud to bloom.

  In music, in art, in thought, I felt that Emma Denman needed but one step to stand on the heights among the inspired. She seemed to feel this also, and to be always pleading tacitly with me to give her the slight aid she needed. She could not pass into the realms of the divine liberty of genius, for some gossamer wall, invisible to all but her, and against her strong as adamant.

  I was terrified sometimes by her keenness of insight into bad motives, her comprehension of the labyrinthine causes of bad acts. It is a perilous knowledge. We must pay price for power. How had she bought this unerring perception of the laws of evil? How came she by this aged possession in her first youth?

  How? I quelled my uneasiness with the thought that the sensitive touch of innocence is warned away from poisoned blossoms by the clammy airs that hang about them, and so recoils, and will not pluck the flower or gather the fruit. I said that the mere dread of evil will instruct a virgin soul where are those paths of evil it must shun. I said it is better to know sin and shun it, than to half ignore and half evade.

  Since our first interview, our relations had grown more and more intimate without check. We named them brotherly and sisterly, as they had been in our childish days. She claimed the sister’s privilege of presiding over my social life, and aiding me to make a choice in love.

  Miss Denman led me about the grand round of society. She took me to see the belles for beauty, the belles for money, the belles for wit, the belles for magnetism, the belles for blood. And all of them she drew out to show their most attractive side, in fact, their better and more genuine nature. She persuaded each to reveal that the belle had not addled the woman.

  And then she wondered that she could not persuade me to fall in love with one of these ladies.

  I could not, of course, if only because her process made her appear superior to them all. I admired the kindliness with which she strove to put sparkle into the stupid girls, to dignify the trifling, to refine the vulgar,—and the teacher was to me an infinitely finer being than her scholars ever could become.

  And so I told her,—but never yet with the words of a lover.

  And so she insisted I should not think,—not craftily and with systematic coquetry. No, poor child! Ah, no! I acquit her of all such slight wiles and surface hypocrisy. But how could I know that she was sincerely striving to save us both from the tragedy of a mutual love?

  And did I love her? The question implied a doubt, where there should be only undoubting conviction and compelling impulse.

  Why doubt, Robert Byng?

  There was surely no other affection in my heart that I was playing false. Surely none. My heart was free from any love of woman.

  And my doubt was based upon a suspicion.

  A suspicion! of what?

  If I at all stated to myself, however faintly, what, it seemed to me such disloyalty that I despised myself for entertaining the unwholesome thought.

  “You are not fit,” I said, “for the society of a pure woman! Densdeth has spoilt you.”

  Thus I trained my affection the more tenderly for its weakness. Thus, ignorant and rejecting the sure law of nature, I strove to create the uncreatable, to construct what should have come into being and grown strong without interference, even without consciousness of mine. Thus I began to deem the sentiment I was manufacturing out of ruth and a loyal intention, as genuine, heart-felt love.

  Bitter error! And to be punished bitterly!

  20

  A Nocturne

  Night! Night in the great city!

  Night! when the sun, the eye of God, leaves men to their own devices; when the moon is so faint, and the stars so far away in the infinite, that their inspection and record are forgotten; when Light, the lawgiver and orderer of human life, withdraws, and mankind are free to bre
ak or obey the commands daylight has taught them.

  Night! when the gas-lights, relit, reawaken harmful purposes, that had slept through all the hours of honest sunshine in their lairs; when the tigers and tigresses take their stand where their prey will be sure to come; when the rustic in the peaceful country, with leaves whispering and crickets singing around him, sees a glow on the distant horizon, and wonders if the bad city beneath it be indeed abandoned of its godly men, and burning for its crimes. Night! the day of the base, the guilty, and the desolate!

  Every evening, when it was possible, of that late winter and wintry spring, I abandoned club, parlor, and ball-room, and all the attractions of the brilliant world, to wander with Cecil Dreeme about the gas-lit city, and study the side it showed to night. And yet the phenomena of vice and crime, my companion refused to consider fit objects of curiosity. Vice and crime were tacitly avoided by us. Dreeme’s nature repelled even the thought of them. I was happy to know one solitary man whose mind the consciousness of evil could not make less virgin.

  It chanced one evening, a fortnight after our conversation when Dreeme gave me the picture, that walking as usual, and quite late, we passed the Opera-House. Some star people were giving an extra performance on an off night. The last act of an heroic opera was just beginning. Dreeme hummed the final air,—a noble burst of triumph over a victory bought by a martyrdom.

  “Your song makes me hungry to hear more,” said I.

  “I have been almost starving for music,” he rejoined.

  “Come in, then. You can take your stand in the lobby, with your mysterious cloak about you, and slouched hat over your eyes. I defy your best friend or worst foe to know you.”

  “No, no!” said he, nervously; “in the glare of a theatre I should excite suspicion. I should be seen.”

  “And pounced upon and hurried off to durance vile?” said I, lightly enough; for I began at last to fancy that his panic of concealment was the sole disorder of a singularly healthy brain. “Well, I will not urge it. I cannot spare you. I am selfish. I should soon go to the bad without my friend and Mentor.”

  “It is strange,” said Dreeme, bitterly, “that I, with a soul white as daylight, should be compelled to lurk about like a guilty thing,—to be as one dead and buried.”

  “I thank the mystery that secludes you for my benefit, Dreeme,” I said. “I dread the time when you will find a thousand friends, and many closer than I.”

  He dropped his cloak and took my arm. It was the first time he had given me this slight token of intimacy. We had been very distant in our personal intercourse. I am not a man to slap another on the back, shake him by the shoulder, punch him in the ribs, or indulge in any rude play or coarse liberties. Yet there is a certain familiarity among men, by which we, after our roughish and unbeautiful fashion, mean as much tenderness for our friends as women do by their sweet embraces and caresses. Nothing of this kind had ever passed between Dreeme and me. His reserve and self-dependence had made me feel that it would be an impertinence to offer even that kind of bodily protection which a bigger man holds ready for a lesser and slighter.

  It surprised me, then, a little, when Dreeme, for the first time, took my arm familiarly.

  “You have been a kind friend to me, Mr. Byng,” said he; “there are not many men in the world who would have treated my retirement with such delicate forbearance and good faith.”

  “Do not give me too much credit. I have been a selfish friend. I know that I am a facile person, something of the chameleon; I need the fairer colors in contact with me to keep me from becoming an ugly brown reptile. Having this adaptability of character, I have had very close relations with many of the best and noblest; but of all the men I have ever known, your society charms me most penetratingly. All the poetry in my nature being latent, I need precisely you to bring it to the surface. The feminine element is largely developed in you, as a poetic artist. It precisely supplies the want which a sisterless and motherless man, like myself, has always felt. Your influence over me is inexpressibly bland and soothing. You certainly are my good spirit. I like you so much, that I have been quite content with your isolation; I get you all to myself. These walks with you, since that famous oyster supper, the very day of my return home, have been the chief feature of my life. I count my hour with you as the pay for my scuffle with the world. A third party would spoil the whole! What would become of our confidence, our intimate exchange of thought on every possible subject, if there were another fellow by, who might be a vulgarian or a muff? What could we do with a chap to whom we should have to explain our metaphysics, give page and line for our quotations, interpret our puns, translate our allusions, analyze our intuitions, define our God? Such a companion would take the sparkle and the flash of this rapid and unerring sympathy out of our lives. No, Dreeme, this isolation of yours suits me; and since you continue to tolerate my society, I must suit you. We form a capital exclusive pair, close as any of the historic ones,—Orestes and Pylades, for example,—to close my long discourse classically.”

  “Do not compare us to those ill-omened two. Orestes was ordained to slay his parent for her sin,” my friend rejoined, in an uneasy tone.

  “It was a judicial murder,—the guiltless execution of a decree of fate. And all turned out happily at last, you remember. Orestes became king of Argos, and gave his sister in marriage to his Pylades, the faithful. Who knows but when your tragic duty is over, whatever it be, and you have brought the guilty to justice, you will resume your proper crown, and find a sister for me, your Pylades, the faithful? If my present flame should not smile, that would be admirable. Your sister for me would make our brotherhood actual.”

  “My sister for you!” said Dreeme, with an accent almost of horror; and I could feel, by his arm in mine, that a strong shudder ran through him.

  We had by this time passed from the side-front of the Opera-House, where this conversation began, had walked along Quatorze Street, and turned up into the Avenue. Quatorze Street, as only a total stranger need be informed, is named in triumphant remembrance of the minikin monarch whom we defeated in the old French war. The crossing of Quatorze Street and the Avenue was, at that time, the very focus of fashion. Within half a mile of that corner, Everybody lived—Everybody who was not Nobody.

  It was mid-March. Lent was in full sigh. Balls were over until Easter. Fasting people cannot take violent exercise. One can dance on full, but not on meagre diet,—on turkey, not on fish. But in default of balls, Mrs. Bilkes, still a leader of fashion, had her Lent evenings. They were The Thing, so Everybody agreed, and this evening was one of them. I had deserted for my walk with Dreeme.

  Mrs. Bilkes’s house was just far enough above Quatorze Street, on the Avenue, to be in the van of the upward march of fashion. Files of carriages announced that all the world was with her that evening. The usual band discoursed the usual music within; but wanting the cadence of dancers’ feet to enliven them, those Lenten strains came dolefully forth.

  We were passing this mansion when Dreeme had last spoken. Before I had time to ask him what meant his agitation at the thought of me for possible brother-in-law, the factotum of the Bilkes party, the well-known professional, hailed me from the steps, where he stood in authority; for by the bright light from the house he could easily recognize me.

  “What, Mr. Byng! You won’t drop in upon us? They’re packed close as coffins inside, but there’s always room for another like yourself. Better come in,—Mrs. Bilkes will take on tremendous if she finds I let you go by without stopping.”

  I paused a moment, half disgusted, half amused by the privileged man’s speech. As I did so, a gentleman coming down the steps addressed me. And it is such trivial pauses as these that bid us halt till Destiny overtakes our unconscious steps.

  I turned with a slight start, for I had not observed the new-comer as an acquaintance until he was at my side.

  It was Densdeth.

  He looked, with his keen, hasty glance, at my companion. He seemed to recogni
ze him as a stranger. He did not bow, but turned to me, and said,—

  “What, Byng! Are you not going in? It is very brilliant. All the fair penitents are there, keeping Lent, in their usual severe simplicity of penitential garb. I asked Matilda Mildood if I should give her a bit of partridge and some chicken-salad. ‘I’m quite ashamed of you, Mr. Densdeth,’ says Matilda, with the air of one resolutely mortifying the flesh; ‘don’t you remember it’s Lent. Oysters and lobster-salad, if you please, and a little terrapin, if there is any.’ ”

  While Densdeth made this talk, he glanced again at my companion. Dreeme had withdrawn his arm, and stood a little apart, half turned away from us, avoiding notice, as usual.

  “Don’t throw away your cigar, Byng,” continued Densdeth, taking out his case, and stepping toward the lamp-post, to make, as it seemed to me, a very elaborate selection. “Give me a light first. Will you try one of mine?”

  “No, thank you. I have had my allowance.”

  Densdeth took my cigar to light his. The slight glow was sufficient to illuminate his face darkly. Its expression seemed to me singularly cruel and relentless. It was withal scornful and triumphant. Something evidently had happened which gave Densdeth satisfaction. Whom had he vanquished to-night?

  The cigar would not draw.

  “Bah!” said Densdeth, tearing it in two, with his white-gloved hands, with a manner of dainty torture, as if he were inflicting an indignity upon a foe. “Bah!” said he, taking out another cigar, with even more elaborate selection, and as he did so glancing, quick and sharp, at my friend, who had retreated from the lamp. “I don’t allow cigars, any more than other creatures, to baffle me. Excuse me, Byng, for detaining you. The second trial must succeed; if not, I’ll try a third time,—that always wins. Thanks!”