Cecil Dreeme

by Theodore Winthrop

  He lighted his cigar. Again by the glow I observed the same relentless, triumphant look.

  Densdeth turned down the Avenue. I rejoined Dreeme. He took my arm again and clung to it almost weakly.

  “What is the matter, Dreeme?” I asked, my tenderness for him all awake.

  No answer, but a nervous pressure on my arm.

  “You are tired. Shall we turn back?”

  “Not the way that man has gone,” said he.

  “Why not? What do you fear?”

  “I heard him name himself Densdeth. I saw his face—that cruel face of his. Mr. Byng,—my dear friend, Robert Byng,—that man is evil to the core. You call me your Mentor, your good influence; take my warning! Obey me, and shun him, as you would a fiend. You say that I have a fresh nature; believe that my instinct of aversion for a villain is unerring.”

  “Is not this prejudice?” said I, somewhat moved by his panic, but still fancying so much alarm idle.

  “It might before have been prejudice, derived from your own account of him; but now I have seen him, face to face.”

  “A glance merely, and in a dusky light.”

  “Yes, but one look at that face of his sears it into the heart.”

  “You seem to have been as inquisitive about him as he about you. He studied your back pretty thoroughly. In fact, I believe it was to observe you that he made such parade of breaking up his delinquent cigar. He evidently meant to know for what comrade I was abandoning the charms of the Bilkes soirée.”

  “I shudder at the thought of such a man’s observation. What ugly fate brought me here?”

  Dreeme turned, and looked back.

  I involuntarily did the same.

  The Avenue, at that late hour, was nearly deserted of promenaders. As far away as two blocks behind us, I noticed the spark of a cigar, and as the smoker passed a gas-light, I could see him take the cigar from his lips with a white-gloved hand. He even seemed to brandish it triumphantly.

  “He is following us!” cried Dreeme.

  The painter whirled me about a corner, and dragged me, almost at a run, along several humbler streets. At last we turned into one of the avenues by the North River, far away from the beat of any guest of Mrs. Bilkes.

  There Dreeme paused, and spoke.

  “Good exercise I have given you by my panic,” said he, with a forced laugh. “How absurd I have been! Pardon me! You are aware how nervous I get, being so much shut up alone. And then, you know, I was only hurrying you away from your devil.”

  “Strange fellow you are, Dreeme! I suppose this very strangeness is one element of your control over me. You excite my curiosity in degree, though not in kind, quite as much as Densdeth does. And now that you and he are brought together, I hope these two mysterious personages will explain each other by some flash of hostile electricity. I wait for light from the meeting of the thunder-clouds.”

  “It must be very late,” said Dreeme in a weary tone. “What a dismal part of the city! This squalor sickens me. These rows of grogshops infect me with utter hopelessness. Sin—sin everywhere, and the sorrow that never can be divorced from sin! How can we escape? How can we save others? These nocturnal wanderings of ours have told me of a breadth and a depth of misery that years of a charitable lifetime would never have revealed. If I ever have opportunities for action and influence, I shall know my duty, and how to do it. I see, Mr. Byng, as I have before told you, that you do not thoroughly share my sympathy for poverty and suffering and crime.”

  “Perhaps not fully. My heart is not so tender as yours. I cannot seem to make other people’s distress my personal business, as you do. I endure the misfortunes of strangers with reasonable philosophy. Suffering, like pain, I suppose is to be borne heroically, until it passes off. Every man has his hard times.”

  “You are not cruel,” said Dreeme, “but you talk cruelly on a subject you hardly understand. Wait until the hours of your own bitterness come, and you will learn the precious lesson of sympathy! You will soften to others, and most to those who suffer for no fault of theirs,—the wronged, driven to despair by wrong-doing in those they love,—the erring, visited with what we name ruin, for some miserable mistake of inexperience. But let us hasten home! I have never felt so sick at heart, so doubtful of the future, so oppressed by the ‘weary weight of all this unintelligible world,’ as I do at this moment.”

  “Dreeme, are you never to take your future into your own hands, and live a healthy, natural life, like other men? Think of yourself! Do not be so wretched with other people’s faults! You cannot annihilate the troubles that have made you unhappy; but do not brood over them. Be young, and live young, in sunshine and gayety.”

  “Be young!” said he, more drearily than ever.

  “Yes; make me your confidant! Face down your difficulties! If you do not trust my experience, and think me too recent in the country to give you practical help, there is my friend, Mr. Churm. He will be here to-morrow from a journey. Churm is true as steel. Trust him! He and I will pull you through.”

  “I trust no one but you. Do not press me yet. I am generally contented, as you know, with my art and your society. Only to-night the sight of that bad man has discomposed me.”

  “Discomposed is a mild term,” said I, as I unlocked the outer door of Chrysalis.

  “Well, I am composed now. But I wish,” said he in a trepidating way, that belied his words, “that you would see me safe to my door.”

  I did so, and we parted, closer friends than ever.

  Densdeth, Cecil Dreeme, Emma Denman,—these three figures battled strangely in my dreams.

  21

  Lydian Measures

  I dined en famille at Mr. Denman’s the day after that panic-struck night walk with Cecil Dreeme.

  “You are looking pale and thin, Emma,” said Mr. Denman, as his daughter rose to leave us to our claret. “You need more variety in your life. Why not let Byng take you to the opera to-night? Our box has stood vacant, now, these many weeks.”

  “Yes,” said I, “it is the new opera to-night.”

  Emma glanced at her black dress.

  “Go!” said Denman, with something of harshness in his tone, “that need not cloud your life forever.”

  “Do go,” said I.

  “I will,” she said, with a slight effort. “But I shrink from appearing in public again.”

  “It is time you should get over that feeling. We shall soon be receiving company again,” said her father. “So be ready when Byng and I have had our cigars.”

  She was ready, and we drove to the Opera-House together.

  Her mourning was exquisitely becoming to her slight, graceful, refined figure. The startled and almost timorous manner I had noticed in our first interview had lately grown more marked. This shy, feminine trait excited instant sympathy. It recalled how her life had been shocked by the sudden news of a tragedy. She seemed to have learned to tremble, lest she might encounter at any moment some new disaster sadder than the first. This was probably mere nervousness after her long grief, so I thought. Yet sometimes, when I spoke to her with any suddenness, she would start and shrink, and turn from me; then, exercising a strong control over herself, she would return, smile away the fleeting shiver, and be again as self-possessed and gay as ever.

  As we entered the Opera-House and took our places in Mr. Denman’s conspicuous box, the glare of the lights and the eyes of a great audience making a focus upon her affected Emma with the panic I have described. She turned to me with the gesture of one asking protection, almost humbly.

  “I must go,” she said; “I cannot bear to have all the world staring at me in this blank, hard, cruel way. They hurt me,—these people, prying into my heart to find the sorrow there.”

  “In a moment it will be an old story,” said I. “Do not think of going, dear Emma. The change and the excitement of the music will do you good. This nervousness of a débutante will pass away presently.”

  Dear Emma! The first time that any such tender familiar
ity had passed my lips. And my manner, too, I perceived, expressed a new and deeper solicitude. I perceived this; so did my companion.

  She looked at me, with a strange, fixed expression, as if she were resisting some potent impulse. Then a hot blush came into her cheeks. She sank into her seat, and fanned herself rapidly. Her brilliant color remained.

  “Emma,” said I, bending toward her, “what splendid change has befallen you? You are at this moment beautiful beyond any possible dream of mine.”

  “Do not speak to me,” she said; “I shall burst into tears before all these people. This crowd, after my seclusion, confuses and frightens me. Let me be quiet a moment!”

  All the world, of course, was immediately aware of the reappearance of the beautiful Miss Denman. There was much curiosity, and some genuine sympathy. “Nods and becks and wreathed smiles” came to her from the boxes on every side. Her entrée was a triumph—as such triumphs go.

  To avoid this inspection, she took her lorgnette and glanced about the house. I followed its direction.

  I saw her pause a moment on the group of men in the lobby. At the same time we both recognized Densdeth, regarding us.

  He was laughing with Raleigh and others. I seemed almost to hear the sharp tone of that cynical, faithless laugh of his.

  All the color faded out of Emma Denman’s face. She sank back, almost cowering. Cowering,—the expression does not exaggerate the effect of her gesture. She cowered into the corner of the box, and hid her face behind her fan.

  I should have spoken to demand the reason of her strange distress, when the leader of the orchestra rapped; there was a hush, and the new overture began with a barbaric blare of trumpets.

  So the opera went on, to the great satisfaction of all dilettanteism.

  It was thoroughly debilitating, effeminate music. No single strain of manly vigor rose, from end to end of the drama. Never would any noble sentiment thrill along the fibres of the soul in response to those Lydian measures. It was music to steep the being in soft, luxurious languors; to make all effort seem folly, all ardor madness, all steady toil impossible;—music to lap the mind in somnolence, in a careless consent to whatever was, were it but bodily ease and moral stagnancy.

  There was no epic dignity, no tragic elevation, no lyrical fervor, in the new opera. Passion it had; but it was a dreamy passionateness, not the passion that wakes action, nervous and intent. Even its wild strains, that meant terror and danger, came like the distant cry of wild beasts in a heavy midnight of the tropics,—a warning so far away, that it would never stir the slumbers of the imperilled.

  Always this music seemed to sound and sing, with every note of voice or instrument,—“Brethren, what have we to do with that idle fiction of an earnest life? While we live, let us live in sloth. Let us deaden ourselves with soft intoxications and narcotic stupors, out of reach of care. Why question? Why wrestle? Why agonize? Here are roses, not too fresh, so as to shame the cheeks of revelry. Here is the dull, heavy sweetness of tropic perfume. Here is wine, dark purple, prostrating, Lethean. Here are women, wooing to languid joys. Here is sweet death in life. So let us drowse and slumber, while the silly world goes wearily along.”

  Emasculated music! Such music as tyranny over mind and spirit calls for, to lull its unmanned subjects into sensual calm. Such as an Italian priesthood has encouraged, to make its people forget that they were men, and remember that they were and would ever be slaves. Music that no tyrant need ever dread, lest it should nerve the arm of a tyrannicide. Music that would never ring to any song of freedom, or chime with any lay of tender and ennobling love.

  The story was as base as the strain. There was tragedy, indeed, in it, and death. But a neat, graceful, orderly death, in white satin. Nothing ugly, like blood and pangs; nothing distressing, like final repentance with tears, or final remorse with sobs and anguish. The moral was, that after a life of revelry, not too frantic, to die by digestible poison, when pleasure began to pall, was a very proper and pretty exit.

  Delicious music, and only soothing if music were simply a corporeal influence, but utterly enervating to the soul. I felt it. I was aware of a deterioration in myself. I passed into a Sybaritic mood,—a mood of consent,—of accepting facts as they were, and missing nothing that could give a finer joy to my sensuous tranquillity. In this frame of mind, the degree and kind of my passion for Emma Denman satisfied me wholly. I yielded to it.

  And she, in the same lulled and dreamy state, lost the dignity of manner which had kept us apart. She no longer shrank as she had been wont to do when my voice or words conveyed a lover meaning. Her shyness was gone. She seemed to yield herself to me, fully and finally.

  All the while the swelling, flowing, soothing strains of honeyed music hung around us, and when the movement of the drama paused, our minds pursued the same intention in our talk. We agreed that all regret was idle; that sorrow was more idle than regret; that error brought its little transitory pang, and so should be forgotten; that mundane creatures should not be above mundane joys in this fair world, reeking with sights and sounds of pleasure, and all lavish with what sense and appetite desire. We agreed that it was all unwisdom to perplex the soul with too much aspiration; better not aspire than miss attainment, and so pine and waste, as one might sigh his soul away that loved a cloud.

  Between the acts, I saw Densdeth moving about, welcome everywhere,—the man who had the key of the world. A golden key Densdeth carried. All the salable people, and, alas! that includes all but a mere decimation, threw open their doors to Densdeth. Opera-box and the tenants of the box were free to him.

  The drama was nearly done, and he had not been to pay his respects to Emma Denman, though he had bowed and smiled in congratulation.

  “Densdeth does not come to tell you how brilliantly you are looking to-night,” I said.

  “I do not need his verdict,” she said, coldly enough;—and then, as if I might take the coldness to myself, she added, “since I have yours, and it is favorable.”

  “Yes; my verdict is this,—Guilty,—guilty of being your most fascinating self,—guilty of a finer charm to-night than ever before.”

  “Guilty!” she said, turning from me. “Guilty, thrice repeated! Do use some less ominous word.”

  The music ceased. The curtain slowly descended, and hid the sham death-scene. There was the usual formal applause. The conceited tenor in his velvet doublet, unsullied by his late despair, the truculent basso, now in jovial mood, the prima donna, past her prime, sidled along, hand in hand, behind the foot-lights, and bowed to the backs of two thirds of the audience, and to the muffled resonance of the white gloves of the other third.

  The spiritual influence of the opera remained, mingled with a slight forlornness, the reaction after luxurious excitement.

  I left Emma Denman in the corridor, and went to find the carriage.

  22

  A Laugh and a Look

  In the lobby of the Opera-House was the usual throng,—fat dowagers, quite warm enough with their fat, and wretchedly red-hot under a grand exhibition of furs; pretty girls, in the prettiest of opera-cloaks, white and pink and blue, and with downy hoods; anxious papas, indifferent brothers, bored husbands, eager lovers, ineligible young men taking out mamma, while her daughter hung on the arm of the eligible.

  Such was the scene within the Quatorze Street lobby. Without, in a raw, drizzly March night, was a huddle of coaches, and on every box a coachman, swearing his worst.

  It was some time before, in the confusion, I could find the Denman carriage. At last I discovered it, and went up-stairs for Emma.

  As I ran up the stairs, and was just at the top steps, whence I should turn into the corridor where the lady was waiting, I heard the ominous sound of Densdeth’s laugh.

  It came from where she stood. I paused.

  Instantly, in answer, and in thorough sympathy with that hateful tone, I heard another laugh. It seemed even baser, more cynical and false, than Densdeth’s; for threaded in it, and tarnished by
the contact, were silver notes I had often heard in genuine merriment.

  “Emma Denman!” I thought, with a shiver. “How dares she let herself respond to his debasing jests? How can she echo him,—and echo that jarring music familiarly, as if she had long been a pupil of the master?”

  The pang of this question drove me forward. I turned into the corridor.

  Only those two were standing there,—Densdeth and she. His back was turned toward me. The glare of a gas-light overhead fell full upon her.

  The languor caused by that enfeebling music was visible in her posture and expression. Her manner, too, to a sensitive observer like myself, betrayed a certain drowsy recklessness.

  And then, as I entered the corridor by a side-door, before she was conscious of my presence, she gave Densdeth a look which curdled my blood.

  I may live long. I am not without a share of happiness. I am at peace. God has given me much that is good and beautiful. The atmosphere of my existence is healthy. But there is one memory in my heart which I have never ventured to recall until this moment,—which I bear down upon and crowd back whenever it stirs and struggles to burst up into daylight. There is one memory which has power to burn away my earthly bliss with a single touch, and to throw such a ghastly coloring over all the world, that my neighbor seems a traitor and my Creator my foe. That memory is the look I saw Emma Denman give to Densdeth.

  It was my revelation of evil in the woman I had honestly and earnestly resolved to love and trust. It showed to me first, by the fiery pang of a personal experience, the curse of sin.

  Sin,—I fancied that I knew it well enough.

  Sin,—I had been wont to class myself lightly among its foes; to feel a transitory gloom when I heard of its harm; to wonder and protest, nonchalantly, at its existence; to believe that its power was broken, with the other ancient tyrannies, and that it would presently accept a banishment and leave the world to a better day.