Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, August, 1880

Miss Custer, feeling herself compromised by having been caught gossiping—and by Mrs. Tascher, of all people!—fortified herself by a little accession of pride in her usually suave demeanor. "Good-afternoon," she returned, passing on through the room. "How stiflingly warm it is here!"

"Yes. I have been thinking of going into the parlor," said Mrs. Tascher: "it is always cool there, because the blinds are kept closed."

"Does she say that to prevent my taking refuge in the parlor?" thought Miss Custer, and moved on and went outside.

By and by some soft piano-strains came through the window, the sash of which was raised, at her back. When they ceased she became conscious, without turning her head to look through the shutters, that Mrs. Tascher had seated herself in an easy-chair and taken up a book from the centre-table, which held the usual stock of gilt-edged poems—Whittier's, Tennyson's, etc.

Nearly an hour passed in sultry silence, broken only by the buzzing of flies and, now and then, a subdued sound of wheels on the sandy road below. At last the gate-latch clicked, and Ruth came in, walking slowly up the path.

Doctor Ebling had driven by a few moments before, and gone up the alley to the stable, and just as Ruth reached the steps, shutting her parasol and smiling up rather wearily at Miss Custer, he came around the corner of the house, lifting his hat and wiping the perspiration from his face.

"Why, where have you been?" Ruth asked in surprise.

"In the country," said he.

"And just think, Miss Stanley," exclaimed Miss Custer, speaking to Ruth, but looking a smiling reproach at the doctor, and for a moment forgetting the parlor occupant at her back, "here I have been sitting this whole blessed afternoon! I could have borne the infliction of my own solitary company better, of course, if I had not been promised an entertainment."

"You must charge your disappointment to a poor fellow who got himself cut to pieces by a grass-mower," said the doctor.

"Who was it?" asked Ruth quickly, with a sympathetic play of facial muscles.

"A man by the name of Burgess, out east of town."

"And is he in a bad way?"

"Rather."

Ruth stood for a moment with her eyes upon the ground, absorbed in the thought of a fellow-being in distress, and the doctor, glancing from her up to Miss Custer, was conscious of the strong contrast between them.

Miss Custer was ten years Ruth's senior, but just now it looked as if it might be the other way: teaching gave Ruth a jaded look that seemed like age. But she was only eighteen. She wore a plain brown dress and linen cuffs and collar, all of which bore the stamp of the school-room. Her shoes were dusty, and her hair, untouched since early morning, had settled into a mass at the back of her neck, more artistic than stylish.

By and by she excused herself and went into the house. It was her habit to take a bath and dress herself before tea. The doctor came up and seated himself on the top step, and remarked that he didn't know whether it would be worth while to go up town before supper or not. Miss Custer was about to persuade him that it would not be worth while, when a movement on the part of Mrs. Tascher recalled her to the consciousness of that lady's proximity and put her under a sort of constraint. "Do you suppose your office to be strewn with orders for your immediate attendance upon wounded individuals?" she asked carelessly.

"If I thought it was," said he, "I'd make for the woods over yonder and hide myself."

"Unnatural physician! I always supposed medical men to be the most devoted to their profession, and the fondest of exercising it, of all beings."

"As to devotion," said the doctor, "I agree with you—we are a devoted class. But as to exercise of any description, that is contrary to all human inclination in such a temperature as this."

"And yet Miss Stanley endures it," said Miss Custer, and could have bitten her tongue the next moment.

A grave expression settled upon the doctor's face. "Yes," said he, "her brave spirit surmounts everything. She is of a different make-up from all the other people I know. And, by the way, it always seems to me irrelevant to bring her into comparison with ordinary mortals," he added; and, getting up and settling his hat upon his head, he strode off.

Miss Custer felt a pang of keen regret. "I have offended him," she thought.

But at the supper-table, an hour or two later, there was no evidence of offence in his attitude toward her, though it must be allowed that he paid rather more attention to Ruth than usual when she came down stairs freshened up in a light-colored lawn dress and her dark hair handsomely coiled and ornamented with a half-blown rose. She sat just opposite Doctor Ebling and beside Miss Custer, and stood the contrast with that amber-eyed beauty very well. Doctor Ebling thought so, and it had a tendency to elevate his spirits. The three carried on an animated dialogue. Mr. Bruce, at the end of the table, was abstracted, and ate his supper with great diligence, except when Mrs. Tascher, being his nearest neighbor, addressed a remark to him: then he turned to her with the utmost deference and replied as elaborately as friendly politeness demanded.

"Any of you folks in for a boat-ride this evening?" called up Hugh from the lower end of the table. "My Sally Lunn is anchored down by the big oak if you want her, and here's the key," holding it up.

"Why, yes," said Doctor Ebling, taking it upon himself to answer. Hugh's questions and remarks were usually addressed to the company collectively, and the doctor generally was tacitly elected spokesman.—"Don't you want to go, ladies?" he asked, "and you, Bruce?"

The ladies, Ruth and Miss Custer, assented with bright looks.

Mr. Bruce replied deliberatively that he was not sure he could leave the office.

"Oh, come now, Bruce, that's put on," said the doctor. "No man, whatever his profession, unless he be a farmer, can convince me of a pressure of business at this season. Banish the delusive idea and make yourself agreeable for once."

Mr. Bruce raised his head, showing at the same time a flash of his white teeth and his black eyes. "For once?" he repeated. "Making myself agreeable, or making a grotesque caricature of myself in my struggles to be agreeable, has been the business of my life."

"Oh, Mr. Bruce!" laughed Ruth. "Everybody knows you are delightful, but the idea of your making an effort in that direction is too absurd."

"If I had made that speech," thought Miss Custer, "Mrs. Tascher would have looked a severe criticism."

Mrs. Tascher, as it was, looked across at Ruth and said laughingly, "That hits him hard, my dear, but he ought not to wince."

Mr. Bruce had colored slightly and broken up the gravity of his face.

Later, when they all rose from the table, Mrs. Tascher, under some pretext or other, detained him a moment. "Do go!" she said: "you see how it is—Ruth never has the doctor to herself a moment any more. They used to take delightful little moonlight strolls together, and were as happy as a pair of young lovers ought to be. Now there is always a third party."

"Oh! So you think I ought to sacrifice myself to the happiness of the precious lovers? And what if I get enthralled myself? Who will come to my rescue?"

"I am willing to trust you," laughed Mrs. Tascher. "You have thirty years upon your head, and a vast amount of hard practicality in it: Dr. Ebling lacks something of both."

The girls had got their hats and were already out upon the veranda.

"Come, Bruce: have you decided whether there is an important case pending or not?" called the doctor.

Mrs. Tascher gave him a little push, and he sauntered out. She stood in the doorway and saw him, with a feeling of satisfaction, pair off with Miss Custer after they had got outside the gate. "I believe she likes him twenty times better than she does the doctor," she soliloquized. "And yet with what persistency she clings to Ruth and her lover! Poor Ruth! She takes her down in good faith."

The stream upon which Westbrook was built was about half a mile distant, and the sun was going down when they reached the big oak where the boat was anchored. Doctor Ebling clambered down the steep bank and unlocked it, and got in and rowed up a little way to where there was a better descent.

"Now, then, shall we all go at once," said he, "or take turns?"

"It is such a diminutive vessel," said Bruce, eying it doubtingly, "that perhaps Miss Custer and myself had better 'pause upon the brink' here, and wait until you two have made a short voyage."

"Oh, we shall not make a very short voyage," said Ruth, running down the bank and grasping the doctor's hand as he held it out to steady her in stepping into the boat. "I want to go up as far as the bridge and make a sketch to-night: the sunset and the moon-rise are lovely."

"Better come on—don't think we'll upset," said the doctor, beginning, nevertheless, to push off.

Bruce looked about and found a log to sit on. "Just spread your shawl on it," said he; and Miss Custer was obliged to unfold her beautiful white burnous.

"What an idea!" she thought, "and how ungallant he is!"

And yet he had a remarkable power of fascination, though, as Ruth said, he made no effort to please.

He took a seat beside her, and for some time his eyes followed the boat. After a while he said, "And did you manage to get through with The Spanish Gypsy again?"

"Oh no," said Miss Custer. "Didn't you know? The doctor was called into the country."

"Ah! he was?"

"Yes."

"Then you lost your afternoon's entertainment? That must have been a great deprivation."

He turned his head and looked at her with a lingering, exploring gaze that was difficult for her to fathom. How should she answer? He was certainly the only being of his sex who baffled or embarrassed her.

"It was indeed," she returned demurely, and yet with a hope that he might discover that she was but half in earnest. Her eyelids drooped and her lips were curved with a smile. She was pleasurably conscious of his prolonged gaze, and hoped something from it, knowing from much previous experience the power of her beauty.

The silence was very eloquent. He broke it—or intensified it indeed—by repeating from The Gypsy, in a low and remarkably well-modulated voice,

"Do you knowSometimes when we sit silent, and the airBreathes gently on us from the orange trees,It seems that with the whisper of a wordOur souls must shrink, yet poorer, more apart.Is it not so?

Do you know the answer?" he asked, never once taking away his eyes.

She raised hers and gave it with equal effect:

"Yes, dearest, it is true.Speech is but broken light upon the depthOf the unspoken: even your loved wordsFloat in the larger meaning of your voiceAs something dimmer."

There was nothing audacious in her manner of repeating it—no coquettish reference, in voice or glance, to him. She threw into her eyes an expression of complete absorption in the spirit and story of the poem, and appeared to be far away with Don Silva and Fedalina.

Her seriousness and evident intensity of feeling were a surprise to him. He had simply been trying her with a careless stroke, but he seemed to strike true flint. "I could have sworn," he thought to himself, "that she was making fun of Ebling's proposition to read to her to-day when she said one could stand hearing a poem a good many times." And he actually went on repeating passage after passage, while she sat with her hands folded and her eyes fixed dreamily, drinking it in like distant music sounding all the way from the Spanish shores.

They were both so absorbed—not in the poem, but in thoughts that floated under the poem and circled right around themselves—that they did not hear the dipping of the oars as the doctor rowed back to shore in the white moonlight—not softened now, as it had been a while ago, by the mellow tints in the west. "Hallo!" he called. "Come down now and embark."

"Shall we?" asked Bruce in a voice so low that it seemed almost tender.

She answered by getting up, and he took the burnous off the log and folded it about her shoulders. It gave her a conscious thrill.

They sauntered down, and Bruce gave her his hand to make the descent of the bank. Ruth sprang up like a gazelle while the doctor held the boat to shore, and then pushed it off when the occupants were seated.

"I'm the poorest rower in Christendom," said Bruce, taking up the oars and making a few awkward strokes.

"Never mind about rowing," said Miss Custer. "When we get out into the current let us drift: I like it just as well."

Bruce did so, resting the handles of the oars upon his knees.

Perfect silence reigned. The moon was strangely bright, making the very air silvery. Miss Custer, with the rarest tact, let the stillness alone, knowing there was power in it.

By and by Bruce murmured,

"With dreamful eyes,My spirit liesUnder the walls of Paradise.

What a strange effect moonlight and water have upon us, Miss Custer! They seem almost to disembody us. I can hardly ever recall a single line of poetry in the daytime when the sun is shining. But moonlight brings out all the delicate images of the mind's palimpsest."

"Pray, then, go on and repeat something more," said Miss Custer in a low voice: "I like to hear you. Repeat the rest of 'Drifting.'"

Bruce complied, and then struck upon Byron, and was surprised and delighted to find that Miss Custer followed him even there. The truth was, Miss Custer had rehearsed all these things many times before with different actors. The whole plot lay before her, ending and all. Bruce was certainly hooked, and all she had to do was to draw the line carefully in. To be sure, he was an odd specimen, a sort of man she was not much acquainted with; but that made him all the more interesting, and she was conscious of her power to manage him.

At last Bruce put the boat about without consulting her, and rowed back to the landing in silence and with considerable dexterity, considering his self-depreciation as a rower. Ruth and the doctor, who had no doubt been affected by the moonlight too, stood on the bank waiting for them. They all went home together, a rather merry party, and immediately dispersed for the night.

The next morning, when Miss Custer came down to breakfast radiant and joyous, with a consciousness of being in perfect keeping with the unpoetic sunshine, she was stricken with consternation at finding Mr. Bruce as distant and nonchalant as ever. No lingering, exploring glance this morning—nothing but the usual flash of his dark eyes as he bowed to her. Was it possible that all the fine effects of last night had passed out of his consciousness?

Some time during the day Bruce found an opportunity to say to Mrs. Tascher, "Don't ask me to do it again: I came near making a fool of myself last night. Got to quoting poetry and all that."

"Did you, indeed?" said she, laughing. "If the siren had that effect on you, a hardened bachelor, consider how it would go with Ebling."

"Ebling's heart is supposed to be preoccupied," said Bruce: "mine is an 'aching void.'"

That evening Hugh challenged Miss Custer to a game of croquet, and she, with secret reluctance, but a very good grace—being one of those sweetly-amiable people who never speak ill of any one, and never manifest the least boredom, no matter who undertakes the office of entertainer to them—accepted. However, she would make the most she could out of it. She invited the rest of the company to come down and look on and see that she had fair play. Bruce, at whom she glanced appealingly, paid no heed, but put on his hat and went down town with the air of a man greatly preoccupied and oppressed with business cares. Mrs. Tascher never went out when the dew was falling, and so there was nobody but Ruth and the doctor. They complied at once, and took seats on a rustic bench under the trees.

Miss Custer was conscious of showing to advantage in this picturesque game, and paid far more attention to her attitudes than her strokes: as a consequence, she was beaten, and immediately threw down her mallet.

"I'll give you another chance," said Hugh wistfully.

"Oh, I could never redeem myself with you if we should play till doomsday," she answered.

"You have beaten me," persisted Hugh.

"But I have a presentiment that I can't do it to-night," she returned.

"Well, then, Hugh," said the doctor, getting up and helping himself to a mallet, "if she is so disheartened, suppose we give her a chance to come off second best by taking a game with me?"

Hugh, smiling, but a little put out, stepped back, and the contest began, with far more animation on the part of Miss Custer. Presently Hugh's mother called him, and he went away. After a time Ruth called to the players, who were both at the other end of the ground, "Say, folks, if you'll excuse me I'll go in."

Miss Custer turned round and answered, "Oh, poor child! I presume you do find it dull."

Ruth ran up to Mrs. Tascher's room. Her acquaintance with that lady she counted among the best things of her life. The world had seemed larger and brighter and better since she had known her.

Mrs. Tascher was a widow: she had considerable wealth, but being an invalid she was deprived of the enjoyment of it to a great extent. She welcomed Ruth's friendly little visits always with a smile that seemed to make her soul stand out upon her face. She was what one might call a woman of the world. That is, she had travelled much, read much, studied people much, and mingled all her previous life in intelligent and refined society.

"Why, where is the rest of your party, my dear?" she asked as Ruth tapped on the door and came in.

"Hugh's mother wanted him," Ruth answered, "and I left Frank and Miss Custer playing a game."

Mrs. Tascher's smile faded. She felt tempted to speak a word of warning, but it seemed too bad to destroy the innocent faith of this high-minded, unsuspecting girl. She gave Ruth a chair, and Ruth begged her to read something: Mrs. Tascher's reading was sweeter than music to her. She complied readily, because it gave her pleasure to do anything Ruth asked. "Here is a poem by Whittier, just out," she said, taking up a magazine, the leaves of which she had cut only that afternoon. She began it, and Ruth leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes the better to see the images that passed in her mind. Mrs. Tascher read on until the light grew so dim that she could not see the lines, and then she got up and went to the window to finish. She glanced out as she did so, and stood silent. At last she said, "Come here, Ruth."

Ruth got up and went and looked out.

Away down at the farther end of the lawn stood Miss Custer and the doctor with their elbows resting upon the fence, evidently very deeply absorbed in each other. The spot was very lonely and still, hemmed in by trees, and would not have been visible from below—perhaps from hardly any other point but this window.

"Doesn't it strike you, Ruth, that a couple of young people must be rather sentimental to stray away like that?" asked Mrs. Tascher.

Ruth laughed, but not very joyously, and immediately turned away from the window, as though the sight hurt her.

Mrs. Tascher did so too, and struck a match to light her lamp. "If I were you, Ruth," she said as she settled the shade over it, "I would go down to the croquet-ground, from where you can see those people, and call to them."

"Oh no," said Ruth with a shiver.

"Why, you see," continued Mrs. Tascher, "it doesn't look well. Miss Custer ought to know better, but she is so vain of her influence over gentlemen that she exercises it upon every occasion that offers. It doesn't appear to make any difference who the gentleman is: it would be all the same to her now if it were Hugh instead of the doctor. I believe she does care something for Bruce, and he is her lawful prey; but she knows the doctor is not in the market."

Ruth threw back her head proudly. "He can be in the market," she said hoarsely.

"No, no, my dear," said Mrs. Tascher, shaking her head. "I don't want you to get reckless: I want to see you play this game with Miss Custer with a cool hand and come out ahead. You can do it, and you will be stronger and safer in the end."

Ruth pretty soon went out. She entered her room with her hand upon her heart, and sat down by the window without striking a light. In the course of half an hour the doctor and Miss Custer appeared in sight, walking slowly toward the house. They passed directly under her window, but their voices were so low that she could distinguish no word. By and by she heard the piano going. A moment after Mrs. Tascher tapped on her door, and, turning the knob, put her head in and called, "Ruth!"

Ruth got up and came forward.

"Come," said her visitor, "let us go down to the parlor."

"I cannot," said Ruth: "please don't ask me."

"Foolish child!" said Mrs. Tascher. "I am a thousand times sorry that I brought this thing to your notice."

"It was brought to my notice long ago," said Ruth brokenly; and Mrs. Tascher turned and went down stairs.

The doctor was leaning back in an easy-chair, completely absorbed in watching the exquisite figure at the piano and listening to the strains she evoked.

"One would think she had feeling," commented Mrs. Tascher mentally as she entered the room and swept across to the vacant seat beside the doctor, dispelling somehow, with her strong presence, the spirit of sentimentalism that pervaded the atmosphere. "Why, Doctor Ebling, are you here?" she asked: "I supposed you had gone to town. Where is Miss Stanley?"

"I—I don't know," said the doctor—honestly enough, to be sure.

"I thought you all went down to the croquet-ground?"

"Yes, we did. But she came back, and left Miss Custer and myself to finish our game."

"Oh, then I presume she is in her room.—Have you finished playing, Miss Custer?" with a smile of placid indifference as Miss Custer turned round on the piano-stool.

"Yes," said Miss Custer, getting up and taking a chair. "Doctor Ebling wished to hear the 'Last Hope.'"

"You haven't come to that in your experience yet, have you, doctor?" laughed Mrs. Tascher, though she was not in the habit of playing upon words.

"No," said the doctor. "It seems to me the 'last hope' is that we feel when we draw our last breath."

The three spent the evening together, and Mrs. Tascher brought into exercise the old charms and graces of manner and conversation that years ago had made her one of the most brilliant and fascinating women society could boast of. She was not old—not more than thirty-five—and when animated she was still beautiful: her face became illuminated and stars shone in her eyes. She so far outdid Miss Custer in the matter of pleasing and entertaining that when the doctor went away he hardly thought of the latter. He said to himself as he went down town, "What a remarkably brilliant woman Mrs. Tascher must have been in her day! And is yet, for that matter. Husband been dead six years: wonder why she never married again?"

Then he wondered with a slight feeling of uneasiness where Ruth had kept herself all the evening. "How affectionately and admiringly Mrs. Tascher always speaks of Ruth!" he said, and added, "Well, she is a noble girl."

There was an indefinable hardness in Ruth's manner the next morning. Her voice was hollow and her smile seemed ironical, though she was unusually gay. Mrs. Tascher, who observed her closely and with some uneasiness, thought her mockingly attentive to Miss Custer. Something was said at the dinner-table again about the doctor's promise to read to Miss Custer, and Ruth exclaimed, "By all means!—Miss Custer, make him stay at home and read you that poem."

The doctor of course fell readily in with the idea, and said he would not go down town this time to see if there were any orders: if anybody wanted him it was generally known that if he was not in his office he was at his boarding-place.

"Why did you do it?" said Mrs. Tascher, putting her handkerchief on her head and going down to the gate with Ruth.

"Because," said Ruth with drawn lips and heaving bosom, "I do not want to get him unfairly. If there is some one else who interests him more than I, he is still at liberty to choose."

"Ruth," said Mrs. Tascher, and her eyes flashed, "do you think she is getting him fairly? You have no conception of the scheming of that woman."