“Is it?” said Aunt Jane, curtly. “That is refreshing in these times.”
“A good beginning,” said Kate. “Go on. You have prepared us for something incredible.”
“You will think it so,” said Malbone. “Emilia is engaged to Mr. John Lambert.” And he went out of the room.
“Good Heavens!” said Aunt Jane, taking off her spectacles. “What a man! He is ugly enough to frighten the neighboring crows. His face looks as if it had fallen together out of chaos, and the features had come where it had pleased Fate. There is a look of industrious nothingness about him, such as busy dogs have. I know the whole family. They used to bake our bread.”
“I suppose they are good and sensible,” said Kate.
“Like boiled potatoes, my dear,” was the response,—“wholesome but perfectly uninteresting.”
“Is he of that sort?” asked Kate.
“No,” said her aunt; “not uninteresting, but ungracious. But I like an ungracious man better than one like Philip, who hangs over young girls like a soft-hearted avalanche. This Lambert will govern Emilia, which is what she needs.”
“She will never love him,” said Kate, “which is the one thing she needs. There is nothing that could not be done with Emilia by any person with whom she was in love; and nothing can ever be done with her by anybody else. No good will ever come of this, and I hope she will never marry him.”
With this unusual burst, Kate retreated to Hope. Hope took the news more patiently than any one, but with deep solicitude. A worldly marriage seemed the natural result of the Ingleside influence, but it had not occurred to anybody that it would come so soon. It had not seemed Emilia’s peculiar temptation; and yet nobody could suppose that she looked at John Lambert through any glamour of the affections.
Mr. John Lambert was a millionnaire, a politician, and a widower. The late Mrs. Lambert had been a specimen of that cheerful hopelessness of temperament that one finds abundantly developed among the middle-aged women of country towns. She enjoyed her daily murders in the newspapers, and wept profusely at the funerals of strangers. On every occasion, however felicitous, she offered her condolences in a feeble voice, that seemed to have been washed a great many times and to have faded. But she was a good manager, a devoted wife, and was more cheerful at home than elsewhere, for she had there plenty of trials to exercise her eloquence, and not enough joy to make it her duty to be doleful. At last her poor, meek, fatiguing voice faded out altogether, and her husband mourned her as heartily as she would have bemoaned the demise of the most insignificant neighbor. After her death, being left childless, he had nothing to do but to make money, and he naturally made it. Having taken his primary financial education in New England, he graduated at that great business university, Chicago, and then entered on the public practice of wealth in New York.
Aunt Jane had perhaps done injustice to the personal appearance of Mr. John Lambert. His features were irregular, but not insignificant, and there was a certain air of slow command about him, which made some persons call him handsome. He was heavily built, with a large, well-shaped head, light whiskers tinged with gray, and a sort of dusty complexion. His face was full of little curved wrinkles, as if it were a slate just ruled for sums in long division, and his small blue eyes winked anxiously a dozen different ways, as if they were doing the sums. He seemed to bristle with memorandum-books, and kept drawing them from every pocket, to put something down. He was slow of speech, and his very heaviness of look added to the impression of reserved power about the man.
All his career in life had been a solid progress, and his boldest speculations seemed securer than the legitimate business of less potent financiers. Beginning business life by peddling gingerbread on a railway train, he had developed such a genius for railway management as some men show for chess or for virtue; and his accumulating property had the momentum of a planet.
He had read a good deal at odd times, and had seen a great deal of men. His private morals were unstained, he was equable and amiable, had strong good sense, and never got beyond his depth. He had travelled in Europe and brought home many statistics, some new thoughts, and a few good pictures selected by his friends. He spent his money liberally for the things needful to his position, owned a yacht, bred trotting-horses, and had founded a theological school. He submitted to these and other social observances from a vague sense of duty as an American citizen; his real interest lay in business and in politics. Yet he conducted these two vocations on principles diametrically opposite. In business he was more honest than the average; in politics he had no conception of honesty, for he could see no difference between a politician and any other merchandise. He always succeeded in business, for he thoroughly understood its principles; in politics he always failed in the end, for he recognized no principles at all. In business he was active, resolute, and seldom deceived; in politics he was equally active, but was apt to be irresolute, and was deceived every day of his life. In both cases it was not so much from love of power that he labored, as from the excitement of the game. The larger the scale the better he liked it; a large railroad operation, a large tract of real estate, a big and noisy statesman,—these investments he found irresistible.
On which of his two sets of principles he would manage a wife remained to be proved. It is the misfortune of what are called self-made men in America, that, though early accustomed to the society of men of the world, they often remain utterly unacquainted with women of the world, until those charming perils are at last sprung upon them in full force, at New York or Washington. John Lambert at forty was as absolutely ignorant of the qualities and habits of a cultivated woman as of the details of her toilet. The plain domesticity of his departed wife he had understood and prized; he remembered her household ways as he did her black alpaca dress; indeed, except for that item of apparel, she was not so unlike himself. In later years he had seen the women of society; he had heard them talk; he had heard men talk about them, wittily or wickedly, at the clubs; he had perceived that a good many of them wished to marry him, and yet, after all, he knew no more of them than of the rearing of humming-birds or orchids,—dainty, tropical things which he allowed his gardener to raise, he keeping his hands off, and only paying the bills. Whether there was in existence a class of women who were both useful and refined,—any intermediate type between the butterfly and the drudge,—was a question which he had sometimes asked himself, without having the materials to construct a reply.
With imagination thus touched and heart unfilled, this man had been bewitched from the very first moment by Emilia. He kept it to himself, and heard in silence the criticisms made at the club-windows. To those perpetual jokes about marriage, which are showered with such graceful courtesy about the path of widowers, he had no reply; or at most would only admit that he needed some elegant woman to preside over his establishment, and that he had better take her young, as having habits less fixed. But in his secret soul he treasured every tone of this girl’s voice, every glance of her eye, and would have kept in a casket of gold and diamonds the little fragrant glove she once let fall. He envied the penniless and brainless boys, who, with ready gallantry, pushed by him to escort her to her carriage; and he lay awake at night to form into words the answer he ought to have made, when she threw at him some careless phrase, and gave him the opportunity to blunder.
And she, meanwhile, unconscious of his passion, went by him in her beauty, and caught him in the net she never threw. Emilia was always piquant, because she was indifferent; she had never made an effort in her life, and she had no respect for persons. She was capable of marrying for money, perhaps, but the sacrifice must all be completed in a single vow. She would not tutor nor control herself for the purpose. Hand and heart must be duly transferred, she supposed, whenever the time was up; but till then she must be free.
This with her was not art, but necessity; yet the most accomplished art could have devised nothing so effectual to hold her lover. His strong sense had always protected him from the tricks of matchmaking mammas and their guileless maids. Had Emilia made one effort to please him, once concealed a dislike, once affected a preference, the spell might have been broken. Had she been his slave, he might have become a very unyielding or a very heedless despot. Making him her slave, she kept him at the very height of bliss. This king of railways and purchaser of statesmen, this man who made or wrecked the fortunes of others by his whim, was absolutely governed by a reckless, passionate, inexperienced, ignorant girl.
And this passion was made all the stronger by being a good deal confined to his own breast. Somehow it was very hard for him to talk sentiment to Emilia; he instinctively saw she disliked it, and indeed he liked her for not approving the stiff phrases which were all he could command. Nor could he find any relief of mind in talking with others about her. It enraged him to be clapped on the back and congratulated by his compeers; and he stopped their coarse jokes, often rudely enough. As for the young men at the club, he could not bear to hear them mention his darling’s name, however courteously. He knew well enough that for them the betrothal had neither dignity nor purity; that they held it to be as much a matter of bargain and sale as their worst amours. He would far rather have talked to the theological professors whose salaries he paid, for he saw that they had a sort of grave, formal tradition of the sacredness of marriage. And he had a right to claim that to him it was sacred, at least as yet; all the ideal side of his nature was suddenly developed; he walked in a dream; he even read Tennyson.
Sometimes he talked a little to his future brother-in-law, Harry,—assuming, as lovers are wont, that brothers see sisters on their ideal side. This was quite true of Harry and Hope, but not at all true as regarded Emilia. She seemed to him simply a beautiful and ungoverned girl whom he could not respect, and whom he therefore found it very hard to idealize. Therefore he heard with a sort of sadness the outpourings of generous devotion from John Lambert.
“I don’t know how it is, Henry,” the merchant would gravely say, “I can’t get rightly used to it, that I feel so strange. Honestly, now, I feel as if I was beginning life over again. It ain’t a selfish feeling, so I know there’s some good in it. I used to be selfish enough, but I ain’t so to her. You may not think it, but if it would make her happy, I believe I could lie down and let her carriage roll over me. By ——-, I would build her a palace to live in, and keep the lodge at the gate myself, just to see her pass by. That is, if she was to live in it alone by herself. I couldn’t stand sharing her. It must be me or nobody.”
Probably there was no male acquaintance of the parties, however hardened, to whom these fine flights would have seemed more utterly preposterous than to the immediate friend and prospective bridesmaid, Miss Blanche Ingleside. To that young lady, trained sedulously by a devoted mother, life was really a serious thing. It meant the full rigor of the marriage market, tempered only by dancing and new dresses. There was a stern sense of duty beneath all her robing and disrobing; she conscientiously did what was expected of her, and took her little amusements meanwhile. It was supposed that most of the purchasers in the market preferred slang and bare shoulders, and so she favored them with plenty of both. It was merely the law of supply and demand. Had John Lambert once hinted that he would accept her in decent black, she would have gone to the next ball as a Sister of Charity; but where was the need of it, when she and her mother both knew that, had she appeared as the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, she would not have won him? So her only resource was a cheerful acquiescence in Emilia’s luck, and a judicious propitiation of the accepted favorite.
“I wouldn’t mind playing Virtue Rewarded myself, young woman,” said Blanche, “at such a scale of prices. I would do it even to so slow an audience as old Lambert. But you see, it isn’t my line. Don’t forget your humble friends when you come into your property, that’s all.” Then the tender coterie of innocents entered on some preliminary consideration of wedding-dresses.
When Emilia came home, she dismissed the whole matter lightly as a settled thing, evaded all talk with Aunt Jane, and coolly said to Kate that she had no objection to Mr. Lambert, and might as well marry him as anybody else.
“I am not like you and Hal, you know,” said she. “I have no fancy for love in a cottage. I never look well in anything that is not costly. I have not a taste that does not imply a fortune. What is the use of love? One marries for love, and is unhappy ever after. One marries for money, and perhaps gets love after all. I dare say Mr. Lambert loves me, though I do not see why he should.”
“I fear he does,” said Kate, almost severely.
“Fear?” said Emilia.
“Yes,” said Kate. “It is an unequal bargain, where one side does all the loving.”
“Don’t be troubled,” said Emilia. “I dare say he will not love me long. Nobody ever did!” And her eyes filled with tears which she dashed away angrily, as she ran up to her room.
It was harder yet for her to talk with Hope, but she did it, and that in a very serious mood. She had never been so open with her sister.
“Aunt Jane once told me,” she said, “that my only safety was in marrying a good man. Now I am engaged to one.”
“Do you love him, Emilia?” asked Hope, gravely.
“Not much,” said Emilia, honestly. “But perhaps I shall, by and by.”
“Emilia,” cried Hope, “there is no such thing as happiness in a marriage without love.”
“Mine is not without love,” the girl answered. “He loves me. It frightens me to see how much he loves me. I can have the devotion of a lifetime, if I will. Perhaps it is hard to receive it in such a way, but I can have it. Do you blame me very much?”
Hope hesitated. “I cannot blame you so much, my child,” she said, “as if I thought it were money for which you cared. It seems to me that there must be something beside that, and yet—”
“O Hope, how I thank you,” interrupted Emilia. “It is not money. You know I do not care about money, except just to buy my clothes and things. At least, I do not care about so much as he has,—more than a million dollars, only think! Perhaps they said two million. Is it wrong for me to marry him, just because he has that?”
“Not if you love him.”
“I do not exactly love him, but O Hope, I cannot tell you about it. I am not so frivolous as you think. I want to do my duty. I want to make you happy too: you have been so sweet to me.”
“Did you think it would make me happy to have you married?” asked Hope, surprised, and kissing again and again the young, sad face. And the two girls went upstairs together, brought for the moment into more sisterly nearness by the very thing that had seemed likely to set them forever apart.