_ VOLUME I. BOOK FIRST. CHAPTER VIII.
Verena Tarrant got up and went to her father in the middle of the room;
Olive Chancellor crossed and resumed her place beside Mrs. Farrinder on
the sofa the girl had quitted; and Miss Birdseye's visitors, for the
rest, settled themselves attentively in chairs or leaned against the
bare sides of the parlour. Verena took her father's hands, held them for
a moment, while she stood before him, not looking at him, with her eyes
towards the company; then, after an instant, her mother, rising, pushed
forward, with an interesting sigh, the chair on which she had been
sitting. Mrs. Tarrant was provided with another seat, and Verena,
relinquishing her father's grasp, placed herself in the chair, which
Tarrant put in position for her. She sat there with closed eyes, and her
father now rested his long, lean hands upon her head. Basil Ransom
watched these proceedings with much interest, for the girl amused and
pleased him. She had far more colour than any one there, for whatever
brightness was to be found in Miss Birdseye's rather faded and dingy
human collection had gathered itself into this attractive but ambiguous
young person. There was nothing ambiguous, by the way, about her
confederate; Ransom simply loathed him, from the moment he opened his
mouth; he was intensely familiar--that is, his type was; he was simply
the detested carpet-bagger. He was false, cunning, vulgar, ignoble; the
cheapest kind of human product. That he should be the father of a
delicate, pretty girl, who was apparently clever too, whether she had a
gift or no, this was an annoying, disconcerting fact. The white, puffy
mother, with the high forehead, in the corner there, looked more like a
lady; but if she were one, it was all the more shame to her to have
mated with such a varlet, Ransom said to himself, making use, as he did
generally, of terms of opprobrium extracted from the older English
literature. He had seen Tarrant, or his equivalent, often before; he had
"whipped" him, as he believed, controversially, again and again, at
political meetings in blighted Southern towns, during the horrible
period of reconstruction. If Mrs. Farrinder had looked at Verena Tarrant
as if she were a mountebank, there was some excuse for it, inasmuch as
the girl made much the same impression on Basil Ransom. He had never
seen such an odd mixture of elements; she had the sweetest, most
unworldly face, and yet, with it, an air of being on exhibition, of
belonging to a troupe, of living in the gaslight, which pervaded even
the details of her dress, fashioned evidently with an attempt at the
histrionic. If she had produced a pair of castanets or a tambourine, he
felt that such accessories would have been quite in keeping.
Little Doctor Prance, with her hard good sense, had noted that she was
anaemic, and had intimated that she was a deceiver. The value of her
performance was yet to be proved, but she was certainly very pale, white
as women are who have that shade of red hair; they look as if their
blood had gone into it. There was, however, something rich in the
fairness of this young lady; she was strong and supple, there was colour
in her lips and eyes, and her tresses, gathered into a complicated coil,
seemed to glow with the brightness of her nature. She had curious,
radiant, liquid eyes (their smile was a sort of reflexion, like the
glisten of a gem), and though she was not tall, she appeared to spring
up, and carried her head as if it reached rather high. Ransom would have
thought she looked like an Oriental, if it were not that Orientals are
dark; and if she had only had a goat she would have resembled Esmeralda,
though he had but a vague recollection of who Esmeralda had been. She
wore a light-brown dress, of a shape that struck him as fantastic, a
yellow petticoat, and a large crimson sash fastened at the side; while
round her neck, and falling low upon her flat young chest, she had a
double chain of amber beads. It must be added that, in spite of her
melodramatic appearance, there was no symptom that her performance,
whatever it was, would be of a melodramatic character. She was very
quiet now, at least (she had folded her big fan), and her father
continued the mysterious process of calming her down. Ransom wondered
whether he wouldn't put her to sleep; for some minutes her eyes had
remained closed; he heard a lady near him, apparently familiar with
phenomena of this class, remark that she was going off. As yet the
exhibition was not exciting, though it was certainly pleasant to have
such a pretty girl placed there before one, like a moving statue. Doctor
Tarrant looked at no one as he stroked and soothed his daughter; his
eyes wandered round the cornice of the room, and he grinned upward, as
if at an imaginary gallery. "Quietly--quietly," he murmured from time to
time. "It will come, my good child, it will come. Just let it work--just
let it gather. The spirit, you know; you've got to let the spirit come
out when it will." He threw up his arms at moments, to rid himself of
the wings of his long waterproof, which fell forward over his hands.
Basil Ransom noticed all these things, and noticed also, opposite, the
waiting face of his cousin, fixed, from her sofa, upon the closed eyes
of the young prophetess. He grew more impatient at last, not of the
delay of the edifying voice (though some time had elapsed), but of
Tarrant's grotesque manipulations, which he resented as much as if he
himself had felt their touch, and which seemed a dishonour to the
passive maiden. They made him nervous, they made him angry, and it was
only afterwards that he asked himself wherein they concerned him, and
whether even a carpet-bagger hadn't a right to do what he pleased with
his daughter. It was a relief to him when Verena got up from her chair,
with a movement which made Tarrant drop into the background as if his
part were now over. She stood there with a quiet face, serious and
sightless; then, after a short further delay, she began to speak.
She began incoherently, almost inaudibly, as if she were talking in a
dream. Ransom could not understand her; he thought it very queer, and
wondered what Doctor Prance would have said. "She's just arranging her
ideas, and trying to get in report; she'll come out all right." This
remark he heard dropped in a low tone by the mesmeric healer; "in
report" was apparently Tarrant's version of _en rapport_. His prophecy
was verified, and Verena did come out, after a little; she came out with
a great deal of sweetness--with a very quaint and peculiar effect. She
proceeded slowly, cautiously, as if she were listening for the prompter,
catching, one by one, certain phrases that were whispered to her a great
distance off, behind the scenes of the world. Then memory, or
inspiration, returned to her, and presently she was in possession of her
part. She played it with extraordinary simplicity and grace; at the end
of ten minutes Ransom became aware that the whole audience--Mrs.
Farrinder, Miss Chancellor, and the tough subject from Mississippi--were
under the charm. I speak of ten minutes, but to tell the truth the young
man lost all sense of time. He wondered afterwards how long she had
spoken; then he counted that her strange, sweet, crude, absurd,
enchanting improvisation must have lasted half an hour. It was not what
she said; he didn't care for that, he scarcely understood it; he could
only see that it was all about the gentleness and goodness of women, and
how, during the long ages of history, they had been trampled under the
iron heel of man. It was about their equality--perhaps even (he was not
definitely conscious) about their superiority. It was about their day
having come at last, about the universal sisterhood, about their duty to
themselves and to each other. It was about such matters as these, and
Basil Ransom was delighted to observe that such matters as these didn't
spoil it. The effect was not in what she said, though she said some such
pretty things, but in the picture and figure of the half-bedizened
damsel (playing, now again, with her red fan), the visible freshness and
purity of the little effort. When she had gained confidence she opened
her eyes, and their shining softness was half the effect of her
discourse. It was full of school-girl phrases, of patches of remembered
eloquence, of childish lapses of logic, of flights of fancy which might
indeed have had success at Topeka; but Ransom thought that if it had
been much worse it would have been quite as good, for the argument, the
doctrine, had absolutely nothing to do with it. It was simply an
intensely personal exhibition, and the person making it happened to be
fascinating. She might have offended the taste of certain people--Ransom
could imagine that there were other Boston circles in which she would be
thought pert; but for himself all he could feel was that to _his_
starved senses she irresistibly appealed. He was the stiffest of
conservatives, and his mind was steeled against the inanities she
uttered--the rights and wrongs of women, the equality of the sexes, the
hysterics of conventions, the further stultification of the suffrage,
the prospect of conscript mothers in the national Senate. It made no
difference; she didn't mean it, she didn't know what she meant, she had
been stuffed with this trash by her father, and she was neither more nor
less willing to say it than to say anything else; for the necessity of
her nature was not to make converts to a ridiculous cause, but to emit
those charming notes of her voice, to stand in those free young
attitudes, to shake her braided locks like a naiad rising from the
waves, to please every one who came near her, and to be happy that she
pleased. I know not whether Ransom was aware of the bearings of this
interpretation, which attributed to Miss Tarrant a singular hollowness
of character; he contented himself with believing that she was as
innocent as she was lovely, and with regarding her as a vocalist of
exquisite faculty, condemned to sing bad music. How prettily, indeed,
she made some of it sound!
"Of course I only speak to women--to my own dear sisters; I don't speak
to men, for I don't expect them to like what I say. They pretend to
admire us very much, but I should like them to admire us a little less
and to trust us a little more. I don't know what we have ever done to
them that they should keep us out of everything. We have trusted _them_
too much, and I think the time has come now for us to judge them, and
say that by keeping us out we don't think they have done so well. When I
look around me at the world, and at the state that men have brought it
to, I confess I say to myself, "Well, if women had fixed it this way I
should like to know what they would think of it!" When I see the
dreadful misery of mankind and think of the suffering of which at any
hour, at any moment, the world is full, I say that if this is the best
they can do by themselves, they had better let us come in a little and
see what _we_ can do. We couldn't possibly make it worse, could we? If
we had done only this, we shouldn't boast of it. Poverty, and ignorance,
and crime; disease, and wickedness, and wars! Wars, always more wars,
and always more and more. Blood, blood--the world is drenched with
blood! To kill each other, with all sorts of expensive and perfected
instruments, that is the most brilliant thing they have been able to
invent. It seems to me that we might stop it, we might invent something
better. The cruelty--the cruelty; there is so much, so much! Why
shouldn't tenderness come in? Why should our woman's hearts be so full
of it, and all so wasted and withered, while armies and prisons and
helpless miseries grow greater all the while? I am only a girl, a simple
American girl, and of course I haven't seen much, and there is a great
deal of life that I don't know anything about. But there are some things
I feel--it seems to me as if I had been born to feel them; they are in
my ears in the stillness of the night and before my face in the visions
of the darkness. It is what the great sisterhood of women might do if
they should all join hands, and lift up their voices above the brutal
uproar of the world, in which it is so hard for the plea of mercy or of
justice, the moan of weakness and suffering, to be heard. We should
quench it, we should make it still, and the sound of our lips would
become the voice of universal peace! For this we must trust one another,
we must be true and gentle and kind. We must remember that the world is
ours too, ours--little as we have ever had to say about anything!--and
that the question is _not_ yet definitely settled whether it shall be a
place of injustice or a place of love!"
It was with this that the young lady finished her harangue, which was
not followed by her sinking exhausted into her chair or by any of the
traces of a laboured climax. She only turned away slowly towards her
mother, smiling over her shoulder at the whole room, as if it had been a
single person, without a flush in her whiteness, or the need of drawing
a longer breath. The performance had evidently been very easy to her,
and there might have been a kind of impertinence in her air of not
having suffered from an exertion which had wrought so powerfully on
every one else. Ransom broke into a genial laugh, which he instantly
swallowed again, at the sweet grotesqueness of this virginal creature's
standing up before a company of middle-aged people to talk to them about
"love," the note on which she had closed her harangue. It was the most
charming touch in the whole thing, and the most vivid proof of her
innocence. She had had immense success, and Mrs. Tarrant, as she took
her into her arms and kissed her, was certainly able to feel that the
audience was not disappointed. They were exceedingly affected; they
broke into exclamations and murmurs. Selah Tarrant went on conversing
ostentatiously with his neighbours, slowly twirling his long thumbs and
looking up at the cornice again, as if there could be nothing in the
brilliant manner in which his daughter had acquitted herself to surprise
_him_, who had heard her when she was still more remarkable, and who,
moreover, remembered that the affair was so impersonal. Miss Birdseye
looked round at the company with dim exultation; her large mild cheeks
were shining with unwiped tears. Young Mr. Pardon remarked, in Ransom's
hearing, that he knew parties who, if they had been present, would want
to engage Miss Verena at a high figure for the winter campaign. And
Ransom heard him add in a lower tone: "There's money for some one in
that girl; you see if she don't have quite a run!" As for our
Mississippian he kept his agreeable sensation for himself, only
wondering whether he might not ask Miss Birdseye to present him to the
heroine of the evening. Not immediately, of course, for the young man
mingled with his Southern pride a shyness which often served all the
purpose of humility. He was aware how much he was an outsider in such a
house as that, and he was ready to wait for his coveted satisfaction
till the others, who all hung together, should have given her the
assurance of an approval which she would value, naturally, more than
anything he could say to her. This episode had imparted animation to the
assembly; a certain gaiety, even, expressed in a higher pitch of
conversation, seemed to float in the heated air. People circulated more
freely, and Verena Tarrant was presently hidden from Ransom's sight by
the close-pressed ranks of the new friends she had made. "Well, I never
heard it put _that_ way!" Ransom heard one of the ladies exclaim; to
which another replied that she wondered one of their bright women hadn't
thought of it before. "Well, it _is_ a gift, and no mistake," and "Well,
they may call it what they please, it's a pleasure to listen to
it"--these genial tributes fell from the lips of a pair of ruminating
gentlemen. It was affirmed within Ransom's hearing that if they had a
few more like that the matter would soon be fixed; and it was rejoined
that they couldn't expect to have a great many--the style was so
peculiar. It was generally admitted that the style was peculiar, but
Miss Tarrant's peculiarity was the explanation of her success. _