AND now while a certain Peter Skerrett, stupendous wag, who is in town for a day or two and has been presented to Mr. Waddy by old Budlong, is showing the returned nabob through streets of deserted houses and telling him the necessary protective scandals about their owners:——
And while at Newport, in the society of De Châteaunéant, Tim Budlong is subscribing more freely than ever, and the Budlong ladies are quivering through the ter-diurnal shift of toilets resplendent:——
And while Sally Bishop, who has heard from her father how he had sold the black to a Mr. Ira Waddy, just returned from India, is dying with something on her mind which she dare not yet reveal:——
And while Horace Belden is beating his bolting horse and training another, to which he naturally gives the name of Knockknees, to run, and no doubt to win purses, and is nursing his finances for an August at Newport with its possible heiress:——
[108]And while Miss Sullivan, at her lovely cottage opposite Belden’s, is singing duets with Mrs. Cecilia Tootler, to whom, though that lady has often spoken of the delightful visit of Mr. Waddy, her friend, she has never yet mentioned her share in the rescue of a person of that name:——
While all our acquaintances are busied thus, Major Granby, at Halifax, boards a Cunarder, embarked for Boston. As he mounted the plank, a young excessively English man defended the gangway with open fist. The major won his entrance by grasping the fist in amicable guise.
“Why, how d’ye do, Ambient?” he said to his compatriot, a pleasant-faced pinkling. “So you have really started on your travels.”
“Aw! Gwanby, I’m vewy glad to see you,” replied Sir Comeguys Ambient, generally called briefly Sir Com. “Yes, I’ve begun my jowney wound the wowuld. It’s lownger than I thought.”
“You’ve had some pleasant company, anyway,” said the major, examining discreetly two young ladies who stood near the rail, and who, seemingly, found much to interest them in the shoreward view.
“Yes; doosed handsome gerwuls,” agreed Sir Com, “and vewy agweeable, but know too much.”
“Not exactly in your line then, eh?”
“I’m weelly a little afwaid of them,” admitted the valiant youth. “But the dark one is a wegular stunner[109] for eyes and hair. The fair one is Miss Clara Waddie. The bwunette is her friend, Diana,” and the pinkling’s cheeks became all suffused with his ingenuous heart’s blood.
“Ah,” said Granby, observing the suffusion, “so that goddess—and she is a goddess—has transfixed you! Beware how you trifle with her; these American ladies do not hesitate to call a man out. Your Diana is divine, but your Clara is angelic. Waddy? I have a friend of that name. I’m going now to meet him in Boston.”
In the course of the day, Major Granby, who had a soldier-like impetuosity in assaulting new opportunities, was presented to Waddie père and by him to the ladies.
Mr. Waddie of New York was a tall, slender gentleman, clean-shaven and high-cravatted. A bit of white collar on each side narrowed his range of chin movement. Dignity required that his head should not gyrate, hence sidelong glances were only effected by a painful twist of his eyes. He wore a blue frock, buttoned, and remarkably perfect boots. His manner was a little stiff, but entirely well-bred, and had a certain careful courtesy very attractive. Altogether, you would say, a man of limited, but not narrow mind, gentle and amiable. His passion was genealogy, and if he was ever querulous, it was when inevitable antiquaries connected him with the first Waddy, well known to all American pedigrees,[110] cook of the Mayflower and victim of Miles Standish.
“Do I look,” he would say, “like the son of a sea-cook, even in the sixth generation?”
And, indeed, he did not resemble a descendant of the caboose, but rather a marquis of the Émigration, such as we behold him at the Théâtre Français. This somewhat faded élégant had another passion: it was for his lovely daughter; nor was he the only man thus affected.
Mrs. Waddie was wifely, motherly, and a little over-energetic, as became the spouse of so mild and unpractical a gentleman. It was she who devised and carried out that purchase of real estate by which their comfortable property became a handsome fortune. It was she who officered the campaign which ended in giving him the civic crown of Member of Congress, and when the bad cookery of the American snob’s paradise had impaired his health and compelled his resignation, it was again his energetic wife who suggested to General Taylor that she wished the embassy to Florence. It was obtained, of course, and was one of the most creditable acts of that President’s brief career. His successor did not venture to recall Mr. Waddie, although he knew the scorn with which that gentleman, usually so amiable, regarded those ridiculously unsuccessful makeshifts and cowardly compromises of 1850. Mr. Waddie’s fortune, high social position, formidable[111] wife, his serene worth and merited popularity, made him a person whom an accidental President could not presume to offend; and if he were already an enemy, at least it were wiser to keep him in a foreign land.
So his wife and the ambassador remained at Florence, where her balls crushed the Grand Duke’s. She instituted a subscription for fronting the Duomo and introduced into Florentine life Buckwheat Cakes, Veracity, and Sewing Machines—of which only the first-named are still popular in that beautiful city.
It was the last year of the embassy when they thought proper to send for Miss Clara, who, with Diana, Mr. Waddie’s ward, had been in charge of Miss Sullivan at home. This was the first year of Mr. Pierce’s administration, and while he was hesitating whom to appoint in Mr. Waddie’s place. He did appoint, in time, a tobacconist from the South-west, who viewed the world only as a spittoon.
Everybody has been in Florence or will go. It is not necessary, therefore, here to describe what Clara and Diana saw under the superintendence of Miss Sullivan, instinctive discoverer of the best. They were devout beneath the dome of Brunelleschi, rapt beside the tower of Giotto, critical in the galleries, gay in the Cascine. The Florentines adored Clara, the fair. Strangers worshipped Diana, the dark. This was not Diana, pale queen of night, but[112] the huntress deity, bold and clear of eye, of colours rich and warm, with vigorous, fiery blood, hastening, almost fevering, a living life of passionateness. An Amazonian queen was Diana, who could do the dashing deeds of an Amazon with fanciful freedom. The Actæons dreaded her. No man of feeble manhood was permitted in her presence. Soldierly men and travellers she liked, and deep-sea fishermen, and blacksmiths and architects and heroes and lyric poets. And when any of these told her of his ambitions, large as life, or the dangers he had passed, and while he told, looked in her unblenching eyes and saw through them a soul that could comprehend any great ambition, or dare any danger; he, the strong man, always loved her madly. But she, the strong woman, the master-hero of her own soul, could not find her hero. There were ideal men in history for her to adore—at least, they seemed so, as history painted them—and as she read of them, she felt that strange thrill of despair for their absence that later she knew to be the passion of love—the passion of the woman longing for the fit, appointed mate.
The friendship of Clara and Diana was fore-ordained. Its historic beginning dates back to the college intimacy between young Waddie, refined, timid, studious, and Diana’s father, a bold and ardent youth of southern blood and foreign race. This gentleman, being afterward unhappy in his[113] home, wandered away into Texas. There he acquired immense estates by the purchase of old Spanish grants, and dying early, bequeathed his only child to his friend, Mr. Waddie, for care and nurture. The two girls grew up as sisters, and it was not until Diana’s womanhood that the serious consideration of her orphanage was forced upon her. Mrs. Waddie, the kindest of mothers, was immersed in business, speculating for her husband, urging him forward to posts of responsibility he shrank from. She was therefore ready to yield her two daughters entirely into the hands of Miss Sullivan.
It was to Miss Sullivan that the task fell of telling Diana the sad history of her father and her mother, and how the mother, after a life worse than death, was now in a madhouse. It was a terrible revelation for this pure and brave young girl. In an agony of tears, she threw herself into Miss Sullivan’s arms and prayed her to be a mother to the orphan. Miss Sullivan must have been of a nature singularly sympathetic, or herself have felt the loneliness of bitter grief, so deeply did she know the only consolations—endurance, and long-suffering faith, and hope in other lives, eternal ones.
Clara was present at this interview, and, after this, the relations between the elder and the younger women were closely sisterly. The elder sister, hardly older in appearance, except of paler and more thoughtful beauty, formed the younger minds.
[114]Clara Waddie had inherited all her father’s grace and refinement of face, form, mien, manner, and thought, and withal had gained from her mother judgment and strength of character, which underlay without diminishing her delicate sweetness. You might have known this fair young person for months and have given only a mental assent to her reputation of exquisite beauty; but one day, when some changing charm of emotion cast an evanescent flush upon her cheek and your sudden inspiration of eloquence had roused a look of interest in her lambent listening eyes, you would become conscious of more than mental assent to her unclaimed claim of perfect loveliness; your soul itself would thenceforth be cognisant of her beauty.
At the end of that delightful year in Florence, now rich with memories of the art and poetry of Italy, Diana was suddenly summoned to America. A most favourable change had come over her mother’s malady, and with sanity returning, she was praying for kindly companionship and love. Her life, at best, was to be but brief, but it was thought that a residence in the dry, elevated regions of the interior might prolong it and allay the pangs of her desperate disease. Diana did not hesitate; she saw her duty clearly and accepted it, rejoicing.
Mr. Waddie went over with Diana. She found a mother with the saddened relics of a feeble beauty. Married hastily, out of silly school, she had been[115] ignorantly, in her husband’s absence, bewildered in the toils of a great villainy, which death to the villain and madness to the victim had sufficiently avenged. Rejecting Mr. Waddie’s kind offer of escort, Diana took her mother to their estates in the up-country of Texas. In that most beautiful region, the Amazon could carry out her huntress fancies. She could gallop with her Mexican master of the horse over vast reaches of prairie, all her own. She could encamp in those belts of timber that sweep like rivers across boundless plains of Western wildness. At noon, when the deer she chased were hid in forest court, she, too, could seek such sylvan shelter, and lying there beneath an oak, all grey with mossy drapery, could take delight of dreamy contrast, and, with closed eyes, narrow her horizon with remembered palaces and rebuild under broad blue heavens the wonderful domes of Italy. Then she would study in some shady pool of the forest her face nut-browned to warm and healthy hues and fancy Clara, more palely beautiful, suddenly appearing, like Una from the ancient grove, and standing beside her at this softening mirror, as they had often stood in loving sisterhood before. In this existence, free and fresh, she learnt what so few women ever know, the pure physical joy of living.
The Texas postmaster was puzzled with strange stamps on Diana’s constant letters from Europe; she was as constant in her replies. At last, she had[116] sadly to tell her friend how her mother, after a sudden and fearful access of madness, had died. If there were any circumstances accompanying this death that made it doubly painful, and if, far away from the civilisation of towns, she had made other friends from whom this death was the cause of bitter parting, of this she said nothing to Clara. There are some secrets which honourable women do not impart to anyone more distant from their hearts than God. As to Endymion, it was certainly not probable that she had found him among Santa Fé trader............