She moves through her duties as hostess with a pretty
well-bred grace, and a childishness infinitely touching.
Yet something more protects her; a certain common
sense, which now and then very nearly achieves wit.
For an instance—But yesterday a certain
pompous lady lamented to her in my hearing (and with
intention, as it seemed to me, who am grown suspicious),
the rapid moral decay of Boston society. “Alas!”
sighs my heroine; “but what a comfort, ma’am,
to think that neither of us belongs to it!”
Add to this that she has learning enough to equip
ten precieuses—and hides it:
has read Plato and can quote her Virgil by the page—but
forbears. Yet all this while you have suspected
me, no doubt, of raving over a ’Belle Sauvage,
a Pocahontas.
Well, I shall watch her progress. . . . I have
become so nearly a part of Vyell that I charge myself
to stand for him and supply what he lacks. He
loves her; she loves him to doting; but I cannot see
into their future.
Vyell, by the way, charges me to request your good
offices with Mr. Mann to procure him a couple of Tuscan
vases. I know that your friend is infinitely
obliging to all who approach him through you:
and this request which my letter carries as a tag
should have been its pretext, as in fact it was its
occasion. Adieu! my dear sir.
Yours most sincerely,
BAT. LANGTON.
SIR OLIVER SAILS.
Mr. Langton was right. Theologians, preaching
mysteries, are helpless before the logical mind until
they abandon defence and boldly attack their opponents’
capital incapacity, saying, “Precisely because
you insist upon daylight, you miss discovering the
stars.” The battle is a secular one, and
that sentence contains the reason, too, why it will
never be ended in this world. But the theologians
may strengthen their conviction, if not their argument,
by noting how often the more delicate shades of human
feeling will oppose themselves to the logical mind
as a mere wall of blindness.
Oliver Vyell loved his bride as passionately as his
nature, hardened by his past, allowed him. To
the women who envied her, to the gossips and backbiters,
he opposed a nescience inexpugnable, unscalable as
a wall of polished stone: but the mischief was,
he equally ignored her sensitiveness.
Being sensitive, she understood the hostile shadows
better than the hard protecting fence. To noble
natures enemies are often nearer than friends, and
more easily forgiven.
But Mr. Langton was also right in guessing her ignorant
of the rumours set going by Silk, who, as yet, had
whispered falsehoods only. The worst rumour
of all—the truth—was beyond his
courage.
Ruth loved her lord devoutly. To love him was
so easy that it seemed no repayment of her infinite
debt. She desired some harder task; and therefore,
since he laid this upon her, she—who would
have chosen a solitude to be happy in—rejoiced
to meet these envious ladies with smiles, with a hundred
small graces of hospitality; and still her bliss swallowed
up their rancour, scarcely tasting its gall.
He (they allowed) was the very pattern of a lover.
