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Dr. Septimus Baxter was President of Marion College, situate in the beautiful town of Hamilton, lying two hundred miles to the northward, and in another state than the mountain-girded valley of which the Dundee Church and the surrounding village were the chief ornaments. Dr. Baxter was the nominal head of the faculty of professors, and Mrs. Septimus Baxter was virtual autocrat of his home.
He was a little man, physically, at his best, which was when he was in his own realm—the area enclosed by the walls of his lecture-room. There was, in popular phrase, "no fit" to his clothes. His trousers bagged at the knees, and his coats hung in loose folds down from his shoulder-blades, on the very day they left the tailor's shop; were shabby within twenty-four hours. He had a trick of brushing the nap of his hat the wrong way in his abstracted moods, and of twisting his forefinger in one bow of his white cravat until he dragged it into a slovenly loop, two crumpled wisps depending from it. Another and his most inveterate habit was, to tie his handkerchief into a succession of tight knots while he lectured, preached, prayed, and talked. Each marked a step in ratiocination or a rise in interest in the matter that engaged his mind until the climax of proof or animation was reached, when he would begin to untie them, one after the other, timing the process so judiciously that "Amen!" or " Quod erat demonstrandum! " passed his lips as the released cambric swept through his hand in a flourish prior to its restoration to his pocket. Nevertheless, he commanded respect from students and professors. His courage in grappling with crabbed or ponderous themes; the eagle eye that penetrated the vapors of mysticism, detected the insidious thread of sophistry, which, intertwined with legitimate argument, was gradually but fatally guiding the inquirer away from the truth; the bursts of real eloquence, passages of beauty and pathos, that starred the didacticism of his discourses, electrifying his hearers as the musical ring from the desiccated tortoise-shell may have startled the god who tripped over it—these made him a hero to his classes, a man to be consulted and reverenced by his co-laborers. Moreover, he had a great heart within his narrow chest, soft as a child's, generous to self-abnegation, and full of such holy and Christian graces as love the shade, while their unconscious aroma betrays their existence to all who pass.
Mrs. Baxter had been a belle, and she would hardly have cast a second glance upon the small and shabby divine, but for two weighty reasons. By some unaccountable freak of Cupid, or of Fortune, the popular Miss Lanneau had counted her thirtieth year without exchanging her celibate state for that which she languishingly avowed would be preferable to one of her dependent nature and seeking sensibilities. She laughed yet with her lips and executed arch manoeuvres with her speaking eyes, when unfeeling allusion was made in her presence to the "crooked stick" that awaits the over-nice fagot gatherer, and to the forlorn and aged virgin, also a wanderer in woodlands, who answered the owl's "To-who?" all the freezing night with the despairing—"Anybody!" But at heart she was growing restless, if not unhappy, when Dr. Baxter fell in her way. She was a littérateur , as well as a beauty, and her reverend suitor was a man of note—a distinguished clergyman, a savant and senior professor in a highly respectable institution of learning. She had longed for a "career" all her life—for a sphere of decided influence—social and literary. Would a more promising avenue to this ever be offered her? She overlooked the ill-fitting coat, the dragged cravat, the inevitable handkerchief. As she put it, she "set the subjective where it should always be placed—above the grosser objective." In direct English she married the doctor, and had for fifteen years made him an excellent wife. If his testimony were of importance in this case—and he was a sturdy truth-teller—he wanted no better.
I have said that he was a little man at his best. He was a pygmy on a certain evening in the November succeeding the Dundee Centennial summer. To begin with the most severe of the dwarfing processes to which he had been subjected. It was a reception night in the presidential mansion. Mrs. Baxter had given a party the previous week, and now sat in state, as was the Hamiltonian usage, to receive the calls demanded from those who had been the invitees on that occasion. The ceremony in its mildest form would have been purgatorial to her spouse, but she had aggravated the torture by personally superintending his toilette. This accomplished, she entreated him if he had one atom of regard for her, to leave necktie and handkerchief alone for that night; walked him into the parlor, and inducted him into an immense easy chair directly beneath a bracket-light; thrust an illuminated folio—one of her centre-table ornaments—between his fingers, and withdrew to her own chair a little way off, to examine the effect.
"You are really picturesque, my love!" she decided, in honeyed patronage. "If you can only remember to sit upright instead of slipping down in the lap of your chair until your coat-collar shows above the back of your neck, you will make a fine study for a sketch of 'Learned Leisure,' or something of that kind."
The poor man smiled resignedly, and began to turn the leaves of his book. It was a sacred album, the work of his wife's fair fingers, although he did not know this.
"I flatter myself you will find some choice bits there?" she said, modestly.
She was fond of talking about "bits," and "effects," and "tone," and "depth;" of " chiaro-oscuro ," and "bas-reliefs," and "intaglios," and "antiques,"—useful cant that forms the stock-in-trade of many an art-critic, whose decrees pass current with a larger circle than the clique which eulogized Mrs. Baxter's talents. She was, in feature and coloring, a pretty woman still, in defiance of her forty-five or forty-six years. Her brown eyes were lively; the red of her complexion, if a trifle fixed and hard, seldom outspreading the distinctly defined round spots upon the cheek-bones, was hers honestly, as were the glossy curls that showed no frost-lines, and the pearly teeth she had trained her lips to reveal at every possible opportunity. Her hands were plump, white, and small, and would have been smaller had she exercised them less. Like the teeth, they were too obtrusive. She could not say "Good-day" to a passing acquaintance without parting her lips in a wide smile over the milk-white treasures, tucking away their natural covering in an incredibly narrow fold above the ivory, and stretching it below into a straight line which lost itself in creases that had once been dimples. She had been renowned in her youth for her vivacity, and had cultivated it into what nobody was kind enough to tell her was frisky affectation. The extent to which the pliant fingers curved, and twined, and twinkled, and sprawled, in the course of a conversation of moderate length, was a thing of wonder forever to the uninitiated spectator of her gambols. She added to this gesticulation a way of plunging forward from her girdle upward, when she waxed very animated, that threatened to precipitate her into the lap of her fellow-colloquist, after which she would lay her hand upon her heaving bust, and swallow audibly, while awaiting a reply to her latest deliverance. To sum up description in one word—Mrs. Baxter's speciality was Manner.
Her friends were correct in one laudation. She was amiable and kind-hearted in her way, as her husband was in his. If she trafficked upon this excellence, made the most of it, very much after the style in which she showed off her teeth and hands, it was rather because display was her controlling foible, than through any design upon the answering gratitude of her beneficiaries. She was dressed in black silk, with a jaunty velvet basquine, a scarlet scarf of Canton crêpe fastened upon the right shoulder with an antique cameo, and knotted under the left, the fringed ends falling low down upon her skirt.
She was just established in her comfortable causeuse , when the door-bell heralded a visitor.
"My dear Mr. Wyllys!" she cried, fluttering forward to meet him. "You are doubly welcome when you come alone. One sees you so seldom except in a crowd, that it is a genuine pleasure to have a few moments' quiet conversation with you."
"It is like yourself to excuse my unfashionably early call with such gracious tact," responded the gentleman, bowing low over her hand.
He shook hands with the doctor with less empressement , but most respectfully, and sank upon a divan near the hostess.
"I have another engagement this evening, but I could not deny myself the pleasure of paying my devoirs to you in passing. I will not ask if you have recovered from the fatigue of Thursday night"—with an expressive look at her blooming face. "I believe, however, it is never a weariness to you to be agreeable, as it is to us duller and less benevolent mortals. I am horribly cross, always, on the morning succeeding a party. It is as if I had overdrawn my account, in the matter of social entertainment; borrowed too heavily from the reserve fund intended by Nature for daily expenses. But this rule applies only to people whose resources of spirits, wit, and general powers of pleasing, are limited. You are above the need of such pitiful economy as we find necessary."
" Shall I undeceive you?" beamed the lady. "If the doctor—dear, patient martyr!—were put into the witness-box, he might tell sad tales, make divulgations that would demolish your pretty and flattering theory. Doctor, my love! Mr. Wyllys is anxious to know what was the status of my spiritual and mental thermometer, on the morning after our little re-union , last week?"
"Eh, what did you say, my dear?"
He lowered his folio. His eyebrows were perked discontentedly, and his forefinger was in the doomed bow she had tied not fifteen minutes before.
Mrs. Baxter tried, unsuccessfully, to frown down the offending digit before she made reply.
"Mr. Wyllys has heard that I am like champagne, 'stale, flat, and unprofitable'—with a dash of vinegar—when the effervescence wrought by social excitement is off," vivified, by her mirthful misrepresentation of her visitor's words, into radiance that revealed every molar, and forced her eyelids into utter retirement.
"Ah!" The doctor smiled absently, and re-bent his brows over the page, protruding his lips in a vicious pout as he read.
"He disdains to notice the slander," resumed Mrs. Baxter, unabashed at her failure to elicit a conjugal compliment. "Seriously, Mr. Wyllys, I am thankful for the guidance of reason and will that counterbalance my mercurial temperament. My spirit resembles nothing else so much as a mettled steed, whose curvettings are restrained by an inexorable rein. But for my sober judgment, Impulse would have led me into an erratic course, I fear."
Relaxing the tension of the fingers and wrist that had pulled hard at an imaginary curb, and unclenching the teeth from their bite upon the word "inexorable," she sighed, reflectively.
"The combination is rare—" commenced the gentleman.
"It is preposterous!" ejaculated the doctor, closing the Russian-leather album with a concussion like the report of a pocket-pistol.
"I think not, dear," said the wife, gently corrective. "It is, as Mr. Wyllys says, a rare combination, but certainly not an impossible one."
"It is preposterous," reiterated the doctor, with a ruinous tug at his cravat, "that a rational creature, who can read and write, should waste time in disfiguring good, honest paper with such incongruous, not to say blasphemous, nonsense as I find here. It was bad enough for mediæval monks to deck the Word of Life in the motley wear of a harlequin. Greek, German, black-letter text, are, all of them, stumbling-blocks to the unlearned, diversions to the thoughtless. But when the sacred Scriptures are bedizened into further illegibility by paint and gilding, and illustrated by birds, beasts, and even fishes, daubed upon fields, azure, argent, and verde, the offence becomes an abomination. Such profanation is offered that divinest of pastorals, the twenty-third psalm, in this volume," elevating it in strong disgust.
Mrs. Baxter arose and took it from his hand in time to save it from being tossed to the table or floor.
"Tastes differ, my dear husband," was all she said, but her forbearance and real sweetness of temper called forth a look of unfeigned respect from the amused spectator.
"I wouldn't keep it in the parlor, if I were in your place, Jane," the doctor expostulated, seeing her deposit the folio upon a stand beyond his reach.
"I will not ask you to look at it again, love,"—still amiably.
She returned to the subject when the critic had helped himself to a volume which was more to his taste.
"I saw few things when I was abroad, before my marriage, that interested me more than the illuminated missals and breviaries preserved in convents, museums, and private collections of vertu ," she said to Mr. Wyllys. "I am the possessor of a remarkably fine specimen of the illuminator's art—the gift of a dear friend and relative, now no more. I had not looked into it for years until after I commenced my humble album, which, allow me to observe, my excellent husband does not guess is my handiwork. To return"—the hands describing an inward curve, and subsiding into an embrace upon her knee—"the best touches in my work were after my precious reliquary. I must show it to you. I am chary of displaying it to non-appreciative or irreverent eyes. Consequently it seldom sees the light."
Orrin followed her to an escritoire at the back of the room, peeping covertly at his watch as he went. Mrs. Baxter laid her hand upon her bust, and choked down some rebellious uprising of memory or regret, as she unlocked a drawer.
"This is it!" mournfully, taking out a thin volume bound in gilded leather and carved boards, and redolent of the scent of some Indian wood.
Orrin examined it in pleased surprise. He had expected to see an absurdity. He beheld a gem of its kind; a collection of Latin hymns, including the Stabat Mater, Dies Iræ, and Veni Sancte Spiritus, each page encircled by a border of appropriate design, and delicate yet rich coloring.
"I have never seen anything finer. I do not wonder that you prize it highly. I thank you for showing it to me," he said, sincerely. "By whom was it executed?"
"My friend ordered it for me of an adept in his art, then resident at Florence. I forget his name, but you will find it cleverly concealed from the common eye in some one of the convolutions of the title-page," was the reply.
The fly-leaf adhered slightly to the page designated, and Orrin read the inscription upon the former before detaching it.
"' Jane Lanneau, from Ginevra. Florence, January 1st, 18—. ' I have surely seen that handwriting before! 'Ginevra!'" he repeated slowly, and the pretty name fell musically from his tongue. "There is poetry in the word!"
"You would have said so, had you known her!" Mrs. Baxter winked away two unbidden tears that glazed her eyes, without forming and dropping—swallowed anew and very hard. "She always reminded me of a plaintive poem set to music. That is, in the later years of an existence which was all song and sunniness when it was fresh and new."
Orrin fluttered a few leaves; commented upon the grace and finish of a decoration here and there, and went back to the inscription. It was strongly like Jessie Kirke's writing, but the resemblance was undoubtedly accidental. The one line had been penned, he learned from the date, before she was born.
"She was the Helena to my Hermia," pursued the hostess. "We lived the same life until her marriage, which preceded mine by five years. She was my senior by some months, but in heart and soul we were twins !"—pressing her hands gradually together, beginning at the wrists, and passing upward to the finger-tips, to express the idea of oneness. "And by a most extra- or -di-nary coincidence, we both married clergymen!"
"Another evidence of the perfect harmony of soul existing between you. Did I understand you to say that she is not living?"
"Alas! she has been in her grave for fifteen years. I never saw her after her marriage, which was a surprise to all her friends. We anticipated a brilliant union for her. But she bestowed herself, her talents, her beauty, upon a clerical widower who was twelve years older than herself. My poor Ginevra! it was a strange ending to her sanguine dreams. Mr. Kirke was a scholarly man, it is true, and a thorough gentleman, and of his devotion to her there could be no doubt. It was such worship as few women can inspire. I believe that he tried faithfully to make her happy, but my personal acquaintanceship with him was very slight."
"Kirke!" repeated Orrin, more deliberately and with less emphasis than was his wont, and he was always the reverse of abrupt. His lazy articulation now was almost a drawl. "I know a gentleman—a clergyman of that name—Rev. Donald L. Kirke, resident, now, and I fancy for many years, at Dundee—"
"It is the very same!" Mrs. Baxter started tragically, and leaned gaspingly toward him, her throat swelling like a pouter pigeon's. "And you know him, you say? Tell me something about him—about his family! My sweet cousin left a child, I know. Does it still live? Dundee! yes! that was the quaint Scotch name of my Ginevra's new home. I have always associated it with 'The Cotter's Saturday Night.' You recollect 'Dundee's wild, warbling measures'? Do sit down and tell me all!"
"You should visit Dundee," said Orrin, sauntering back to the fireplace, but declining the seat she offered. "It is a beautiful valley—sheltered from storms by a barricade of picturesque hills. I was there in May, and the climate and flowers—especially the wealth of roses, reminded me of sunny Provence. I became quite well acquainted with Mr. Kirke. He is, as you describe him, a thorough gentleman—one of the genuine 'old school'—handsome, refined, and scholarly. His daughters, of whom there are two, are cultivated ladies. The younger—who is, I presume, the child to whom you refer—is, I have heard, very like her beautiful mother. You would be interested in her, first, for your cousin's sake, but very soon for her own. This matter of family likeness is a curious one. I see now what was the resemblance that puzzled me last Spring. Miss Jessie Kirke might easily be mistaken for your daughter."
"If she were, what a happy woman I should be!" cried the flattered lady, casting up her brown eyes, and raising her clasped hands to a level with her chin. "The relief afforded by your charming description is beyond expression. I have never dared inquire respecting my lost darling's babe. And she is really a Lanneau! Heaven bless her! I feared— how I feared! to hear that she had grown up an awkward rustic, whose faint likeness to her parent would pain, not gratify me. Therefore I have maintained no correspondence with Mr. Kirke since our exchange of letters immediately after his wife's decease. 'Jessie Kirke!' what a riante , piquante , bewitching name!"
"I wish you could prevail upon her father to entrust her to you for a time. She would be a feature in our society this winter. Her face and manners are strikingly attractive, and hers is a style of beauty that will improve with years and knowledge of the world. Her bearing and conversation have much of the fascination which is, I suspect, a family gift. She will grow handsomer until—I cannot say when. Women, like leaves, have their time to fade, and this trying season lies, with a large majority, a little on the bright side of thirty. The Lanneaus have not lost the secret they brought from fair France—the magic that purchases the gift of perennial youth."
"Fie! fie! how you digress! I am dying for information of my beloved young cousin, and you launch into irrelevant gallantries—flattery that is thrown away, let me tell you, upon one of my age and gravity!" frowned Mrs. Baxter with her forehead, her lips openly refractory, and her eyes dancing with delight. " Do sit down and tell me more!"
"I cannot, thank you! I have already bored you with a visit three times as long as I meant it should be. Your cousin does the family credit. I can award her no higher praise. Au revoir! "
"One second!" she entreated, detaining him. "The discoveries of this evening seem trifles to you. To me they are an Event ! I shall write to the precious lamb to-morrow. Please give me her address in full."
Orrin dictated, and she wrote it upon her ivory tablets.
"Perhaps it would be as well not to mention me in connection with this renewal of your intercourse with Mr. Kirke's family," he said, carelessly. "Your friendship will be the more welcome if it is supposed that it has its root in your fond recollection of your lamented relative. Excuse the suggestion—but from what I have seen of father and daughters, I am inclined to think them sensitive and proud—as they have a right to be. Your tact hardly needed this hint, however. There is a ring! I have loitered here shamefully! Do you know that your beautiful drawing-room is likened, about town, to Circe's cave?"