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Page 8
The laying aside of her mourning garb was but one indication of the
change that had come over her.
The whole household, from scullion to coachman, caught the inspiration of
her brighter mood. The servants laughed aloud about the house. The
children of the gardener, ever before banished to other parts of the
grounds, played unrebuked in the sacred street of the silent village.
As for Paul, since the revelation had come to him that the lady of his
love was no mere dream of a life for ever vanished, but was herself alive
for evermore, and that he should one day meet her, his love had assumed a
colour and a reality it had never possessed before. To him this meant all
it would have meant to the lover of a material maiden, to be admitted to
her immediate society.
The sense of her presence in the village imparted to the very air a fine
quality of intoxication. The place was her shrine, and he lived in it as
in a sanctuary.
It was not as if he should have to wait many years, till death, before he
should see her. As soon as he gave place to the later self which was to
succeed him, he should be with her. Already his boyish self had no doubt
greeted her, and she had taken in her arms the baby Paul who had held his
little arms out to her picture twenty years before.
To be in love with the spirit of a girl, however beautiful she might have
been when on earth, would doubtless seem to most young men a very
chimerical sort of passion; but Paul, on the other hand, looked upon the
species of attraction which they called love as scarcely more than a
gross appetite. During his absence from home he had seen no woman's face
that for a moment rivalled Ida's portrait. Shy and fastidious, he had
found no pleasure in ladies' society, and had listened to his classmates'
talk of flirtations and conquests with secret contempt. What did they
know of love? What had their coarse and sensuous ideas in common with the
rare and delicate passion to which his heart was dedicated--a love asking
and hoping for no reward, but sufficient to itself?
He had spent but a few weeks at home when Miss Ludington began to talk
quite seriously to him about studying for some profession. He was rather
surprised at this, for he had supposed she would be glad to have him at
home, for a while at lease, now that he had done with college. To Paul,
at this time, the idea of any pursuit which would take him away from the
village was extremely distasteful, and he had no difficulty in finding
excuses enough for procrastinating a step for which, indeed, no sort of
urgency could be pretended.
He was to be Miss Ludington's heir, and any profession which he might
adopt would be purely ornamental at most.
Finding that he showed no disposition to consider a profession she
dropped that point and proposed that he should take six months of foreign
travel, as a sort of rounding off of his college course. To the
advantages of this project he was, however, equally insensible. When she
urged it on him, he said, "Why, aunty, one would say you were anxious to
get rid of me. Don't we get on well together? Have you taken a dislike to
me? I'm sure I'm very comfortable here. I don't want to do anything
different, or to go off anywhere. Why won't you let me stay with you?"
And so she had to let the matter drop.
The truth was she had become anxious to get him away; but it was on his
account, not hers.
In putting his room to rights one day since his return from college she
had come upon a scrap of paper containing some verses addressed "To Ida."
Paul had rather a pretty knack at turning rhymes, and the tears came to
Miss Ludington's eyes as she read these lines. They were an attempt at a
love sonnet, throbbing with passion, and yet so mystical in some of the
allusions that nothing but her knowledge of Paul's devotion to Ida would
have given her a clue to his meaning. She was filled with apprehension as
she considered the effect which this infatuation, if it should continue
to gain strength, might have upon one of Paul's dreamy temperament and
excessive ideality. That she had devoted her own lonely and useless life
to the cult of the past did not greatly matter, although in the light of
her present happier faith she saw and regretted her mistake; but as for
permitting Paul's life to be overshadowed by the same influence she could
not consent to it. Something must be done to get him away from home, or
at least to divert the current of his thought. The failure of her efforts
to induce him to consider any scheme that involved his leaving the
village threw her into a state of great uneasiness.
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