Slowly and instinctively she retreated and put up her hands with a deprecatory gesture.
“She cannot endure the sight of me,” thought he, but at once he said, with dignified courtesy: “Miss Ludolph, you have nothing to fear from me, that you should regard me in that manner. You need not shrink as if from contagion. We can treat each other as courteous strangers, at least.”
“I—I—I—thought you were dead!” she gasped, in a loud whisper.
Dennis’s cheek grew paler than it had been in all his sickness, and then as suddenly became dark with anger. His eyes were terrible in their indignation as he advanced a few paces almost fiercely. She trembled violently and shrunk further away.
“You thought I was dead?” he asked, sternly.
“Ye‑e‑s,” in the same unnatural whisper.
“What!” he exclaimed, in short and bitter emphasis, “do you mean to say that you never cared even to ask whether I lived or died in my long, weary illness?—that you were so supremely indifferent to my fate that you could not articulate one sentence of inquiry? Surely this is the very sublimity of heartlessness; this is to be callous beyond one’s power of imagination. It seems to me that I would feel as much interest as that in any human being I had once known. If even a dog had licked my hand in goodwill, and afterward I had seen it, wounded or sick, creep off into covert, the next time I passed that way I would step aside to see whether the poor creature had lived or died. But after all the wealth of affection that I lavished upon you, after toiling and almost dying in my vain effort to touch your marble heart, you have not even the humanity to ask if I am above ground!”
The illusion had now passed from Christine’s mind, and with it her alarm. The true state of the case was rapidly dawning upon her, and she was about to speak eagerly; but in his strong indignation he continued, impetuously: “You thought I was dead! The wish probably was father to the thought. My presumption deserved no better fate. But permit me to tell you, though all unbidden, I did not die. With God’s blessing I expect to live to a good old age, and intend that but few years shall pass before my name is as well known and honored as the ancient one of Ludolph;” and he turned on his heel and strode from the room.
XXXVII
If He Knew!
For a little time after Dennis’s angry tread died away, Christine sat almost paralyzed by surprise and deeper emotion. Her mind, though usually clear and rapid in its action, was too confused to realize the truth. Suddenly she sprang up, gathered together her sketching materials, and drawing a thick veil over her face sped through the store, through the streets, to the refuge of her own room. She must be alone.
Hastily throwing aside her wrappings, she began to walk up and down in her excitement. Her listlessness was gone now in very truth, and her eye and cheek glowed as never before. As if it had become the great vivifying principle of her own life, she kept repeating continually in a low, ecstatic tone, “He lives! he lives! he is not dead; his blood is not upon my conscience!”
At last she sat down in her luxurious chair before the window to think it all over—to commune with herself—often the habit of the reserved and solitary. From the disjointed sentences she let fall, from the reflection of her excited face in yonder glass, we gather quite correctly the workings of her mind. Her first words were, “Thank heaven! thank something or other, I have not blotted out that true, strong genius.”
Again—“What untold wretchedness I might have saved myself if I had only asked the question, in a casual way, ‘How is Mr. Fleet?’ Christine Ludolph, with all your pride and imagined superiority, you can be very foolish.
“How he hates and despises me now! little wonder!”
“But if he knew!”
“Knew what? Why could you not ask after him, as after any other sick man? You have had a score or so of offers, and did not trouble yourself as to the fate of the lovelorn swains. Seems to me your conscience has been very tender in this case. And the fact that he misjudges you, thinks you callous, heartless, and is angry, troubles you beyond measure.”
“When before were you so sensitive to the opinion of clerks and tradespeople, or even the proudest suitors for your hand? But in this case you must cry out, in a tone of sentimental agony, ‘Oh, if he only knew it!’ ”
“Knew what?”
Her face in yonder mirror has a strange, introverted expression, as if she were scanning her own soul. Her brow contracts with thought and perplexity.
Gradually a warm, beautiful light steals into her face, transforming it as from the scowl of a winter morning into a dawn of June; her eyes become gentle and tender. A rich color comes out upon her cheeks, spreads up her temples, mantles her brow, and pours a crimson torrent down her snowy neck. Suddenly she drops her burning face into her hands, and hides a vision one would gladly look longer upon. But see, even her little ears have become as red as coral.
The bleakest landscape in the world brightens into something like beauty when the sun shines upon it. So love, the richer, sweeter light of the soul, make the plainest face almost beautiful; but when it changed Christine Ludolph’s faultless, yet too cold and classical, features into those of a loving woman’s, it suggested a beauty scarcely human.
A moment later there came a faint whisper: “I fear—I almost fear I love him.” Then she lifted a startled, frightened face and looked timidly around as if, in truth, walls had ears.
Reassured by the consciousness of solitude, her head dropped on her wrist and her revery went
