THE ANGEL AT THE GRAVE
The House stood a few yards back from the elm-shaded village street,
in that semi-publicity sometimes cited as a democratic protest against
old-world standards of domestic exclusiveness. This candid exposure to
the public eye is more probably a result of the gregariousness which, in
the New England bosom, oddly coexists with a shrinking from direct social
contact; most of the inmates of such houses preferring that furtive
intercourse which is the result of observations through shuttered windows
and a categorical acquaintance with the neighboring clothes-lines. The
House, however, faced its public with a difference. For sixty years it had
written itself with a capital letter, had self-consciously squared itself
in the eye of an admiring nation. The most searching inroads of village
intimacy hardly counted in a household that opened on the universe; and a
lady whose door-bell was at any moment liable to be rung by visitors from
London or Vienna was not likely to flutter up-stairs when she observed a
neighbor "stepping over."
The solitary inmate of the Anson House owed this induration of the social
texture to the most conspicuous accident in her annals: the fact that she
was the only granddaughter of the great Orestes Anson. She had been born,
as it were, into a museum, and cradled in a glass case with a label;
the first foundations of her consciousness being built on the rock of
her grandfather's celebrity. To a little girl who acquires her earliest
knowledge of literature through a _Reader_ embellished with fragments
of her ancestor's prose, that personage necessarily fills an heroic space
in the foreground of life. To communicate with one's past through the
impressive medium of print, to have, as it were, a footing in every library
in the country, and an acknowledged kinship with that world-diffused clan,
the descendants of the great, was to be pledged to a standard of manners
that amazingly simplified the lesser relations of life. The village street
on which Paulina Anson's youth looked out led to all the capitals of
Europe; and over the roads of intercommunication unseen caravans bore back
to the elm-shaded House the tribute of an admiring world.
Fate seemed to have taken a direct share in fitting Paulina for her part as
the custodian of this historic dwelling. It had long been secretly regarded
as a "visitation" by the great man's family that he had left no son and
that his daughters were not "intellectual." The ladies themselves were the
first to lament their deficiency, to own that nature had denied them the
gift of making the most of their opportunities. A profound veneration for
their parent and an unswerving faith in his doctrines had not amended their
congenital incapacity to understand what he had written. Laura, who had her
moments of mute rebellion against destiny, had sometimes thought how much
easier it would have been if their progenitor had been a poet; for she
could recite, with feeling, portions of _The Culprit Fay_ and of the
poems of Mrs. Hemans; and Phoebe, who was more conspicuous for memory than
imagination, kept an album filled with "selections." But the great man
was a philosopher; and to both daughters respiration was difficult on the
cloudy heights of metaphysic. The situation would have been intolerable
but for the fact that, while Phoebe and Laura were still at school,
their father's fame had passed from the open ground of conjecture to the
chill privacy of certitude. Dr. Anson had in fact achieved one of those
anticipated immortalities not uncommon at a time when people were apt to
base their literary judgments on their emotions, and when to affect plain
food and despise England went a long way toward establishing a man's
intellectual pre-eminence. Thus, when the daughters were called on to
strike a filial attitude about their parent's pedestal, there was little
to do but to pose gracefully and point upward; and there are spines to
which the immobility of worship is not a strain. A legend had by this time
crystallized about the great Orestes, and it was of more immediate interest
to the public to hear what brand of tea he drank, and whether he took off
his boots in the hall, than to rouse the drowsy echo of his dialectic. A
great man never draws so near his public as when it has become unnecessary
to read his books and is still interesting to know what he eats for
breakfast.
As recorders of their parent's domestic habits, as pious scavengers of his
waste-paper basket, the Misses Anson were unexcelled. They always had an
interesting anecdote to impart to the literary pilgrim, and the tact with
which, in later years, they intervened between the public and the growing
inaccessibility of its idol, sent away many an enthusiast satisfied to have
touched the veil before the sanctuary. Still it was felt, especially by old
Mrs. Anson, who survived her husband for some years, that Phoebe and Laura
were not worthy of their privileges. There had been a third daughter so
unworthy of hers that she had married a distant cousin, who had taken her
to live in a new Western community where the _Works of Orestes Anson_
had not yet become a part of the civic consciousness; but of this daughter
little was said, and she was tacitly understood to be excluded from the
family heritage of fame. In time, however, it appeared that the traditional
penny with which she had been cut off had been invested to unexpected
advantage; and the interest on it, when she died, returned to the Anson
House in the shape of a granddaughter who was at once felt to be what Mrs.
Anson called a "compensation." It was Mrs. Anson's firm belief that the
remotest operations of nature were governed by the centripetal force of her
husband's greatness and that Paulina's exceptional intelligence could be
explained only on the ground that she was designed to act as the guardian
of the family temple.
The House, by the time Paulina came to live in it, had already acquired
the publicity of a place of worship; not the perfumed chapel of a romantic
idolatry but the cold clean empty meeting-house of ethical enthusiasms. The
ladies lived on its outskirts, as it were, in cells that left the central
fane undisturbed. The very position of the furniture had come to have a
ritual significance: the sparse ornaments were the offerings of kindred
intellects, the steel engravings by Raphael Morghen marked the Via Sacra
of a European tour, and the black-walnut desk with its bronze inkstand
modelled on the Pantheon was the altar of this bleak temple of thought.
To a child compact of enthusiasms, and accustomed to pasture them on the
scanty herbage of a new social soil, the atmosphere of the old house was
full of floating nourishment. In the compressed perspective of Paulina's
outlook it stood for a monument of ruined civilizations, and its white
portico opened on legendary distances. Its very aspect was impressive
to eyes that had first surveyed life from the jig-saw "residence" of a
raw-edged Western town. The high-ceilinged rooms, with their panelled
walls, their polished mahogany, their portraits of triple-stocked ancestors
and of ringleted "females" in crayon, furnished the child with the historic
scenery against which a young imagination constructs its vision of the
past. To other eyes the cold spotless thinly-furnished interior might have
suggested the shuttered mind of a maiden-lady who associates fresh air and
sunlight with dust and discoloration; but it is the eye which supplies the
coloring-matter, and Paulina's brimmed with the richest hues.
Nevertheless, the House did not immediately dominate her. She had her
confused out-reachings toward other centres of sensation, her vague
intuition of a heliocentric system; but the attraction of habit, the steady
pressure of example, gradually fixed her roving allegiance and she bent her
neck to the yoke. Vanity had a share in her subjugation; for it had early
been discovered that she was the only person in the family who could read
her grandfather's works. The fact that she had perused them with delight at
an age when (even presupposing a metaphysical bias) it was impossible for
her to understand them, seemed to her aunts and grandmother sure evidence
of predestination. Paulina was to be the interpreter of the oracle, and the
philosophic fumes so vertiginous to meaner minds would throw her into the
needed condition of clairvoyance. Nothing could have been more genuine than
the emotion on which this theory was based. Paulina, in fact, delighted in
her grandfather's writings. His sonorous periods, his mystic vocabulary,
his bold flights into the rarefied air of the abstract, were thrilling to
a fancy unhampered by the need of definitions. This purely verbal pleasure
was supplemented later by the excitement of gathering up crumbs of meaning
from the rhetorical board. What could have been more stimulating than
to construct the theory of a girlish world out of the fragments of this
Titanic cosmogony? Before Paulina's opinions had reached the stage when
ossification sets in their form was fatally predetermined.
The fact that Dr. Anson had died and that his apotheosis had taken
place before his young priestess's induction to the temple, made her
ministrations easier and more inspiring. There were no little personal
traits--such as the great man's manner of helping himself to salt, or the
guttural cluck that started the wheels of speech--to distract the eye
of young veneration from the central fact of his divinity. A man whom
one knows only through a crayon portrait and a dozen yellowing, tomes on
free-will and intuition is at least secure from the belittling effects of
intimacy.
Paulina thus grew up in a world readjusted to the fact of her grandfather's
greatness; and as each organism draws from its surroundings the kind of
nourishment most needful to its growth, so from this somewhat colorless
conception she absorbed warmth, brightness and variety. Paulina was the
type of woman who transmutes thought into sensation and nurses a theory in
her bosom like a child.
In due course Mrs. Anson "passed away"--no one died in the Anson
vocabulary--and Paulina became more than ever the foremost figure of the
commemorative group. Laura and Phoebe, content to leave their father's
glory in more competent hands, placidly lapsed into needlework and fiction,
and their niece stepped into immediate prominence as the chief "authority"
on the great man. Historians who were "getting up" the period wrote to
consult her and to borrow documents; ladies with inexplicable yearnings
begged for an interpretation of phrases which had "influenced" them, but
which they had not quite understood; critics applied to her to verify some
doubtful citation or to decide some disputed point in chronology; and the
great tide of thought and investigation kept up a continuous murmur on the
quiet shores of her life.
An explorer of another kind disembarked there one day in the shape
of a young man to whom Paulina was primarily a kissable girl, with an
after-thought in the shape of a grandfather. From the outset it had been
impossible to fix Hewlett Winsloe's attention on Dr. Anson. The young man
behaved with the innocent profanity of infants sporting on a tomb. His
excuse was that he came from New York, a Cimmerian outskirt which survived
in Paulina's geography only because Dr. Anson had gone there once or twice
to lecture. The curious thing was that she should have thought it worth
while to find excuses for young Winsloe. The fact that she did so had not
escaped the attention of the village; but people, after a gasp of awe, said
it was the most natural thing in the world that a girl like Paulina Anson
should think of marrying. It would certainly seem a little odd to see a
man in the House, but young Winsloe would of course understand that the
Doctor's books were not to be disturbed, and that he must go down to the
orchard to smoke--. The village had barely framed this _modus vivendi_
when it was convulsed by the announcement that young Winsloe declined to
live in the House on any terms. Hang going down to the orchard to smoke!
He meant to take his wife to New York. The village drew its breath and
watched.
Did Persephone, snatched from the warm fields of Enna, peer
half-consentingly down the abyss that opened at her feet? Paulina, it must
be owned, hung a moment over the black gulf of temptation. She would have
found it easy to cope with a deliberate disregard of her grandfather's
rights; but young Winsloe's unconsciousness of that shadowy claim was as
much a natural function as the falling of leaves on a grave. His love was
an embodiment of the perpetual renewal which to some tender spirits seems a
crueller process than decay.
On women of Paulina's mould this piety toward implicit demands, toward
the ghosts of dead duties walking unappeased among usurping passions,
has a stronger hold than any tangible bond. People said that she gave up
young Winsloe because her aunts disapproved of her leaving them; but such
disapproval as reached her was an emanation from the walls of the House,
from the bare desk, the faded portraits, the dozen yellowing tomes that no
hand but hers ever lifted from the shelf.
