第19章 Reckless Words and Deeds.(3)

Even at his far remove Van Berg could see that she was ill at ease during the dinner hour.There would be times of forced and unnatural gayety,followed by a sudden cloud upon the brow and an abstracted air,as if her thoughts had naught to do with the chattering group around her.It would also appear that her appetite was flagging unusually,and once or twice he thought she darted an angry look towards him.

As if something were burdening her mind,she at last left the table hastily,before the others were through with their dessert.

As may be surmised,she sought her father's room.Receiving no response to her knock,she entered and saw at a glance the confirmation of her fears.Her father sat in an arm-chair with his head upon his breast.A brandy bottle stood on the table beside him.At the sound of her step he looked up for a moment with heavy eyes,and mumbled:

"He ain't of your style,is he?Nor of mine,either.Froth and mud!"Ida gave a sudden stamp of rage and disgust,and whirled from the room.

Van Berg happened to see her as she descended to the main hall-way,and her face was so repulsive as to suggest to him the lines from Shakespeare:

"In nature there's no blemish,but the mind;None can be called deformed,but the unkind;Virtue is beauty;but the beauteous--evil Are empty trunks,o'er flourished by the devil."That afternoon and evening her reckless levity and open coquetry secured unfavorable comment not only from the artist,but from others far more indifferent,whose attention she half compelled by a manner that did not suggest spring violets.

Van Berg was disgusted.He was less versed in human nature than art,and did not recognize in the forced and obtrusive gayety the effort to stifle the voice of an aroused conscience.Even to her blunted sense of right it seemed a hateful and disgraceful truth that a stranger had helped her father towards manhood,an that she had destroyed the transient and salutary influence.Her complacency had been disturbed from the time her cousin had repeated Van Berg's remark,"I could not speak civilly to a lady that I had just seen giggling and flirting through one of Beethoven's finest symphonies;"and now,through an unexpected chain of circumstances,she had,for the first time in her life,reached a point of self-disgust and self-loathing.Such a moral condition is evil's opportunity when a disposition towards penitence or reform is either absent or resisted.The thought,therefore,of her father's drunkenness that day,and of herself as the immediate cause,made her so wretched and reckless that she tried to forget her miserable self in excitement,as he had in lethargy.Even her mother chided her,asking if she did not "remember the day.""Indeed,I shall have occasion to remember it,"was her ambiguous answer;"but Mondays in the country are always blue,and I'll do my repenting then.If I were a good Catholic I'd hunt up a priest to-morrow.""I'll be your father-confessor to-day,"said a black-eyed young man,twirling his mustache.

"You,Mr.Sibely?You would lead me into more naughtiness than you would help me out of,twice over.For my confessor I would choose an ancient man who had had his dinner.What a comfortable belief it is,to be sure!All one has to do is to buzz one's sins through a grating (that is like an indefinite number of key-holes)to a dozing old gentleman inside,and then away with a heart like a feather,to load up again.I'd bless the man who could convert me to a Papist."But she hated the man who had made her feel the need of absolution,and who seemed an inseparable part of all her disagreeable experiences.

Although he appeared to avoid any locality in which she remained,she observed his eyes turned towards her more than once before the day closed,and it exasperated her almost beyond all endurance to believe that their expression was only that of contempt.

She might have been a little better pleased,perhaps,if she had known that she made the artist almost as uncomfortable as herself.

Never before had there seemed to him so great a contrast between her beauty and herself,her features and her face.The latter could not fail to excite his increased disgust,while the former was so great that he found himself becoming resolutely bent on redeeming them from what seemed a horrid profanation.In accordance with one of his characteristics,the more difficult the project seemed,the more obstinately fixed became his purpose to discover whether she had a mind of sufficient calibre to transform her into what she might be,in contrast with what she was.The more he saw of her the more his interest as an artist,and,indirectly,as a student of character,was deepened.If she had no mind worth naming he would give the problem up to the solution of time,which,however,promised nothing but a gradual fading away of all beauty,and the intensifying of inward deformity until fully reproduced in outward ugliness.