Instead of going down to supper she returned to the solitude of her own room,but the apathy of the earlier part of the day had vanished utterly.Indeed,body ad soul seemed to quiver with pain like a wounded nerve.Anger,which had given a brief support,faded out,and left only shame and despair as in memory she saw the emblem,representing herself,tossed contemptuously into the carriage-way by the man she loved.
"I remember reading,"she groaned,"when at school,how conquerors put their feet on the necks of their captives.He has put his spurning foot on my heart.Oh,hateful riddle!Why should I love the man that despises me?"Her mother,and then Stanton,called at her door and asked her to come down to supper.
"No,"she said,briefly to each.
"If you knew what people were saying and surmising you would not continue to make a spectacle of yourself,"said her cousin,through the closed door.
"That is one reason why I do not come down,"she replied."I'm not in the mood to make a spectacle of myself.I have been shown how one perfect member of society regards me,and I am not equal to meeting any more faultless people to-night.""Oh,nonsense!"cried Stanton,irritably."You must come down.""Break in the door then,and carry me down,"was the sharp reply.
With a muttered oath he descended to the supper-room,and his moody and absent manner revealed to Mrs.Mayhew and Van Berg that his interview with his cousin had been anything but satisfactory.
For a time the artist seemed rather "distrait"also,as if a memory were troubling him.He often looked around when any one entered,and his eyes at times rested on Ida's vacant chair.But he soon passed under the spell of Jennie Burton's genial talk,which seemingly glowed with the sunshine that had enveloped her during her quest of the roses,and the poor girl,who was fairly quivering with pain because of his significant act and words on the piazza,was forgotten.
She knew she was forgotten.The hum of voices,the cheerful clatter from the lighted supper-room,came up to her darkening apartment,and only increased her sense of loneliness and isolation.Her quick ear caught Van Berg's mellow laugh,evoked by one of Miss Burton's sallies.
It is a dreary sensation to find one's self wholly forgotten by mere acquaintances;but to find that we have no place in the thoughts of those we love,seems in a certain sense like being annihilated.
But for poor Ida was reserved a deeper suffering still,since she believed that the man she loved did not dismiss her from his mind indifferently,but rather with aversion and disgust.
She felt her isolation terribly.To whom could she turn in her trouble?The thought of her father was both a reproach and a humiliation.He was drifting hopelessly,and almost unresistingly,towards final wreck,and,so far from seeking to restrain,she had added to the evil impetus.She shrank from the very idea of confiding in her garrulous,superficial mother.She felt that her cousin detested as well as despised her.The flattered girl,who a little before thought the world was at her feet,now felt friendless and alone,scarcely tolerated by her own family,and scorned by others.
Of course she exaggerated the evil of her lot.The young an inexperienced are ever prone to look,for the time,on the earlier misfortunes of their lives as irretrievable.In after years they may smile at their causeless despair;but the world is full of tragedies that to the wise and sober minded had slight cause.
Ida's troubles,however,were scarcely slight,and she,above all others,was the least fitted to bear trouble and thwarting.To be refused anything would be a new and disagreeable experience,but to be denied that which her heart craved supremely,tended to call out all the passionate recklessness of her ungoverned,undisciplined nature.The child from whom something is taken,will often cast away in anger all that is offered in its place;and in like hasty folly many a man and woman,to their eternal regret,have thrown away life itself.Suicide is often the product of passion as well as of despair;the irritable,headlong protest against evils that might have been and should have been remedied.
As Ida sat alone in her desolation and shame,the thought of self-destruction had surged up in the lava of other tumultuous thoughts occasioned by the artist's scorn,and at first she had shrunk from it with natural and instinctive dread.But the awful thought began to fascinate her like a dizzy height from which it seems so easy to fall and end everything.
In her morbid condition and to her poisoned imagination the act did not appear so revolting after all.She had been made familiar with it in her favorite novels.She had often seen it simulated with applause on the stage,with all the melodramatic accessories with which it is produce mere effect.Indeed,from her education,she might also think self-destruction was the only dignified and high-spirited thing to do.
For a time her thoughts took the coloring of high tragedy.She would teach this proud artist a lessen,even though at supreme cost to herself.If he would never love her,she would make it certain that he could not longer despise her.She would write him a letter that would harrow his very soul,informing him that she had taken his hint and followed his suggestion.Since he had thrown away the emblem of herself as a worthless and unsightly thing,she had thrown herself away,so that faultless taste and faultless people might be no more offended by the presence of so much imperfection.
For a moment her eyes glowed with exultation over his imagined dismay as he read this message from one to whom no reparation could be made;and then better and more wholesome feelings resumed their sway.Perverted,misguided,and uncounselled as she was,she was too young,too near the mother heart of nature,not to react from the false and the evil towards the simple and the true.
She threw herself upon her couch."Oh,that I might live and be happy!"she sobbed."If in the place of the bitter frost of his words and manner he would give me but one ray of kindness,I would try to bloom,even though but a poor worm-eaten bud."Frowns blight far more flowers than October nights.
