Mrs. Loring

“ Mrs. Loring spoke with sudden seriousness; "take my advice, and encourage Leon Dexter. I am pleased to know that you were so much an object of his attentions as your remarks lead me to infer. I know that you will make him a good wife; one of whom he can never be ashamed; and I know that a union with him will give you a proud position."
"Will you waive the subject, at present, dear aunt?" said Jessie, with a pleading look, at the same time glancing covertly towards her cousins, who were drinking in every word with girlish eagerness. ”

“ She passed from her husband's presence again, seeming almost to vanish where she stood.
"What is to be done?" said Mr. Dexter, turning towards Mrs. Loring, with a certain shame-facedness, that showed his own perception of the aspect in which his hasty conduct had placed him.
"It is impossible to answer that question now," replied Mrs. Loring. "These muddy waters must have time to run clear. As for Jessie, it is plain that she needs seclusion, and freedom from all causes of excitement. ”

“ Then, with her arm about Evilena, Miss Loring ascended the wide stairway, where several portraits of vanished Lorings hung, none of them resembling her own face particularly.
She was what the Countess Biron had likened her to when the photograph was shown––a white lily, slender, blonde, with the peculiar and attractive combination of hazel eyes and hair of childish flaxen color. Her features were well formed and a trifle small for her height. She had the manner of a woman perfectly sure of herself, her position and her own importance. ”

“ Miss Loring raised her eyes and looked steadily upon him. "Go sir, and let this hour and this interview pass from your memory. If you are wise, you will forget it. Be just to me, sir. If I have betrayed the existence of any feeling towards you warmer than respect, it has been under sudden and strong temptation. As a man of honor, you must keep the secret inviolate."
There was not a sign of girlish weakness about the calm speaker. Her small head was erect; her slight body drawn to its full height; her measured tones betrayed not a ripple of feeling. ”

“ Jessie replied.
"Why not? The law has cancelled your marriage!" said Mrs. Loring. "You stand in your old relation to the world."
"But not to myself," Jessie answered with a deep sigh; and leaving her aunt, she went away to her little chamber, there to sit in solemn debate over this new aspect of affairs in her troubled life.
No—no. She did not stand in her old relation to herself. She was not a maiden with lips free from the guile of a false marriage promise; but a divorced wife. A thing questionably recognized, both in human opinion and divine law. ”

“ She had never ventured to bring to her aunt's very external judgment the real questions that troubled her. Mrs. Loring's prompt way of sweeping aside these cobwebs of the brain, as she called the finer scruples of conscience, could not satisfy her yearning desire for light.
"Yes; time works wonders. He is the great restorer. But why not see clearly at once; and not wait in suffering for time's slow movements? I am a wiser philosopher than you are, Jessie; and try to gain from the present all that it has to give."
"Some hearts require a severer discipline than others," said Jessie. ”

“ These self-inflicted stripes are horrible to think of, for the pain is not salutary, but only increases the morbid states of mind that ever demand new flagellations."
"We are differently made, Aunt Phoebe," was the quiet answer.
"No, we are not, but we make ourselves different," replied Mrs. Loring a little hastily.
"The world would be a very dead-level affair, if we were all made alike," said Jessie, forcing a smile, and assuming a lighter air, in order to lead her aunt's mind away from the thought of her as too painfully disturbed by the announcement of Mr. Dexter's marriage. ”

“ Loring,” I replied, “once upon a time there was a fox, who was caught in a trap, and had his tail cut off. After that——”
“Ah well, I suppose you know your own mind. But, Mr. Butterfield”—she leaned over, and spoke quite low—“I believe you make out your young days—and Loring’s—to have been much worse than they were. Do you not, now?”
Mrs. Loring had a little beauty-spot on her conscience which she thought was a stain.
II
A HYPOTHETICAL CASE Carrie and I were placidly surveying, from either end of my little dining-table, the creditable wreck we had made of a rather neat little dinner. ”

“ His voice gloated. So did his hands and his heavy, dense-blue eyes. He was altogether a rather unpleasantly "gloatful" person, as a lover. Loring quivered with wrath and nausea. He would have liked to tear Cuthbridge "from the scabbard of his limbs."
"Dinner is served," said the old butler.
It was not until the next day at tea-time that Loring got a chance to see Belinda alone. He came in just as she and her mother also returned from a drive. "I must go up to have tea with Grace," said Mrs. Horton. "You give Morry his tea, Linda." ”

“ Loring never spoke harshly—indeed, he seldom spoke at all the little he was at home, but the attentions he paid were so obviously from a sense of duty, that they fell like ice-drops on the heart of his wounded wife. ”

“ I always regarded Loring as the possessor of one sterling quality. Selfish he might be, or indolent, or inconsiderate, an old maid in his fussy little rules of everyday existence and an incurable romantic in his attitude to the life of the twentieth century. With it all he was a man of his word. Under blackmail he had pledged himself to entertain my French journalists, and when the time came for fulfilling the pledge he smiled welcome on them in the hall of House of Steynes. ”

“ Not I. Until we came to New York I spent all of my life looking at the gay world out of windows. I’m tired of playing second-fiddle.”
Jane Loring stood before her mother and touched her timidly on the arm. The physical resemblance between them was strong, and it was easily seen where the daughter got her beauty. Mrs. Loring had reached middle life very prettily, and at a single impression it was difficult to tell whether she was nearer thirty-three or fifty-three. Her skin was of that satiny quality which wrinkles depress but do not sear. ”

“ Loring became a widow she was both poor and friendless, she was also very delicate. She had never worked in her life, and although she attempted to do so, in order to support herself and little Guy, she found it almost impossible to earn enough to supply them with food. She opened a little school, but could get only a few scholars, and they paid her so little that she was obliged also to take in sewing. This displeased the parents of her pupils and they took away their children, saying "she could not do two things at once." ”

“ Morris Loring walking with H. R. H. the Crown Prince of Blauethürme. Mrs. Loring is one of our most distinguished and chic young matrons. She entertains lavishly and brilliantly both at her unique town house in New York (said to be decorated by her own fair hands) and at her sumptuous summer palace in Newport. Mrs. Loring was formerly the wife of the Hon. Cecil Chesney, younger brother of Viscount Wychcote."
She tossed the paper to Morris with a grimace. "Look at that snobbish abomination!" she said. "How good Americans would love a King and Court all their own! ”

“ My cause is with Him. If my burdens are too heavy, He will not turn from me because I fall fainting by the way."
"Jessie, what is the meaning of this?" Mrs. Loring spoke in a suddenly changed voice, and coming close to her niece, looked earnestly into her face. "Here is a bad bruise on your right cheek, and another on the temple just above. And the skin is inflamed around the edges of these bruises, showing them to be recent. How came this, Jessie?"
"Bruises? Are you certain?"
"Why, yes, child! and bad ones, too."
Mrs. Dexter looked surprised. ”

“ A little while Dexter stood looking at her, embarrassment and trouble written on every feature. Then bowing coldly, he retired.
CHAPTER XX.
WHEN Mrs. Loring went back to her chamber, after Mr. Dexter withdrew from the house, she found Jessie in bed, lying as still as if asleep. She looked up when her aunt came to the bedside—at first with stealthy, half-timid glances—then with more of trust, that changed into loving confidence. Mrs. Loring bent down and kissed her.
"Oh, Aunt Phoebe! that was very cruel in him." ”

“ Lifted from an almost obscure position, as the dependent niece of Mrs. Loring, the young wife of Mr. Dexter found herself in a larger circle, and in the society of men and women of more generally cultivated tastes. She soon became a centre of attraction; for taste attracts taste, mind seeks mind. And where beauty is added, the possessor has invincible charms. It did not escape the eyes of Dexter that, in the society of other men, his young wife was gayer and more vivacious than when with him. This annoyed him so much, that he began to act capriciously, as it seemed to Jessie. ”

“ It stirred the imagination in a strange way, as a woman utterly abandoned, lost to all shame, may cease to be a capricious wanton, given to light-hearted amours and become so coldly lascivious that she repels the most passionate of men.
And suddenly, as Loring stared, he saw the woman-shape. He saw that the city, its entire circumference, its central mass, was shaped like a recumbent female with great wanton knees and flame-tipped breasts. ”

“ The Lorings were very much astonished to have Sister Sue tell them she was going back to Gilmoreville right away. They were more astonished when she told them that she had decided, after all, not to go on with her music just at present.
Mr. Loring only smiled and said a polite something that meant nothing, and let the matter pass. But Mrs. Loring was not so easily satisfied. She seized the first opportunity, when they were alone together, to induce the girl to tell her more about it. ”

“ Ah, Aunt Phoebe! that marriage was a sad mistake. A union unblessed by love, is the commencement of a wretched life. It is the old story; and never loses its tragic interest. It was folly in the beginning, and it is madness now."
Mrs. Loring would have questioned her niece closely as to the meaning of Mr. Dexter's allusion to a certain individual as having been too intimate with his wife, but these closing remarks fell like rebuke upon her ears. She remembered how almost like a victim-lamb, Jessie had been led up to the marriage altar ”

“ She came of a race that required chastity in husbands as well as in wives. What made it all so overwhelming was that Loring knew well that he "had committed adultery already in his heart." It was as though his spirit were being arraigned by these people. That he had only kissed a woman made no difference to them. To them it was adultery in the heart....
When he had been at Sweet-Waters a week, something happened that absolutely staggered him. He felt, when he read a certain item in a letter from his mother, as though he had received a violent blow in the midriff. ”

“ The mental question arrested the footsteps of Miss Loring, ere she had proceeded five paces from the door of her chamber.
"Is not what imprudent?" was answered back in her thoughts.
"What folly is this!" she said, in self-rebuke, and passed onward.
"Miss Loring!" There was too much feeling in Hendrickson's manner. But its repression, under the circumstances, was impossible.
"Mr. Hendrickson!" The voice of Miss Loring betrayed far more of inward disturbance than she wished to appear. ”

“ I have considered you simply as my son’s friend—almost my son’s{108} contemporary—a young man with an exceptionally wise and reliable head. Certainly not as a young man who would be foolish enough to want to marry a woman old enough to be his mother.”
Loring’s lips were rather thin, and his eyes glittered dangerously. As she stood looking at him then, with a certain softening excitement about her face, there was no slightest suggestion of age about her; nothing but an admirably developed and preserved maturity. And Loring was a young man in nothing but years. ”

“ Peggy Glamorgan asked as she, her sister and Benson sat at luncheon three hours later. The table was spread on the broad, shadowy veranda on the north side of the ranch-house. The sun beat down upon fields and white roads; insects droned lazily to the accompaniment of the faint roar of the stream swollen by the heavy rain of the night before. "Ye gods! If here isn't Abdul the Great," she mocked saucily as Courtlandt appeared at the door. "Are his humble slaves to be honored with his presence at the noonday meal? Allah, oh Allah! Jerry, aren't you overwhelmed at this tribute to our charms?" ”

“ And as this was the longest speech Turnbull had ever heard from Loring's lips, except his arraignment of Nevins before the court, the colonel pondered over it not a little. He took the letter and read it when, an hour later, the Idaho was plowing her lazy way southward through a dull and leaden sea. [Pg 130]
"I'm not the first man to be fooled by a slip of a girl, Loring," wrote Blake. "It isn't the first time that a woman has got the better of me, and it may not be the last. ”

“ There is always something novel and romantic to a young girl in an offer of marriage. It is the great event of her life. I do not wonder that you are disturbed—though I am surprised at the nature of this disturbance. Time will subdue all this. You have a beautiful life before you, darling! The cherished bride of Leon Dexter must tread a path of roses."
A long sigh parted the lips of Miss Loring, and her face, to which not even the faintest tinge of color had yet returned, bent itself downward. ”