Clara Denman, Dead

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      I watched Churm, as he smoked.

      Love, disloyalty, penitence, death, — were these all unrealities, that he could speak of them in his own history so calmly? Could a man be hurt as he had been, and overlive unscarred? I had heard cool men say, that “the tragedies of this life become the comedies of another, and that we should some time smile to recall our cruellest battles here, as now we smile to watch the jousts of flies in a sunbeam.” Churm’s tragedy was still tragedy to him. He had begun to recite it with evident pain. But the pain of his tone became indifference before he closed; and now he sat there smoking, as if he had related gravely, but without emotion, the mishaps of some stranger.

      I wondered.

      He looked through the smoke, caught my wondering eye, smiled soberly, and said: “Such an experience as I have described is like a shirt of Nessus, which one wears until the prickles of its poisoned serge have thoroughly toughened his skin. When it ceases to gall, he strips it off and hangs it by the highway for whoever runs to take; or if he finds some sensitive friend, like you, Robert, he lays it upon his shoulders, and says, ‘Wear this! The edge of its torture is gone. It will harden you for the garment the Fates are weaving for you.’”

      “Dear me!” said I, shrugging my shoulders. “Have I got to stand haircloth and venom? Well, if that is the common lot, and I cannot escape, I am much obliged to you for trying to make me pachydermatous. But you have not succeeded very well. The story of another’s pain makes my heart softer.”

      “Sympathy for others is stout armor for one’s self. But, Byng, you have heard the first tragedy of the series; listen to the second!”

      “The second! Is there a third? Is the series a trilogy?”

      “The third is unwritten. The march of events has paused while Densdeth was off. And to-day he steps from behind the curtain with you, a new character, half inclined to be his satellite. Perhaps you have a part to play.”

      There was a vein of seriousness in this seeming banter.

      “Perhaps!” said I, puffing a ring of smoke away. “But pray go on. I am eager to hear the whole.”

      “After his wife’s death, Denman said to me, ‘Mr. Churm, Emma told me that you were willing, for old friendship’s sake, to give an eye to my two poor girls’ education. Suppose you take the whole responsibility off my hands. I will make their million apiece for them. You shall teach them how to spend it.’ I gladly accepted this godfatherly post. The girls became to me as my own children.

      “I shall say nothing to you,” Churm here interjected, “of Emma.”

      “Why not?” I asked.

      “You will see her. Judge for yourself! Clara you will never see. Of her I will speak. But first what do you remember of the sisters?”

      “They were my pets when I was a school-boy. Emma I recollect as a lovely, fascinating, caressing little thing. Clara was shy and jealous, full of panics that people disliked her for her ugliness. I might have almost forgotten them, except for a sweet, simple, girlish letter they jointly wrote me upon my father’s death. It touched me greatly.”

      “I remember,” said Churm. “Clara consulted me as to its propriety. Dear child! sympathy always swept away her reserve. But you speak of her ugliness, Robert?”

      “She was original, unexpected; but certainly without beauty. In fact, ugly and awkward, beside Emma.”

      “She became beautiful to me by the light that was in her. I could not criticise the medium through which shone so fair a soul. She educated me; not I her. She illuminated for me the new truths, she interpreted the new oracles; and so I have not fallen old and staid among my rudiments, as childless men, with the best intentions, may.”

      “You give me,” said I, “a feeling of personal want and personal robbery by her death.”

      “Fresh, earnest, unflinching soul!” Churm sadly continued. “How she flashed out of being all the false laws that check the mind’s divine liberty! Not the laws of refinement and high-breeding; they, the elastic by-laws of the fundamental law of love, are easy harness to the freest soul. In another house than Denman’s, among allies, not foes, what a noble poem her life would have been!”

      “Foes!” said I. “Was there no love for her at home?”

      “Denman admired his daughters. Love remains latent in him. He has not outgrown his passion for the grosser fictions, wealth, power, show.”

      “But Emma! The two sisters did not love one another? If not, where was the fault?”

      “Nature made them dissonant.”

      “Their foster-father could not harmonize them?”

      “I did my best, Byng. But young women need a mother. I suppose the mothers in society shrug up their shoulders, when they talk of Clara’s disappearance and death, and say, ‘What could you expect of a young person, whose nurse, governess, and chaperon was that odd Mr. Churm?’”

      “You were absent when she disappeared?”

      “Away from my post. In England. On some patent business.”

      “Pity!”

      “I curse myself when I think of it. About this misery, Robert, I have not learned to be calm.”

      “You did not approve her proposed marriage with Densdeth, — that I am sure.”

      “I knew nothing of it.”

      “What! your ward, your child, did not write, did not consult you on so grave a matter?”

      “Her letters had been constant. They suddenly ceased. Her last had been a pleading cry to me to succor her father against his growing intimacy with Densdeth. I wrote that I would despatch my business, and hasten home. I never heard again. There was foul play.”

      “Suppression of letters?”

      “Yes; or I was belied to her.”

      “Such a woman would not lightly abandon a faith.”

      “Only some villanous treason could destroy her faith in me. And such I do not doubt there has been. I make no loose charges. But why was I kept in the dark?”

      “No rumor of the marriage reached you?”

      “A rumor merely. Do you know Van Beester?”

      “That banking snob who tries to be a swell? a fellow who talks pro-slavery and fancies it aristocracy? Yes; I was bored with him once at a dinner in Paris.”

      “Van Beester was put in my state-room on board the steamer when I returned. He had been in England, consummating a railroad job. The old story. Eight per cent third mortgage bonds, convertible. Enormous land grant. Road running over Noman’s Land into Nowhere. One of Densdeth’s schemes. Denman also had an interest.”