Changes in the world without often make sad havoc in our content and happiness.Loss of fortune and friends,removal to new scenes,death and disaster,sometimes so alter the outlook that we have to ask ourselves:Is this the same earth in which we have dwelt hitherto?But the changes that can most blast and blacken,or,on the other hand,glorify the world about us,are those which take place within our souls.
Such a radical change had apparently taken place in Ida Mayhew's world.She was bewildered with her trouble,and could not understand the dreary outlook.She had come to the Lake House but a few weeks before,a vain,light-hearted maiden,looking upon life with laughing and thoughtless glances,and having no more definite purposes than the butterfly that flits from flower to flower,caring not which are harmless and which poisonous,so that they yield a momentary sweetness.
But now,for causes utterly unforeseen and half-inexplicable,all flowers had withered,and the old pleasures once so exhilarating were a weariness even in thought.Her world,once a pleasure garden,had been transformed into a path so thorny and flinty that every step brought new bruises and lacerations;and it led away among shadows so cold and dark,that she shivered at the thought of her prospective life.
Her heart had so suddenly and thoroughly betrayed her,that she was overwhelmed with a sense of helplessness and perplexity.The spoiled and flattered girl had always been accustomed to have her own way.Self-gratification had been the rule and habit of her life.If Van Berg had only admired and complimented her,if he had joined the honeyed chorus of flattery that had waited on her sensuous beauty,his voice would probably have been unheeded and lost among many others.But his sharp demand for something more than a face and form had awakened her,and to her dismay she learned that her real and lasting self was as dwarfed and deformed as her transient and outward self was perfect.
The artist seemed to her princely,regal even,in his strong cultivated manhood,his lofty calling and ambition,and his high social rank.As for herself,it now appeared that her beauty,whose spell she had thought no man could resist,had lured him to her side only long enough to discover what she was and who she was,and then he had turned away in disgust.
From their first moment of meeting,she felt that she had been peculiarly unfortunate in the impressions she had made upon him.
Her attendant at the concert-garden had been a fool;and now he was associating her with a man whom he more than despised.She believed that he pitied her father as the victim of a wife's heartlessness and a daughter's selfishness and frivolity,and that he felt a repugnance toward her mother which his politeness could not wholly disguise.He was probably learning to characterize them in his mind by her father's horrible words--"froth and mud."Such miserable thoughts were flocking round her like croaking ravens as she sat rigid and motionless in her room,her form tense from the severity of her mental distress.Suddenly Sibley's loud tones,and her cousin's voice in reply,caught her attention,and she opened the lattice of the blinds.She had scarcely done so before she saw Stanton strike the blow which had felled Sibley to the earth.
With breathless interest she watched the scene till Van Berg stepped forward.Then she sprang to a drawer,and taking out a small field-glass which she carried on her summer excursions was able to see the expression of the young men's faces,although she could not distinguish their words.The stern,menacing aspect of the artist made her tremble even at her distance,and it was evident that his words were throwing Sibley into a transport of rage;and when in his passion he tried to shoot Van Berg,she could not repress the cry that attracted their attention.