Chapter #24Silas Merriman, Chapter 2 by: Seuzz   That Merriman spoke the truth when he said that the city of his fathers filled him with horror is not to be doubted. Nor is it to be doubted that the attempt to give this horror a name and a locus had left him utterly routed. It was not the city itself, in either its form or in the tissue of its buildings or citizens, that caused him to reel. The city contained many memories for him, it is true, but there was nothing poignant in or about its neighborhoods to fill him, who after all had been raised in a great house upon one of the larger boulevards, with gloom. Nor was it that Baltimore—by chance though it had been—was the place where he had grown up in the company of his cousin and where she had perforce abandoned him and all others before her second decade had ended. There were no nostalgic shades that lingered upon embankments or under church spires to remind him of what he had lost: there were no places where he might turn a sharp corner and think with a pain There she is—Ah!, no, it is another, where she—as he thought of her now—where she once stood, where she might have been standing now. Baltimore had its charms—so many people said—but they were the dreary charms of color and shape and texture and not, for Merriman, the sinews of experience, and remembrance, that bind a heart to city stones.
It is also true that the determination to flee this nameless dread had come upon him that very morning as he stood in a small, walled-in court where ornate crypts and vaults stood shoulder to shoulder without quite embracing each other. He had stood there for an hour at least, contemplating the door behind which she had withdrawn so unexpectedly. Above its white walls he could glimpse the gray roof tiles and red brick chimneys of prosperous houses, and could hear the horse-and-carriage clatter penetrate from the streets. The day for this visit, he vaguely felt, ought to have been gloomy, with a bitter wind to bite at the back of his neck and rake dead leaves across the stony ground, but on this day in April the sun was bright, and a fresh wind, laundered and spiced by the bay, pushed wispy clouds across a pale blue sky. Spring had painted her best face for the occasion, and the merry sounds of the portage of people and goods bespoke a city cheered by the alteration of winter and pleased to celebrate it with bustle and profit. Even Merriman had felt the revived spirit within him, and had had to check his step and throttle a tune on his lips as he made his way to her resting house, so that the quiet spite he felt toward the day as he stood in the yard could not but be mingled with a certain churlish embarrassment at his earlier failure to don a suitable demeanor.
This, then, had been the thought that had determined him into quitting Baltimore—the recognition that the site of his loss should be so temperamentally indifferent to the sight of his loss. But "spirit" rather than "thought" would better characterize the nature of his punnish rumination. Irked he had been by the blank happiness of a blue sky, but he had not consciously wished for low, dark clouds and a cold, dark wind to crawl spider-like up his spine—though the truth is that he would have been happier to feel that awful thrill as he watched that awful door, keeping company with the angels on their friezes, who in the appropriate season would have been weeping rain but which on this cloudless day had only seemed to gaze down upon their charges with a mix of anxiety and boredom. For Silas Merriman—who in truth had never expressed toward his "beloved" any intimation of such a feeling; who had actually found her more than a trifle shallow, being inclined rather to gossip about parties and engagements than the profundities of philosophy and poetry which were Merriman's own preferred subject of discourse; who had in fact once remarked behind his cousin's retreating back that it must be God who gives us our family because we would never have chosen them for ourselves—had found Jane Merriman Edwards a figure of greater beauty and pathos in death than in life. We may grant that it would have taken no great feat of acrobatics by sensibilities less refined than Merriman's to put the late figure over the quick one in the estimation. Jane, let it be said with a forthright honesty, had been a silly girl. But she had been sweet and mild, and a more perceptive observer might have seen in the sweet and mild day that found Silas Merriman at her resting place a fine tribute to the departed—finer, to be sure, than would have been the dour day her not-exactly-betrothed pined for, with a wind rattling the ghosts of the mausoleum. But Merriman, who had watched with consciously harrowed eyes as a heavy oak lid closed over the rose-enwreathed face, and who had leaned with deliberately heavy affect on his cane as the coffin was borne into the family vault, was not one to clutch a light grief when a great one was at hand. Rather, in the circumstances he had crushed it between his fingers and held it up to his gaping mouth and flaring nostrils, the better to catch the fragrance of pathos and deep sympathy and, yes, horror at the cutting down of girlish youth. There had been cautious, sidelong glances in his direction during the funeral, but he had been blessedly oblivious to them—and even more blessedly oblivious to the incongruity between his present emotions and the condescension he had shown his cousin's dumpy figure during her life. Only the year before, the sidelong glances had said without saying, he had laid his own father to rest in the same vault and been all brisk business about it. But neither did this attitude strike his surviving cousins and aunts—the men in his family seemed to die at an unnaturally young age—as wholly foreign to the Silas Merriman they knew. Shakespeare probably never wrote a sonnet in remembrance of a hard-headed merchant banker like Merriman pere. But poets are soft on girls who die young, and the Silas they knew was certainly soft on poetry, which he had brought back in abundance from his situation at Princeton only the year before. There had been no argument, then, only a subtle and almost imperceptible withdrawal of the company in embarrassed silence, when, after the funeral, Silas had bowed his head and taken to referring bitterly and wholly unexpectedly to the passing of his "intended."
And so Merriman had found himself draped in a surfeit of emotion but lacking the dramatic stage against which he could show it in proper relief. Hence his determination to quit Baltimore, at least until a more suitable season should fall, when, in a properly rain-spattered cloak and with a broad-brimmed hat pulled down low upon his brow, he could stand again upon a certain spot and let grief swallow his heart without being distracted by a superfluity of birdsong. He had even fixed his attention on the particular location at which to take his respite: Ashgate. He had had in his pocket that very morning a letter from Roger de Vere which, among other business, reiterated in tones more polite than ardent an earlier observation that his college acquaintance might find a visit to the de Vere family plantation interesting and profitable. The Merrimans occupied themselves with the shipping of Virginia produce to ports overseas—or, rather, in the arrangement of such shipping, for the Merrimans owned no vessels and loaded no boats themselves, but instead arranged it so that goods that wanted shipping and ships that wanted cargo should find each other, and they collected a modest fee for this service. The de Veres resided in Georgia, not Virginia, and shipped through Charleston, not Baltimore, but Roger de Vere prayed that his friend might come and study firsthand his family's business, which was the growing of rice, as it might illuminate one side of the equation of which the Merrimans were the identity sign. It would likely be the only side of the equation Silas Merriman would be able to study with equanimity, as even the sight of a rocking mast could cause his sensitive stomach distress.
The afternoon of his final interview with Dernwood, therefore, had seen him post a letter to Ashgate, revealing that business in June would take him to Charleston, and continuing that, if Roger still found the prospect congenial, it would be Silas's pleasure to append to his trip a visit to the de Vere home. De Vere's positive reply found Silas, as Merriman had directed, in Charlotte, for it was part of his plan to leave Baltimore immediately but to move south only by slow degrees, so that his migration might have the appearance of a businesslike progress and not that of a sudden flight. Roger de Vere was sensitive but phlegmatic, and though Silas intended—and was, indeed, already rehearsing with elaborately dropping handkerchief—a fulsome recital of the tragedy that had struck in Baltimore, he judged it inexpedient to spring the full terror of it before stepping into Ashgate. Yes, the more he thought about it, the more delicious became the prospect of having it drawn out of him by his sympathetic friend.
To put aside the book and keep investigating the room: "Disposing of Lucy"    indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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