Rebecca Wentworth's Distraction (17 page)

“I think if she were to find some exercise of her gifts, she would be more compliant and purposeful.”

“That may be true, but it is not her decision, as I troubled to remind her. She forgets that, all too conveniently for the moment. But I daresay such forgetfulness will cause her enormous inconvenience in the long run. Do you suppose she continues to produce any of those maniacal illustrations, in secret I mean?”

Sanborn stumbled. “As before? Had you seen them?”

“No, but Madam Browne once described some of them to me in detail.”

“It's possible, of course. You saw that she continues her more sacred productions. . . .” He hesitated. “But, really, I don't know enough to report.”

“You seem uncertain, Daniel.” The parson looked narrowly at him. “She perhaps confides in you, as a fellow dauber.”

“She has, to some extent. I had offered to provide her proper training, once. Her guardians wouldn't hear of it.”

“And you have no reason to suspect her return to this pictorial . . . melancholy?”

“I have nothing to go on, as I say, beyond her occasional spleenishness, as I believe Madam Browne reports.”

“Yes. She does indeed.” The minister still fixed him with his penetrating gaze, as if he wished to ferret out some unspoken truth.

Finally, the silence grew uncomfortable for both of them, so the parson continued. “She had better marry, I told the colonel, and provide for herself some more appropriate line of endeavor.”

“You may be right there, Parson.” He laughed congenially. “She had suitors in Blackstone.”

“I don't doubt it for a minute. Though I expect they knew little enough of her outlandish ambitions. She's a little upstart Camilla.”

“Camilla?” Sanborn said.

“One who has shaken off all female folly save dress and show. Virgil.”

Sanborn laughed. “I assure you, Parson, she has never even learned the language of looks and glances, of the blow of a fan. What may appear as renunciation is mere innocence, and a passion for quite other things.”

Sanborn thought it was very lucky Reverend Browne had never actually seen, apparently, the more fantastical productions of Rebecca's pen, pencil, and pigment. Moderate though he was compared to the local Congregational divines, the curate of Queen's might well have condemned her for such visions so powerfully expressed.

“All passions in excess are un-Christian,” Parson Browne said. “This is what these itinerant Enthusiasts misunderstand. As you well know, I'm not a man of intolerance or narrow principles, Sanborn. I'm speaking of her familial and her civil duties. However, even love, if it does not first serve our duty, is certain to make us fail in that duty.”

“She is fortunate, then, all the more, to have a man of your moderation as her counselor, Parson.” The parson nodded in agreement and refilled their glasses. “There was some trouble in Blackstone, following a visitation and much preaching by one such Enthusiast.”

“Indeed?”

He first assured himself of the pastor's strict confidence, and then he explained what had happened, the frenzy of some of the populace and their turning on Rebecca for “a portrait or two she had done,” as he put it. The curate shook his head knowingly. Then Sanborn repeated that it was her good fortune to have a true Christian leader of his temper as her spiritual advisor.

He was betting on Browne's distaste for the New Lighters, aware as he was of Browne's sermon “Against the Pernicious Doctrine of Enthusiasm.” He had a printed edition of it, and a passage came to mind as they spoke:

By the lights of these Enthusiasts, these Illuminati, he is the best and most edifying preacher who is most presumptuous and unintelligible and can boldly anathematize all that dissent from him. Visions, Dreams, Trances are as frequent in our day as they were in those of Fox and Nayler. People making all manner of mouths, turning out their lips as if convulsed, straining eyeballs and twisting their bodies into unseemly postures. Nothing but Scotch Cameronian Divinity will go down with them, and thereby do they disturb our peace and promote division. These itinerants pour in from all parts to pelt us with their sermons and lectures, sometimes four in a day and into the night in a most disorderly manner. It is a specie of madness and frenzy.

The pastor's voice returned Sanborn to the moment. “She shows little recognition of her good fortune, Daniel,” he was saying. “I spoke to her of the necessity of humility before God, of the struggle against crippling ambition all men and women must wage, and do you know what she said to me?”

“I dare not ask, Parson. Really, I can't imagine. She always surprises.” He prepared to contain himself again.

“‘So much religiosity about us, sir. Yet so little Christian charity.' I'm not exaggerating, Daniel, I assure you. Her very words. Followed by the most complacent smile. It chilled me. It chilled my heart.”

Sanborn could see that what remained with the good reverend were her quips and challenges. He had no doubt that Rebecca was, otherwise, the model of courtesy, as he had seen she could be. Might she have been referring to the Episcopalians as much as to the dissenters and Enthusiasts? Her words reminded him again of her forbidden drawings and paintings. Her thoughts and her pictures, he realized now, were of a piece. She could at times act like some ancient sophistic gadfly. Was that her ambition? Were her darker paintings above all criticisms? None of this could he consider with the good parson, so he kept his thoughts to himself.

“Perhaps she was thinking only of this infection of Enthusiasts, Arthur, which you've spoken against so often yourself,” Sanborn said, trying to mollify him. “I've never taken her for an Enthusiast, nor any of her disorders of intellect and fancy for sectarian distempers. I take them to be more mundane distempers of the brain. I trust you've spoken to Colonel Browne since her visit.”

“Yes, immediately,” the pastor said, “as it was he who sent her to me. They have been thinking of service, but I advised them to consider matrimony, provided they had someone in mind to protect and tame her.”

“I see,” Sanborn said. “He would first have to appreciate her delicacy of mind and sensibility. My own feeling has been all along, if I may speak frankly and confidentially again, that she would be more malleable if they were to find some appropriate channel for her talents and energies. But they've insisted on restraining her from a more acceptable exercise of her powers.”

“That is their prerogative. I trust they have good reason.”

“I wouldn't presume to inflict my views on them. Perhaps you are right.”

“Matrimony would not be an unusual palliative in a case of such extremity,” the parson said. “I'm put in mind of another instance, some few years ago, over Durham way. Perhaps you've heard of it? An Enthusiast by the name of Mary Reed—one of Mr. Gilman's, the most fanatical of New Lighters? One among those true Aeolists, as my good Doctor Swift used to call them.”

“Not of Miss Reed particularly,” Sanborn said. “Mr. Gilman is rather infamous among Church of England people, however, as he must be among his own clan. I'm given to understand he'd preach some eight hours running, only to be taken outside by a church elder to be walked up and down until the screaming from his congregation drew him back into meeting.”

“Precisely. However, I'm not suggesting Miss Rebecca's an Enthusiast, but there is a certain visionary similarity leading to what Madam Browne has described as bizarre flights of fancy and intervals of unmanageability.”

“I take your point, sir.”

“Oh, Nicholas Gilman had a veritable apoplectic entourage—Hannah Huckins, Mary Reed, others. But my point is that these fits of vision, these hysteric disorders, this fantasticalness and coquetry, indicate some want of a more legitimate manly presence, some connubial balance, in the young woman's life. In Miss Reed's case, her behavior provoked a scandal and anticipated the minister's final undoing.”

“Scandal, sir? From what cause?”

“When Mr. Gilman had just moved to his Durham parsonage, his wife and family still at Exeter preparing to join him, Miss Reed presented herself at the minister's door in a state of ‘exceeding joy' that she proclaimed had possessed her all day. She was invited in, innocently enough one supposes, but soon fell into a trance and ended up spending four days in a parsonage bed—envisioning, by Mr. Gilman's own defensive account, her soul in heaven the whole time.”

Sanborn suppressed a laugh; he looked down and shook his head.

“A great upheaval ensued,” the prelate went on, “but such was the state of the enthusiasm at that time the people were finally induced to exonerate their new minister and the prostrate seer herself.”

“A scandal indeed,” Sanborn said, allowing himself a small laugh finally. “But I take your point, sir. And I find myself of your mind as well. Perhaps marriage is the best physic in such instances—and in this instance of the fair Rebecca.”

Chapter 26

S
ANBORN DID NOT TRY
to communicate with Rebecca. He would see her at Queen's Chapel of a Sunday, but they did not speak. Abigail delivered him no further missives, so there was scant opportunity to send or respond to private messages. He believed that calling upon Rebecca again, or even speaking of her to her guardians, would have had too much the appearance of intrusiveness. And he had no wish to confirm further his unreasonable preoccupation with Rebecca and her affairs. He went about his business for some months, right through the terrible news of the destruction of Saratoga and other settlements deep in the western frontier, thinking about her but without speaking his thoughts to anyone.

This strategy of aloofness and self-interest began to unravel, however, when Rebecca finally renewed their correspondence after the Christmas season.

Had he said something that sent the good parson on such researches into Rebecca's private quarters? Sanborn tried to recall their conversation precisely. Or perhaps it was something he did
not
say? How could he be certain? He was certain, only, that the Brownes would hear nothing more of his proposed lessons or his pleas to indulge her a little in her passion to draw and paint. He might be somehow implicated in the strictures of her present condition, but there was little he could do about it now. Moreover, he had come to the opinion with so many others that perhaps marriage was her best recourse. If only the alternatives in that line were not so “dreary,” as she had put it. He did not really wish to see her married to another, especially to one who would make her unhappy. Nor did he allow himself to contemplate the pangs of jealousy he could not entirely deny. But the fact remained that, married, she would be protected from the intrusions, even the vagaries, of guardians and ministers. Whether she would be allowed to continue her drawing was another matter. If she were, a husband surely would countenance only the sweeter delineations. That was quite understandable, he thought. One couldn't expect a husband to revel in her more antic figurations. But at least she would be exercising, rather than suppressing, her talents, however narrowly to her mind.

He began to wonder if there were not some way to make the young Wentworth more pleasing to her. He knew who the proud young man was, however, so that line of thought ran out quickly. Or perhaps another suitor, one more tolerable to her, yet equally acceptable to the Brownes. But how would he initiate such a scheme of matchmaking? Moreover, would the Brownes ever countenance his own suit? Not for a moment, he assured himself. He was no longer poor, but he was irrevocably beyond their marriageable, clannish circles.

He couldn't trust any of his female acquaintances of standing; they would be too loyal to the Brownes to join in his scheming. And his closest associates who were women, Gingher and Miss Norris, were outside the sphere of proper husband-hunting. Nevertheless, he called on Miss Norris for advice.

“She will be ruined,” Miss Norris said after he detailed Rebecca's own description of her narrowing circumstances. “Not only are such men unworthy of her, they will never understand her and therefore soon tire of her. She will live abandoned in her marriage.”

“I suppose ultimately she will be marooned,” he finally admitted.

“To put it bluntly,” she said.

“Yet the alternative is even more frightful.”

“A certainty, Mr. Sanborn.”

“Is there nothing to be done?”

“It would take some drastic measure on our part, or
your
part, Mr. Sanborn. Something daring and audacious.”

“What do you mean?”

“I'm not at all certain myself, yet. I think she will refuse these chosen suitors, as you intimated.” She got up from her chair and began to pace about. “And when she does, the Brownes, I now believe, will complete their threat. They'll not be crossed or blocked.”

“It's vexing to think it may be so. They believe she is, in some degree, mad. They seem to believe that as separation and domestic labors were the curative for the child, so now marriage would be for the woman.” He got up and began to pace about, too. “Perhaps you should talk to her of your conviction, as you have to me, and at the least enjoin her to marry, for her own security.”

“You may be right,” she said. “I don't know that she'll listen to me, but marriage, even such marriage, is preferable to destruction.”

That evening they discovered no other way to proceed, so Miss Norris prepared to call on Rebecca.

U
PON CALLING,
however, Miss Norris understood that it was too late. Rebecca had refused both suitors and she believed the Brownes in the process of making good their threat. Whether they saw this as a punishment to bring her “to her senses,” or as a more permanent means of disposing of their recalcitrant ward, Miss Norris could not yet fathom. But Rebecca was in a terrible state of mind herself, Miss Norris reported. One might be convinced she
was
mad.

“She somehow keeps stealing paper and pen and making her secretive and ever more bizarre illustrations,” she said, reporting to Sanborn on her visit. “They've had to lock her in her room for long periods to keep her from it. But the very drawings now incriminate her. As they did at Blackstone, I now understand.”

“You heard of that mess?”

“Miss Rebecca told me. And Mrs. Prescott, still in mourning but come to her own senses, has told the Brownes of the incident. You'd have done better to tell me of that yourself, sir.”

“I intended to, and soon would have, but had remained silent out of my fear for her.”

Miss Norris was now beside herself, and she and Sanborn fell into a chaos of helplessness, and, in Sanborn's case, self-recrimination. He, after all, had returned her to her guardians-turned-persecutors, he told himself.

“I don't understand how they can contemplate such a course of action,” he said. “This trade in lunacy. They baffle and anger me.”

“They will brook no rebellion,” she said. “And they believe her lucid intervals grow more infrequent by the month.”

“But this?”

“As I mentioned before, there is a history of madness of some sort—religious melancholia, hypochondria, suicide, and the like—in Squire Browne's lineage. His people have always feared it greatly, all the more so for occasional manifestations through the generations.”

“But Rebecca comes by way of the other side of the family—the Wentworths.”

“That doesn't matter, or lessen the fear of it, the repugnance, the shame of it, in the squire's eyes. Her grandmother Mehitabel, on the Browne-Cutts side, married a Wentworth. And Mehitabel's grandmother in turn, Elizabeth Browne, drowned herself in the river on her birthday. That woman is none other than the Squire's own grandmother, on his father's side! There were, I believe, others. Of this only you can be certain, Mr. Sanborn—he'll have no mad woman, by his lights, under his roof.”

Sanborn looked at her without speaking.

“We must get her away from there,” Miss Norris finally said. “We simply can't let such a thing happen.”

“But how?” he asked. “Shall we ruin ourselves into the bargain?”

“Could you not return to Boston, or some farther center, Mr. Sanborn, to ply your lucrative trade, and take her with you? For a time only, of course. Provide for her safety and work, without anyone knowing who she is or how she helps you, painting drapery—or whatever you wish. She might well be a younger sister after all. . . .” She ran out of speech as if she had run out of silly ideas and explanations. She stood before him desperate and empty.

He could not make an answer. He knew that he most certainly could do no such thing. And he knew that she was equally certain of the impossibility of it. Every instinct told him it would be his ruin as well as Rebecca's. A thought returned to his mind: He might marry her himself and indeed take her away. But it was a useless thought. The Brownes would never hear of it—a painter of portraits, a man of social servility when all was said and done, marrying into the Browne and Wentworth families.