Barriers Burned Away · Chapter 12 (2/2)

For some weeks Mr. Ludolph treated his daughter with cold distrust. “She will be like her mother, I suppose,” he thought. “Already she has begun to deceive me and to imperil everything by her folly;” and his heart was full of bitterness toward his child. Thus the poor girl dwelt in a chilled and blighting atmosphere at a time when she most sorely needed kindness and wise guidance.

She was very unhappy, for she saw that her father had lost all confidence in her. She fairly turned sick when she thought of the past. She had lived in the world of romance and mystery; she had loved with all her girlish power; and, however wrongly and unjustly, by the inevitable laws of association she connected the words “love” and “romance” with one whom she now detested and loathed. Within a week after her miserable experience she became as utter a sceptic in regard to human love, and happiness flowing from it, as her father had taught her to be respecting God and the joy of believing. Though seemingly a fair young girl, her father had made her worse than a pagan. She believed in nothing save art and her father’s wisdom. He seemed to embody the culture and worldly philosophy that now became, in her judgment, the only things worth living for. To gain his confidence became her great desire. But this had received a severe shock. Mr. Ludolph had lost all faith in everything save money and his own will. Religion was to him a gross superstition, and woman’s virtue and truth, poetic fictions.

He watched Christine narrowly, and said just enough to draw out the workings of her mind. He then decided to tell his plan for life, and give her strong additional motives for doing his will. The picture he portrayed of the future dazzled her proud, ambitious spirit, and opened to her fancy what then seemed the only path to happiness. She entered into his projects with honest enthusiasm, and bound herself by the most solemn promises to aid in carrying them out. But in bitterness he remembered one who had promised with seeming enthusiasm before, and he distrusted his daughter, watching her with lynx-eyed vigilance.

But gradually he began to believe in her somewhat, as he saw her looking forward with increasing eagerness to the heaven of German fashionable life, wherein she, rich, admired, allied by marriage to some powerful noble family, should shine a queen in the world of art.

“I have joined her aspirations to mine,” he said, in self-gratulation. “I have blended our ambitions and sources of hope and enjoyment, and that is better than all her promises.”

When Dennis saw first the face that was so beautiful and yet so marred by pride and selfishness, Christine was about nineteen years old, and yet as mature in some respects as a woman of thirty. She had the perfect self-possession that familiarity with the best society gives. Mr. Ludolph was now too shrewd to seek safety in seclusion. He went with his daughter into the highest circles of the city, and Christine had crowds of admirers and many offers. All this she enjoyed, but took it coolly as her right, with the air of a Greek goddess accepting the incense that rose in her temple. She was too proud and refined to flirt in the ordinary sense of the word, and no one could complain that she gave much encouragement. But this state of things was all the more stimulating, and each one believed, with confidence in his peculiar attractions, that he might succeed where all others had failed. Miss Ludolph’s admirers were unaware that they had a rival in some as yet unknown German nobleman. At last it passed into a proverb that the beautiful and brilliant girl who was so free and courtly in society was as cold and unsusceptible as one of her father’s statues.

Thus it would seem that when circumstances brought the threads of these two lives near each other, Dennis’s and Christine’s, the most impassable barriers rose between them, and that the threads could never be woven together, or the lives blended. She was the daughter of the wealthy, aristocratic Mr. Ludolph; he was her father’s porter.

Next to the love of art, pride and worldly ambition were her strongest characteristics. She was an unbeliever in God and religion, not from conviction, but from training. She knew very little about either, and what light she had came to her through false mediums. She did not even believe in that which in many young hearts is religion’s shadow, love and romance, nor did her father take a more worldly and practical view of life than she.

In marked contrast we have seen the character of Dennis Fleet, drawing its inspiration from such different sources.

Could two human beings be more widely separated⁠—separated in that which divides more surely than continents and seas?

Could Dennis have seen her warped, deformed moral nature, as clearly as her beautiful face and form, he would have shrunk from her; but while recognizing defects, he shared the common delusion, that the lovely outward form and face must enshrine much that is noble and ready to blossom into good, if the right motives can be presented.

As for Christine, she had one chance for life, one chance for heaven. She was young. Her nature had not so hardened and crystallized in evil as to be beyond new and happier influences.