"Very good," said Miserrimus Dexter "Mrs. Valeria, do you see the face of this creature in front of me?"He pointed with the hand-mirror to his cousin as unconcernedly as he might have pointed to a dog. His cousin, on her side, took no more notice than a dog would have taken of the contemptuous phrase by which he had designated her. She went on combing and oiling his beard as composedly as ever.
"It is the face of an idiot, isn't it?" pursued Miserrimus Dexter! "Look at her! She is a mere vegetable. A cabbage in a garden has as much life and expression in it as that girl exhibits at the present moment. Would you believe there was latent intelligence, affection, pride, fidelity, in such a half-developed being as this?"I was really ashamed to answer him. Quite needlessly! The impenetrable young woman went on with her master's beard. Amachine could not have taken less notice of the life and the talk around it than this incomprehensible creature.
"_I_ have got at that latent affection, pride, fidelity, and the rest of it," resumed Miserrimus Dexter. "_I_ hold the key to that dormant Intelligence. Grand thought! Now look at her when Ispeak. (I named her, poor wretch, in one of my ironical moments.
She has got to like her name, just as a dog gets to like his collar.) Now, Mrs. Valeria, look and listen.--Ariel!"The girl's dull face began to brighten. The girl's mechanically moving hand stopped, and held the comb in suspense.
"Ariel! you have learned to dress my hair and anoint my beard, haven't you?"Her face still brightened. "Yes! yes! yes!" she answered, eagerly. "And you say I have learned to do it well, don't you?""I say that. Would you like to let anybody else do it for you?"Her eyes melted softly into light and life. Her strange unwomanly voice sank to the gentlest tones that I had heard from her yet.
"Nobody else shall do it for me," she said at once proudly and tenderly. "Nobody, as long as I live, shall touch you but me.""Not even the lady there?" asked Miserrimus Dexter, pointing backward with his hand-mirror to the place at which I was standing.
Her eyes suddenly flashed, her hand suddenly shook the comb at me, in a burst of jealous rage.
"Let her try!" cried the poor creature, raising her voice again to its hoarsest notes. "Let her touch you if she dares!"Dexter laughed at the childish outbreak. "That will do, my delicate Ariel," he said. "I dismiss your Intelligence for the present. Relapse into your former self. Finish my beard."She passively resumed her work. The new light in her eyes, the new expression in her face, faded little by little and died out.
In another minute the face was as vacant and as lumpish as before; the hands did their work again with the lifeless dexterity which had so painfully impressed me when she first took up the brush. Miserrimus Dexter appeared to be perfectly satisfied with these results.
"I thought my little experiment might interest you," he said.
"You see how it is? The dormant intelligence of my curious cousin is like the dormant sound in a musical instrument. I play upon it--and it answers to my touch. She likes being played upon. But her great delight is to hear me tell a story. I puzzle her to the verge of distraction; and the more I confuse her the better she likes the story. It is the greatest fun; you really must see it some day." He indulged himself in a last look at the mirror.
"Ha!" he said, complacently; "now I shall do. Vanish, Ariel!"She tramped out of the room in her heavy boots, with the mute obedience of a trained animal. I said "Good-night" as she passed me. She neither returned the salutation nor looked at me: the words simply produced no effect on her dull senses. The one voice that could reach her was silent. She had relapsed once more into the vacant inanimate creature who had opened the gate to us, until it pleased Miserrimus Dexter to speak to her again.