"Frankly, I do not. I cannot enter into it on either side. If I were even as full of the milk of human kindness as we are bound to suppose these soft-tempered foreigners to be, it seems to me I should still like to choose my beneficiaries; and, in your place, I should have quite another taste in benefactors. When I indue myself in imagination with a black skin, and try to think and feel conformably, I find my innate narrowness too much for me; I cannot disguise from myself that I should prefer to lavish my benefits on my own flesh and blood. Resuming my personality, I can as littledivest myself in fancy of my pride of race. If I must accept a state of dependence, I would take the bounty of a white man, hard and scanty though it might be, rather than receive luxurious daily bread at the hands of blacks."
"Borrow, you always had the knack of making a fellow feel uncomfortable. I would rather talk with Dudley than with you. I do not see that you are any better friend to our institutions than he is."
"A friend to slavery? Distrust the man not born and bred to it who calls himself one!
"I suppose I am as much of a pro-slavery man as you will easily find in New England,—for an unambitious, private man, I mean. Slavery does not mean for me power or place. What does slavery mean for me when I oppose its opponents? It means you, Westlake, my old schoolmate,—you and your wife and children. It means Harvey and his wife and children. I have the weakness to care more for you than for your slaves. I cannot resolve to see you deprived of comforts and luxuries that use has made necessary to you, that they may rise to wants they have no sense of as yet. As to your duties to your humble neighbors, and the way you fulfil them, that account is kept between you and your Maker. He has not made me a judge or a ruler over you."
Westlake's deep red deepened. "I leave religious matters to those whose charge it is. I have been instructed to hold the place which has been awarded me, without asking why I have been made to differ from others. And the teaching which is good enough for me is, I suppose, good enough for my servants. As for the rest, we know that our people are as well off as the same class in any part of the world, not excepting New England."
"I dare say such a class would be no better off there than here. But come and learn for yourself how it is there."
"I could not learn there how to live here. And I do not pretend that we can understand you better than you can us. But, Borrow, you are hard to suit. You twit us with our waste and improvidence, and yet you are not better pleased with Rasey, who follows gain like a New-Englander."
"Rasey follows gain from the blind impulse of covetousness. The New-Englander's zeal is according to knowledge. Rasey's greed is the inherited hunger of a precarious race. The New-Englander thrives because he has always thriven. He has in his veins 'the custom of prosperity.'
"Fuller tells us, that, in his time, 'a strict inquiry after the ancient gentry of England' would have found 'most of them in the class moderately mounted above the common level'; the more ambitious having suffered ruin in the national turmoils,while these even-minded men, 'through God's blessing on their moderation, have continued in their condition.' It was from this old stock that the planters of New England were chiefly derived, mingled with them some strong scions of loftier trees."
"Do we not know that there is no such thing as birth in New England? There, even if a man had ancestry, he would not dare to think himself the better for it."
"Disabuse yourself; the New-Englander is perfectly human in this respect, and only a very little wiser than the rest of the world. But he disapproves waste, even of so cheap a thing as words: he does not speak of his blood, because his blood speaks for itself.
"Rasey thinks whatever is held by others to be so much withheld from him. To make what is theirs his is all his aim. He has no conception of a creative wealth, of a diffusive prosperity. To live and make live is an aristocratic maxim. Rasey, and such as he, grudge almost the subsistence of their human tools. With the New-Englander, parsimony is not economy. The aristocratic household law is a liberal one, and it is his. He lives up to his income as conscientiously as within it. Rasey and his like think what is theirs, enjoyed by another, wasted;—they think it wasted, enjoyed by themselves. The New-Englander's rule of personal indulgence is the same with that given to the Persian prince Ghilan by his father, the wise Kyekyawus, who, warning him against squandering, adds, 'It is not squandering to spend for anything which can be of real use to thee either in this world or the next.'
"Together with the inherited habit of property, the well-descended have and transmit an inherited knowledge of the laws which govern its acquisition and its maintenance: laws older than legislation; as old as property itself; as old as man; a part of his primitive wisdom; always and everywhere the common lore of the established and endowed. If Rasey had inherited or imbibed this knowledge, perhaps he would have been more cautious. 'Beware of unjust gains,' says an Eastern sage, an ancient member of our Aryan race; 'for it is the nature of such, not only to take flight themselves, but to bear off all the rest with them.' 'Do not think,' it is set down in the book of Kabus, a compendium of Persian practical wisdom, 'Do not think even a good use of what has been ill acquired can make it thine. It will assuredly leave thee, and only thy sin will remain to thee.'
"The well-born would not dare to amass a fortune by such means as Rasey uses; amassed, they would not expose it to such hazards. 'The sameword in the Greek'—I am citing now an English worthy, the contemporary of our New-England fathers—'The same word in the Greek—ἰός—means both rust and poison; and a strong poison is made of the rust of metals; but none more venomous than the rust of the laborer's wages detained in his employer's purse: it will infect and corrode a whole estate.'
"A man's descent is written on his life yet more plainly than on his features. In New England you shall see a youth come up from the country to the metropolis of his State with all his worldly goods upon his back. Twenty years later you shall find him as much at ease in the position he has retaken rather than gained, as he was in the farm-house where he was born, or on the dusty road he trudged over to the scene of his fortunes. His house is elegant, not fine; it is furnished with paintings not bought on the advice of the picture-dealer, with a library not ordered complete from the bookseller. He is simple in his personal habits, laborious still, severe to himself, lenient and liberal to those who depend upon him, munificent in his public benefactions, in his kindly and modest patronage. If he enters public life, it is not because he wants a place there, but because there is a place that wants him. He takes it to work, and not to shine; lays it down when he can, or when he must; and takes hold ofthe nearest duty, great or small as may be, with the same zeal and conscience. Such a man is called a self-made man. He is what ages of culture and highest discipline have made him,—ages of responsibility and thought for others.
"Stealthy winning and sterile hoarding are the marks of a degraded and outlawed caste. When these tendencies show themselves in a member of an honest race, they have come down from some forgotten interloper. The Raseys are the true representatives of the transported wretches who, and whose progeny, have been a dead weight upon the States originally afflicted with them, and upon those into which they have wandered out. In their native debasement, they furnish material for usurpation to work upon and with; raised here and there into fitful eminence, they infect the class they intrude upon with meannesses not its own.
"Thomas Dudley, writing to England from New England in its earliest days, when, as he frankly owns, it offered 'little to be enjoyed and much to be endured,' is explicit as to the class of men he and his colleagues would have join them. He invites only godly men of substance. Such, he says, 'cannot dispose of themselves and their estates more to God's glory.' Those who would 'come to plant for worldly ends' he dissuades altogether; for 'the poorer sort' it was 'not time yet.' As for reckless adventurers and the destitute idle, who sought the New World for gold or an indolent subsistence, when these, 'seeing no other means than by their labor to feed themselves,' went back discouraged, or off to find some more indulgent plantation, the colony felt itself 'lightened, not weakened.'
"The chief distinctive mark of high race is the quality the Romans calledfortitudo,—a word of larger meaning than we commonly intend by ours derived from it: that strength of soul, namely, which gives way as little before work as before danger or under suffering. A Roman has defined this Roman fortitude as the quality which enables a man fearlessly to obey the highest law, whether by enduring or by achieving.
"Another mark of high race is its trust in itself. The early heads of New England did not try to secure a position to their children. They knew that blood finds its level just as certainly as water does. Degenerate sons they disowned in advance.
"Westlake, you ought to know New England better. Even if your memory did not prompt you to do it justice, there ought to be a voice to answer for it in your heart. But I find ancestry is very soon lost in the mists of antiquity down here. You come early into the advantages of a mythical background. Must I teach you your own descent?"
"I thank you. I am acquainted with it. Mygreat-grandfather was an Englishman,—a man of some consideration, as I have been informed. He went over to Massachusetts; but my grandfather left it, as soon as he was of age, for a newer State, where he could enjoy greater freedom."
"Your great-grandfather came from England to New England, as you say. He fixed himself in that part of our Massachusetts town of Ipswich which used to go by the name of 'The Hamlet.' What he was before he came out I do not know; but I suppose he brought credentials, for he married his wife from a family both old and old-fashioned. Your grandfather, Simeon Symonds Westlake, at seventeen found the Hamlet too narrow for him, and the paternal, or perhaps the maternal, rule too strict. He walked over into New Hampshire one morning, without mentioning that he was not to be back for dinner. New Hampshire did not suit him: he went to Rhode Island; then tried New York for a year or so: it did not answer. His father died, and Simeon made experiment of life at home again, but only again to give it up in disgust. Finally he emigrated to Georgia, taking with him a little money and a great deal of courage; invested both in a small farm which was soon a large plantation; added a yet larger by marriage; died, a great landholder and a great slaveholder.
"Simeon—I must call him by that name, historical for me, although I know that the first initial disappeared from his signature after his marriage—Simeon left two sons, Reginald and Edwin. He had the ambition of founding a dynasty; so left his whole estate to the elder, yet with certain restrictions and conditions, which, doubtless, he had good reasons for imposing, and which the intended heir lost no time in justifying. By some law of inheritance which statutes cannot supersede nor wills annul, this son of a father in whom no worst enemy could have detected a trace of the Puritan, was born in liberal Georgia, in the last half of the enlightened eighteenth century, as arrogant a bigot and as flaming a fanatic as if he had come over in the Mayflower. He refused his father's bequest, on the ground that God has given man dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowls of the air, and over the cattle,—but none over his fellow-man, except such as he may win through affection or earn by service. He went back to New England, where he belonged. I knew a son of his, a respectable mason. You need not blush for him, though he was your own cousin and worked with his hands. He was never conscious of any cause for shame, himself, unless it were the sin of his slaveholding grandfather; and that did not weigh on him, for he believed the entail of the curse cut off with that of the rest of the inheritance.
"If I have grieved the shade of Simeon by pronouncing that rejected name, I will soothe it again by stating that this name has not been perpetuated by his New-England descendants. That branch of his house has already a third Reginald, about a year younger than yours. He is now a Freshman in college. You may hear of him some day."
"He is in college? That is well. He has, then, recovered, or will recover, the rank of a gentleman?"
"No need of that, if he ever had a claim to it. You, who know so much about birth, should know that its rights are ineffaceable. This was well understood by those whom it concerned, in the time of our first ancestors. We have it on high heraldic authority of two hundred years ago, that a gentleman has a right so to be styled in legal proceedings, 'although he be a husbandman.' 'For, although a gentleman go to the plough and common labor for a maintenance, yet he is a gentleman.' The New-England founders had no fear of derogating in taking hold of anything that needed to be done; had no fear that their children could derogate in following any calling for which their tastes and their abilities qualified them. Carrying to it the ideas, feelings, and manners of the gentle class, they could ennoble the humblest occupation; it could not lower them.
"It is out of this respect that good blood has for itself, that the true New-Englander, whatever his station, is not ashamed of a humbler relative. You are amazed down here at the hardihood of a Northern man who speaks coolly of a cousin of his who is a blacksmith, it may be, or a small farmer; and you bless yourselves inwardly for your greater refinement. But you are English, you say, not New-English.
"When I was in Perara, dining with one of the great folks there, I happened to inquire after a cousin of his, an unlucky fellow, who, after trying his fortune in half the cities of the Union, had had the indiscretion to settle down in a very humble business, within a stone's throw of his wealthy namesake. I had known him formerly, and could not think of leaving Perara without calling on him. To my surprise, my question threw the family into visible confusion. They gave me his address, indeed, but in a way as if they excused themselves for knowing it. This may be English, but it is not Old-English.
"In the Old England which we may call ours,—for it was before, and not long before, she founded the New,—a laboring man came to the Earl of Huntingdon, Lieutenant of Leicestershire, to pray for the discharge of his only son, the staff of his age, who had been 'pressed into the wars.' TheEarl inquires the name of his petitioner. The old man hesitates, fearing to be presumptuous, for his family name is the same with that of the nobleman he addresses; but being urged, he takes courage to pronounce it. 'Cousin Hastings,' said the Earl then, 'my kinsman, your son, shall not be pressed.' This 'modesty in the poor man and courtesy in the great man' were found in that day 'conformable to the gentle blood in both.' Those who know New England know that this absence of assumption and of presumption, this modest kindliness and this dignified reserve, are characteristic there, testifying to the sources from which it derives.
"I am a cosmopolite. I could never see why I should think the better or the worse of a place, for my happening to draw my first breath there. I am of the company of the truth-seekers. A fact, though it were an ugly one, is of more worth to me than a thousand pleasantest fancies. But a fact is not the less one for being agreeable: the extension of a fine race is an agreeable fact to a naturalist.
"The earlier emigrations to New England were emphatically aristocratic emigrations. Their aim was to found precisely what you claim to show here. Their aim was to found a community of gentlemen,—a community, that is to say, religious, just, generous, courteous. They proposed equality,but equality on a high plane. Their work has been hindered by its very success. The claimants for adoption have crowded in faster than full provision could be made for them. They cannot instantly be assimilated. Their voices sometimes rise above those of the true children. But New England is there, strong and tranquil. Her heart has room for all that ask a place in it. She welcomes these orphans to it motherly, and will make them all thoroughly her own with time.
"Come to us, Westlake. I have planned out a tour for you."
And Dr. Borrow, tracing the route he had marked out for his friend, sketched the country it led through, comparing what came before us with reminiscences of other travels. No contrasts here of misery with splendor rebuke a thoughtless admiration. Nowhere the picturesqueness of ruin and squalor; everywhere the lovely, living beauty of healthfulness, dignity, and order.
With what a swell of feeling does the distant New-Englander listen to accounts of family life in the old home! How dear every detail, making that real again which had come to be like a sweet, shadowy dream!
Dr. Borrow led us through the beautiful street of a New-England village, under the Gothic arches of its religious elms. He did not fear to throwopen for us the willing door. He showed us the simple, heartsome interior, with its orderly ease, its unambitious hospitality, its refined enjoyments. Other travellers have drawn for us other pictures. They have told us of a pomp and state which have reconciled us to our rudeness. But Dr. Borrow sketched the New-England home, such as we know it by tradition, such as it still exists among those who are content to live as their fathers lived before them.
"Hold on, Borrow!" cried Westlake; "you don't suppose you are going to persuade me that there is neither poverty nor overwork in New England! I have heard, and I think I have seen, that there are hard lives lived there,—harder than those of our slaves, of my slaves, for example;—and that not by foreigners, who, you may say, are not up to the mark yet, but by Americans born and bred."
"There are very hard lives lived there. The human lot is checkered there as everywhere. Death sometimes arrests a man midway in his course and leads him off, leaving his wife and children to struggle along the road they never knew was rough before. It happened thus to your Cousin Reginald. His wife and children were thus left. You are right. His son, the boy I told you of, is as much a slave as any of yours: almost as poorly fed, and twice as hardly worked. He livesat a distance from his college, to have a cheaper room; his meals he prepares himself;—no great fatigue this, to be sure, for they are frugal, and he contents himself with two. In what ought to be his vacation, he delves away at his books harder than ever, and is besides a hewer of wood and a drawer of water,—all without wages. His only pay is his mother's pride in him, and the joy of sometimes calling back the old smiles to her face."
"How did he get to college? How does he stay there, if he has nothing?"
"He has less than nothing. To go to college, he has incurred debts,—debts for which he has pledged himself, body and soul. He was ten when his father died. His sister was sixteen. She assumed the rights of guardian over him, kept him up to his work at school, sent him to college when he was fourteen, and maintains him there.
"If his life is a hard one, hers is not easier. Every morning she walks nearly three miles to the school she teaches, gives her day there, and walks back in the late afternoon. The evening she passes in sewing, a book on the table before her. She catches a line as she draws out her thread, and fixes it in her memory with the setting of the next stitch. Besides Reginald, there are two other boys to make and mend for, not yet so mindful of the cost of clothes as he has learned to be; and she has herown education to carry on, as well as that of the little community among whom she must hold her place as one who has nothing left to learn.
"Her mother works at the same table, evenly, continuously, not to disturb or distract by haste or casual movement, and under a spell of silence, which only the child whose first subject she is is privileged to break. It is broken from time to time,—the study being suspended, though not the needlework. These intervals are filled with little, happy confidences,—hopes, and dreams, which the two cherish apart and together, and whose exchange, a hundred times renewed, never loses its power to refresh and reassure. If you were near enough to hear the emphatic word in these snatches of conversation, be sure you would hear 'Reginald.'"
"Do you know them so well?"
"Perhaps I may have spent a summer in the country town where they live. Perhaps it has been my chance some evening to walk by the little, old, black house they moved into after their father's death, from the nice, white, green-blinded one he built for them, and the astral lamp on the round table may have lighted for me the tableau I am showing you. Our heroine works and studies late, perhaps; but she must not the less be up early the next morning, to do the heavier portion of the house-work before her mother is stirring. If everyou hear a severe tone in her voice, be sure the mother has been encroaching upon the daughter's prerogative by rising first, or by putting her hand to some forbidden toil.—Well, is all this enough? Not for Anna Westlake. There is a music lesson to be given, before she sets off for her regular day's work."
"Is her name Anna?"—Westlake had once a sister Anna, whom he loved.—"Is she pretty?"
"She might have been."
"Fair hair? Blue eyes?"
"Yes; a true Westlake in features and complexion; but somewhat thin for one of your family, as you may believe."
"Pale, delicate?"
"The winds of heaven have visited her too roughly."
"Graceful?"
"I should not dare to say Yes, seeing that grace is denied to New-England women; still less do I dare to say No, remembering how I have seen her taking her small brothers to their school, on the way to her own, making believe run races with them, to get the little wilful loiterers over the ground the quicker."
"Borrow, it is a hard life for Anna Westlake,—for my cousin's child."
"You would be a severe taskmaster, if you demanded of a slave such a day's work as hers. Of a slave! He would be insane who should expect it of any woman who had not the developed brain, the steady nerves, the abounding vitality of the born aristocrat.
"But how is Reginald ever going to pay his debt to this sister? Do you think she will be satisfied with anything short of seeing him President? Who knows but she looks for more yet? The Puritan stamp is as strong on her as on her grandfather. Who knows but she looks to see him one of the lights of the world,—one of the benefactors of his race,—a discoverer in science,—a reformer? Here are responsibilities for a boy to set out under!"
"For the boys, let them rough it; I have nothing to say. But, Borrow, when you go back, tell Anna Westlake there is a home for her here, whenever she is ready to come and take it."
"I will tell her, if you will, that her cousins here wish to have news of her, and are ready to love her and hers. But propose to her a life of dependence! You must get a bolder man to do that errand."
"It should not be a life of dependence. She may surely do for her own kindred what she does for a pack of village children. She should be an elder sister to my girls. Why, Borrow, I should like to have her here. I don't put it in the formof a favor to her. Her being here would be a great pleasure and a great good to my little Fanny."
"And her own brothers?"
"She should be able to do for them all she does now."
"All she does now! Do you know what that is?"
"She should be able to do more than she does now. Reginald should live as he ought."
"He shall have three good meals a day, and cooked for him: is that it? And the two little boys?"
"They should be as much better off as he. I do not forget that I have the whole inheritance, which might have been divided."
"Yes, the means for their material bread might be supplied by another; but it is from her own soul that she feeds theirs. And then, homage, Westlake,—homage, that sweetest draught! Do you suppose it is least sweet when most deserved?"
"I have nothing, then, to offer which could tempt her?" asked Westlake, a little crestfallen.
"You have nothing to offer, the world has nothing to offer, which could tempt her to resign her little empire;—little now, but which she sees widening out in futurity through her three brothers' work and their children's."
"I knew," said Westlake, after he had sat for a few moments in dissatisfied silence, "I knew I had once an uncle who went off to parts unknown; but it never occurred to me that he might have descendants to whom I might owe duties. Have they not claims upon me?"
"No more than you on them. Their ancestor made his choice, as yours made his. They have the portion of goods that falleth to them. They are quite as content with their share as you are with yours. Moreover, each party is free to complete his inheritance without prejudice to the other. They can recover the worldly wealth they gave up, if they choose to turn their endeavors in that direction; and nothing forbids to your children the energy and self-denial which are their birthright as much as that of their cousins.
"New England never gives up her own. A son of hers may think he has separated himself forever from her and from her principles, but she reclaims him in his children or in his children's children.
"You have forgotten your tie to the old home. The conditions of your life forbid you to remember it. But your heart formerly rebelled against these conditions. It has never ceased to protest. Reginald's protests already, and will some day protest to purpose."
"You think so!" cried Westlake; then, checkinghimself, "I am glad, at least, that you think so; it proves that you like him. I was afraid"——
"You are right. I do not like him as he is, but only as he is to be. I saw what you feared I did, and marked it. I saw him knock down the boy whom he had condescended to make his playmate in default of better, for taking too much in earnest the accorded equality. But I saw, too, that his own breast was sorer with the blow than the one it hit. That is not always a cruel discipline which teaches a man early what he is capable of, whether in good or evil. When your Reginald comes to the responsible age, his conscience will hand in the account of his minority. Looking, then, on this item and on others like it, he will ask himself, 'Am I a dog that I have done these things?' and he will become a man, and a good one.
"We see farcical pretensions enough down here, where men are daily new-created from the mud. There is Milsom. He does not own even the name he wears. His father borrowed it for a time, and, having worn it out, left it with this son, decamping under shelter of a new one. The son, abandoned to his wits at twelve years old, relieved his father from the charge of inhumanity by proving them sufficient. His first exploit was the betraying of a fugitive who had shared a crust with him. This success revealed to him his proper road to fortune.He passed through the regular degrees of slave-catcher and slave-trader, to the proud altitude of slave-holder; then, moving out of the reach of old associations, proclaims himself a gentleman by descent as well as by desert. His sons take it on his word; in all simplicity believe themselves an integral part of time-honored aristocracy, and think it beneath them to do anything but mischief.
"Your claims I neither blame nor make light of. I know what their foundation is better than you do yourself. Only dismiss illusions, and accept realities, which do not yield to them even in charm to the imagination. When you know the ground under your feet, you will stand more quietly as well as more firmly. You will understand then that the silence of the New-Englander in regard to his extraction is not indifference, but security. Nowhere is the memory of ancestry so sacredly cherished as in New England, nowhere so humbly. What are we in presence of those majestic memories? We may lead our happy humdrum lives; may fulfil creditably our easy duties; we may plant and build and legislate for those who come after us; but it will still be to these great primitive figures that our descendants will look back; it will still be the debt owed there that will pledge the living generation to posterity.
"John Westlake, your first paternal ancestor inNew England had nothing in common with the Puritan leaders. You are well informed there. He came over to seek his fortune. They came to prepare the destinies of a nation. He had nothing to do with them, except in being one of those they worked for. He came when the country was ready for him. His motive was a reasonable one. I shall not impugn it; but it tells of the roturier. The founding of states is an aristocratic tendency. He was a respectable ancestor. I have more than one such of my own. I owe to them the sedate mind which permits me to give myself to my own affairs, without feeling any responsibility about those of the world. But these are not the men who ennoble their descendants in perpetuity. If your breast knows the secret suggestions of lineage, these promptings are not from John Westlake. You must go back to our heroic age to find yours."
"I should be very glad to find myself in an heroic age," said Westlake, with a slight laugh, followed by a heavy sigh. "I feel as if I might have something to do there. But this thought never yet took me back to the Puritans: the battle-field is the hero's place, as I imagine the hero. They, I have understood, were especially men of peace. Is it not one of their first titles to honor?"
"The office of the hero is to create, to organize, to endow;—works of peace which incidentally requirehim to suppress its disturbers. The heroes have always been men of peace—its winners and maintainers for those who can only enjoy it—from Hercules down, that first great overthrower of oppressions and founder of colonies.
"To the age I call on you to date from—that of the imagining and founding a new England, a renovated world—belongs the brightest and dearest of English heroic names: the name whose associations of valor and tenderness, of high-heartedness and humility are as fresh now as when the love of the noble first canonized it. It is not without good reason that the name of Philip Sidney is a household word throughout New England, held in traditional affection and reverence. He was one of the first to project a new state beyond the seas, in which the simplicity and loyalty of primitive manners were to be restored, and the true Christian Church revived. He turned from these hopes only because he felt that he owed himself to Europe as long as an effort for the vindication of human rights upon its soil was possible. It was not love of war that led him to his fate in the Netherlands. He was not to be misled by false glory. In his Defence of Poesy he makes it a reproach to History, that 'the name of rebel Cæsar, after a thousand six hundred years, still stands in highest honor.' The peace-loving Burleigh, when the expedition in whichSidney fell was setting forth, wrote,—deprecating the reproach of lukewarmness,—that he 'should hold himself a man accursed, if he did not work for it with all the powers of his heart, seeing that its ends were the glory of God and the preservation of England in perpetual tranquillity.'
"'Nec gladio nec arcu' was the motto of Thomas Dudley, Harry's first ancestor in this country. He was a man of peace. But he offered his life to the same cause for which Philip Sidney laid down his,—drawing the sword for it in France, as Sidney had done ten years before in Flanders. He was reserved to aid in carrying out the other more effectual work which Sidney had designed, but from which his early death withdrew him.
"I am not telling you of Harry's ancestor for Harry's sake. You have your own part in all this, Westlake. When Reginald and Harry met and loved each other, blood spoke to blood.
"How many descendants do you suppose there are now from Governor Thomas Dudley's forty grandchildren? Hardly a family of long standing in New England but counts him among its ancestors; hardly a State of our Union into which some of that choice blood has not been carried, with other as precious.
"New England is not limited to that little northeastern corner. Our older country, 'that sceptredisle, that earth of majesty,' did not send forth the happiest of its 'happy breed of men' to found a world no wider than its own: wherever the descendants of those great pioneers set up their home, they plant a new New England.
"Do you know how their regenerate Transatlantic country presented itself to its early projectors? The most sanguine of us do not paint its future more brightly now than it was imaged in 1583.
"A Hungarian poet, on a visit to England, enjoyed the intimacy of Hakluyt, and, through him introduced to the society of such men as Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Philip Sidney, was initiated into the hopes and projects of the nobler England of the day. He has celebrated these in a poem addressed to Sir Humphrey Gilbert. The return of the Golden Age promised in ancient prophecy is, he believes, impossible in Europe, sunk below the iron one. He sees it, in vision, revive upon the soil of the New World, under the auspices of men who, true colonizers, renounce home and country, and dare the vast, vague dangers of sea and wilderness, not for gain or for glory, but 'for the peace and welfare of mankind.'
"'Oh, were it mine to join the chosen band,Predestined planters of the promised land,My happy part for after-time to traceThe earliest annals of a new-born race!There Earth, with Man at amity once more,To willing toil shall yield her willing store.There Law with Equity shall know no strife;Justice and Mercy no divided life.Not there to birth shall merit bend; not thereRiches o'ermaster freedom. Tyrant careShall lay no burden on man's opening years,Nor bow his whitening head with timeless fears;But—every season in its order blest—Youth shall enjoy its hope, and age its rest!'
"'Oh, were it mine to join the chosen band,Predestined planters of the promised land,My happy part for after-time to traceThe earliest annals of a new-born race!There Earth, with Man at amity once more,To willing toil shall yield her willing store.There Law with Equity shall know no strife;Justice and Mercy no divided life.Not there to birth shall merit bend; not thereRiches o'ermaster freedom. Tyrant careShall lay no burden on man's opening years,Nor bow his whitening head with timeless fears;But—every season in its order blest—Youth shall enjoy its hope, and age its rest!'
"Our poet was in earnest. He did not write the annals of the country that his hero did not found; but he shared his grave under the waves of the Atlantic. Their hope outlived them. Visions like theirs are not for you and me, Westlake. They are for young men,—for the men who never grow old. We may admit that such have their place in the world. Man must strive for something greatly beyond what he can attain, to effect anything. He cannot strive for what he has not faith in. Those men who live in aspirations that transcend this sphere believe that all human hearts can be tuned to the same pitch with theirs. We know better, but let us not for that contemn their efforts. I am no visionary. I have no inward evidence of things not seen; but I am capable of believing what is proved. I believe in work,—that none is lost, but that, whether for good or ill, every exertion of power and patience tells. I believe in race, and I believe in progress for a race with which belief inprogress is a tradition, and which inherits, besides, the strength, the courage, and the persistence which make faith prophetic.
"Your institutions, Westlake, are to yield the ground to other forms. They are contrary to the inborn principles of the race that leads on this continent. We at the North, who tolerate them, tolerate them because we know they are ephemeral. It is a consciousness of their transitoriness that enables you yourselves to put up with them."
"Not so fast! If they are not rooted, they are taking root. They have a stronger hold with every year. If any of us felt in the way you suppose, we should have to keep our thoughts to ourselves."
"So you all keep your thoughts to yourselves for fear of each other. What a lightening of hearts, when you once come to an understanding! I wish it soon for your own sakes; but a few years in the life of a people are of small account. I am willing to wait for the fulness of time. The end is sure."
"It all looks very simple to you, I dare say."
"I do not undervalue your difficulties. The greatest is this miserable population that has crept over your borders from the older Slave States: progeny of outcasts and of reckless adventurers, they never had a country and have never found one. Without aims or hopes, they ask of theirworthless life only its own continuance. Ignorant that they can never know anything worse than to remain what they are, dreading change more than those who may have something to lose by it, they uphold the system that dooms them to immobility, shameful Atlantes of the dismal structure."
"You will not wonder that we are ready to renounce the theories of equality put forth by the men you would have us look to as founders. We make laws to keep our black servants from getting instruction. Do you think we could legislate the class you speak of into receiving it?"
"Westlake, they are here. They are among you, and will be of you, or you of them."
"We must take our precautions. We intend to do so. The dividing line must be more strongly marked. They must have their level prescribed to them, and be held to it."
"The more you confirm their degradation, the more you prepare your own. The vile and abject, for being helpless, are not harmless. Unapt for honest service, but ready tools of evil, they corrupt the class whose parasites they are, tempting the strong and generous to tyranny and scorn."
"You know them!"
"They are known of old. The world has never wanted such.
'The wretches will not be dragged out to sunlight.They man their very dungeons for their masters,Lest godlike Liberty, the common foe,Should enter in, and they be judged hereafterAccomplices of freedom!'
'The wretches will not be dragged out to sunlight.They man their very dungeons for their masters,Lest godlike Liberty, the common foe,Should enter in, and they be judged hereafterAccomplices of freedom!'
"But ten righteous men are enough to redeem a state. No State of ours but has men enough, greatly more than enough, to save and to exalt it, whose descent pledges them to integrity and entitles them to authority. Only let them know themselves, and stand by themselves and by each other.
'Nought shall make us rue,If England to itself do rest but true.'
'Nought shall make us rue,If England to itself do rest but true.'
And it will. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation, but their virtues are a perpetual inheritance.
"I should not talk as I have been talking out of the family."—The Doctor fell into his familiar tone.—"I take in Colvil, because I know, if we had time to trace it up, we should not go back far without coming upon common ancestors. Our pedigrees all run one into another. When I see a New-England man, I almost take for granted a cousin. I found one out not many days' journey from here, by opening the old family Bible, which made an important part of the furniture of his log-house, and running over the names of his grandmothers. I am so well informed in regard to your great-grandfather, because his story is a part of my ownfamily history. It is through your mother that you are related to Harry. Perhaps, if she had lived long enough for you to remember her, you would not have forgotten New England."
"My mother was an orphan young, and had neither brother nor sister. I have never seen any member of her family. They tell me that Reginald looks like her."
"Where is Reginald? Why did he not come with you?"
"I asked him to come. He said that Dudley and he had agreed on a time of meeting. He is not very communicative with me; but they seem to understand each other."
The parting of the classmates was very kindly. Westlake led his horse as far as the end of our road,—the Doctor, Harry, and I accompanying. When he had mounted, he still delayed. I thought that he looked worn and weary. With his old friend, he had been his old, easy self; but now that his face was turned towards home, it seemed that he felt its vexations and cares confronting him again. The Doctor probably does not know as much of Westlake's position as is known in the neighborhood; he saw in this sadness only that of the separation from himself, and was more gratified than pained by it.
"We shall not see each other again, Borrow," said Westlake, stretching down his hand for a last clasp of his friend's.
"Yes, we shall. Why not, if we both wish it? Say good-bye for me to the little Fanny," the Doctor added, gayly.
Westlake brightened with the one pleasant thought connected with his home, and, under its influence, set forward.
The Doctor stood looking after him with a friendly, contented air. He was pleased with himself for having spoken his mind out, and with Westlake for having heard it. But when he turned and met Harry's happy, affectionate look, his face clouded. He passed us and walked on fast. When we came into the house, he was seated in the arm-chair, looking straight before him. Harry went and stood beside him, waiting for him to give sign that all was right between them again by opening a new conversation.
The Doctor did not hold out long. "I have told, or as good as told, my old friend," he began, with rather a sour smile, "that he is suffering himself to be infected by the meannesses of those below him; and now I am almost ready to tell myself that my grave years are giving into the fanaticisms of boyhood. But I stand where I did, Harry. I stand precisely where I did. I have always toldyou that I hate slavery as much as you do. The only difference between us is, that I am not for justice though the heavens fall."
"Justice, and the heavens willnotfall," Harry answered, firmly, but with a tender deference in look and tone.
"And you make too much account of a name," the Doctor went on. "What does it signify that men are called slaves and slaveholders, if, in their mutual relations, they observe the laws of justice and kindness? You will not deny that this is possible? I object to slavery, as it exists, because it too often places almost absolute power in unqualified hands. But you are too sweeping. Good men are good masters. I should count Harvey among such. Colvil has given you a portrait you will accept in Shaler, who was as good a man when he was a slaveholder as he is now. Cicero, a slaveholder,—and Roman slaveholders have not the best repute,—writing upon justice, does not put the slave beyond its pale; he recognizes his humanity and its rights. Will you suppose that we have not American slaveholders as Christian as Cicero?"
"Cicero has said that to see a wrong done without protesting is to commit one."
"We will not dispute to-night, Harry. I am not altogether insensible to the interests of the world, but I have some regard for yours. PerhapsI should take less thought for them, if there were hope that you would take any. At any rate, we will not dispute to-night."
Harry, at least, was in no mood for disputing. He was very happy. He had a gayety of manner I had hardly seen in him. The Doctor soon fell into tune with it, and reconciled himself to the pleasure he had caused.
Wednesday, April 17, 1844.
The Friday came. We had made our last evening a long one, but we were up early on the last morning. Harry and I had our walk together. Coming back, we found the Doctor under Keith's Pine, busy making up his dried grasses and flowers into little compact packages. We sat down there with him as usual. I read aloud. My reading gave us matter of discussion on the way home.
After breakfast, Hans, Karl, and Fritz came up to the house. Good Friday we always keep alone with our own family; but these three are of it, though they are lodged under a different roof. I read part of a sermon of South's:—"For the transgression of my people was he stricken."
How real seemed to me, that morning, the sacred story! I had hitherto contemplated the Christ in his divine being, looking up to him from a reverent distance. Now he seemed suddenly brought near to me in his human nature. I felt that our earth had, indeed, once owned him. And then how vivid the sense of loss and waste,—a beautiful and beneficent life cut short by violence! "Dying, not like a lamp that for want of oil can burn no longer, but like a torch in its full flame blown out by the breath of a north wind!"
Everything that I read with Harry, or that I talk over with him, has new meaning for me, or a new force.
Why are we so careful to avoid pain? If it was a necessary part of the highest mortal experience, how can we ask that it may be left out from ours? And yet, on every new occasion, we strive to put from us the offered cross. Even while we say, "Thy will be done!" an inward hope entreats that will to be merciful. Such remonstrances with myself rose in me as I read. They did not prevent me from feeling a thrill of dread as this warning passed over my lips:—"Who shall say how soon God may draw us from our easy speculations and theories of suffering, to the practical experience of it? Who can tell how soon we may be called to the fiery trial?" I turned involuntarily to Harry. He, too, had heard a summons in these words. I read in his eyes the answer that came from his steady breast,—"My Father, I am here!" I felt my spirit lifted with the closing words,—"If we suffer with him, we shall also reign with him"; but there was no change in Harry's clear, prepared look. I have never known a faith so implicit as his. He does not ask after threats or promises; he only listens for commands.
When the services were over, Hans came forward to say good-bye to the Doctor and Harry. Hetook a hand of each, and stood looking from one to the other.
"We cannot spare you, Harry Dudley. We shall miss you, Doctor. Harry, when you are ready to set up your farm, come and take a look round you here again. We are good people, and love you. There will be land near in the market before long. Sooner should you have it than old Rasey. Think of it; we can talk things over, evenings."
"You shall have your turn," he said to his boys, who were waiting, one on either side of him. "I am an old man, and leave-taking comes hard. Youth has many chances more."
He gave his benediction, repeated a little rhyming German couplet,—a charm, perhaps, for a good journey,—and then turned away sturdily, went slowly out of the door and down the steps, leaving Karl and Fritz to say their words of farewell. Karl spoke for both. What Fritz had in his heart to say he could not utter, for the tears would have come with it.
At a quarter before twelve Harry brought down the russet knapsack,—brought down the little flower-press,—brought down the long umbrella.
He transferred from the over-full knapsack to his own some packages of flowers. The flower-press would not enter either knapsack. The Doctor hadit strapped on outside his. I watched these little arrangements, glad of the time they took. Harry helped the Doctor on with his pack. I would have done the same for Harry, but he was too quick for me. I adjusted the strap from which the green tin case hung, that I might do something for him.
Doctor Borrow took a serious leave of my mother,—for this, at least, was a final one. But Harry would not have it so. The tears were gathering in her eyes. "You will see us again," he said, confidently.
The Doctor shook his head. "You have made us too happy here for us not to wish that it might be so."
But my mother accepted Harry's assurance.
They looked round for Tabitha. She appeared from my mother's room, the door of which had been a little open. Both thanked her cordially for her kind cares. She gave them her good wishes, affectionately and solemnly, and disappeared again.
"I shall not bid you good-bye," said the Doctor, yet taking my hand.
"Only till the nineteenth," said Harry, clasping it as soon as the Doctor relinquished it. "Till the eighteenth," I mean; "till the eighteenth," he repeated, urgently.
"Till the eighteenth," I answered.
The Doctor mounted the blue spectacles. Thiswas the last act of preparation. The minute-hand was close upon the appointed moment.
At the first stroke of twelve, they were on their way. I followed, slowly, as if the reluctance of my steps could hold back theirs. The gate closed behind them. The Doctor took at once his travelling gait and trudged straight on; but Harry turned and gave a glance to the house, to the barn, to the little patch of flowers,—to all the objects with which the week had made him familiar. Then his look fell upon me, who was waiting for it. He searched my face intently for an instant, and then, with a smile which made light of all but happy presentiments, waved me adieu, and hastened on to overtake the Doctor.
I was glad it was not a working-day,—glad that I could go in and sit down by my mother, to talk over with her, or, silent, to think over with her, the scenes which had animated our little room, and which were still to animate it. Harry's parting look stayed with me. I felt all my gain, and had no more sense of loss. Can we ever really lose what we have ever really possessed?
Evening.
I have been over to Blanty's. I should have gone yesterday, but it rained heavily from earlymorning until after dark. Such days I consider yours. I had been anxious about Blanty since Sunday, and not altogether without reason. He has had a threatening of fever. I hope it will prove a false alarm. I found him sitting at his door, already better,—but still a good deal cast down, for he was never ill in his life before. He had been wishing for me, and would have sent to me, if I had not gone. He could hardly let me come away, but pressed me to stay one hour longer, one half hour, one quarter. But I had some things to attend to at home, and, as he did not really need me, I bade him good-bye resolutely, promising to go to him again next Monday. I cannot well go sooner.
If I had stayed, I should have missed a visit from Frederic Harvey. When I came within sight of our gate, on the way back, a horseman was waiting at it, looking up the road, as if watching for me. He darted forward, on my appearance,—stopped short, when close beside me,—dismounted, and greeted me with a warmth which I blamed myself for finding it hard to return. He did not blame me, apparently. Perhaps he ascribes the want he may feel in my manner to New-England reserve; or perhaps he feels no want. He is so assured of the value of his regard, that he takes full reciprocity for granted. The docile horse, at a sign, turned andwalked along beside us to the gate, followed us along the path to the house, and took his quiet stand before the door when we went in.
Frederic Harvey, having paid his respects to my mother, seated himself in the great arm-chair, which now seems to be always claiming the Doctor, and which this new, slender occupant filled very inadequately.
"I stayed in New York three weeks too long," he exclaimed, after looking about him a little—for traces of Harry, it seemed. "Time goes so fast there! But I thought, from one of my sister's letters, that Dudley was to go back to World's End after he left you. Is he changed? Oh, but you cannot tell. You never knew him till now. I need not have asked, at any rate. He is not one to change. While I knew him, he was only more himself with every year."
"It is two years since you met, is it not?"
"Yes; but what are two years to men who were children together? We shall take things up just where we laid them down. Ours is the older friendship. I shall always have the advantage of you there. But you and he must have got along very well together. Your notions agree with his better than mine do. It does not matter. Friendship goes by fate, I believe. He may hold what opinions he likes, for me; and so may you."
"I believe that on some important subjects my opinions differ very much from yours."—I am determined to stand square with Frederic Harvey.
"In regard to our institutions, you mean? I know, that, spoken or unspoken, hatred of them is carried in the heart of every New-Englander. It is sometimes suppressed through politeness or from interest, but I never saw a Northerner who was good for anything, in whom it did not break out on the first provocation. I like as well to have it fairly understood in the outset. I have had a letter from Harry in answer to one of mine. It is explicit on this point."
I had no doubt it was very explicit. Frederic's eye meeting mine, he caught my thought, and we had a good laugh together, which made us better friends.
"The Northerners are brought up in their set of prejudices, as we in ours. I can judge of the force of theirs by that of my own. I only wish there was the same unanimity among us. We are a house divided against itself."
And Frederic's face darkened,—perhaps with the recollection of the rupture of old ties in Shaler's case,—or rather, as it seemed, with the rankling of some later, nearer pain. He turned quickly away from the intrusive thought, whatever it was. He does not like the unpleasant side of things.
"At any rate, because Harry Dudley and I are to be adverse, it does not follow that we are to be estranged. I cannot forget our school-days,—our walks on the boulevards and the quays,—our rides in the Bois,—our journeys together, when we were like brothers. I was never so happy as in those days, when I had not a care or a duty in the world."
He had the air, with his twenty-one years, of a weary man-of-the-world. There was no affectation in it. Unless report have done him injustice, the last two years have put a gulf between him and that time.
I reminded him of the conversation between him and his sister, in which they spoke of Harry Dudley before I knew who Harry Dudley was. He remembered it, and returned very readily to the subject of it. He related many incidents of the tour in Brittany, and spoke warmly of the pleasure of travelling with a companion who is alive to everything of interest in every sort. He said his travels in Germany, and even in Italy, had hardly left with him so lively and enduring impressions as this little journey into Brittany; for there he had gone to the heart of things.
"I must see him again. We must meet once more as we used to meet. We must have one good clasp of the hand; we must, at least, say a kind good-bye to the old friendship. If, hereafter,we find ourselves opposed in public life, I shall deal him the worst I can, but with openness and loyalty like his own, and doing him more justice in my heart, perhaps, than he will do me."
Frederic Harvey inquired anxiously where Harry was to be found, and I was obliged to tell him of our intended meeting. I was afraid he would propose to go with me. He was on the point of doing so, but refrained, seeing that I was not expecting such a suggestion.
We could easily have arranged to meet at Quickster, which is about the same distance from him that it is from me. But a ride of twenty miles, most of them slow ones, beside a man with whom you are not in full sympathy, is a trial. I did not feel called upon to undergo it for him. When he took leave of me, he again seemed about to propose something, and I felt it was this plan which was so natural; but he was again withheld, by pride or by delicacy. Either feeling I could sympathize with, and I was more touched by this reserve than by all his friendly advances; but I hardened my heart. He mounted his horse. I saw him go slowly down the path to the road, stoop from the saddle to open the gate,—pass out. And then I was seized with sudden compunction. I heard the slow step of his horse, receding as if reluctantly, and ready to be checked at a hint. I ran to the gate.Frederic was just turning away, as if he had been looking back, expecting to see me; but in the same instant he gave an intimation to his horse, and was out of the reach of my repentance.
"I liked him." With Harry these words mean a great deal. Could Harry ever have liked him, if he had not been worthy to be liked? How sad his look was, when he spoke of his happy boyish days!—happier than these only because they were blameless. Was not this regret itself an earnest of the power of return? He had good blood in him. He is Charles Shaler's cousin. He has a weak, shallow mother,—a father whose good qualities and whose faults are overlaid with the same worldly varnish impartially. He feels the need of other influences, and clings to Harry. He comes to me instinctively seeking something he has not in his home. My mother has always judged him more kindly than I have. If he had been a poor outcast child, I should have felt his coming to me so frankly and so persistently to be a sign I was to do something for him. Is there a greater need than that of sympathy and honest counsel? I have been selfish, but this pain is punishment enough. I feel a remorse surely out of proportion to my sin. I do not prevent his going to meet Harry by not asking him to go with me. He is not one to give up his wish; and in this case there is no reason that he should.He will arrive; I am sure of it. And I will atone, at least in part. I will ask him to join me on the ride home.
Old Jasper has told me stories of Frederic Harvey's good-heartedness in childhood: tells them to me, indeed, every time he sees me. I remember one in particular, of the pretty little boy in his foreign dress, and speaking his foreign language, carrying his own breakfast one morning to the cabin where the old man lay sick; and another of his taking away part of her load from a feeble woman; and another of his falling on a driver and wresting from him the whip with which he was lashing a fainting boy. But Jasper has only these early stories to tell of him; and what different ones are current now!
In dear old New England the child is father of the man. There the lovely infancy is the sure promise of the noble maturity. But where justice is illegal! where mercy is a criminal indulgence! where youth is disciplined to selfishness, and the man's first duty is to deny himself his virtues! If the nephew of Augustus had lived, would he indeed have been Marcellus?Heu pietas! Heu prisca fides!—these might have been mourned, though Octavia had not wept her son.
Thursday, April 18, 1844.
It is thirty-five miles to Omocqua by the common road through Metapora and Tenpinville; but I shall save myself five, going across fields and through wood-paths, and coming out at Quickster. You left the Omocqua road there, and took that to Quarleston. I shall stop half an hour at Quickster to rest my horse and have a little talk with Barton. I mean to allow myself ample time for the journey, that Brownie may take it easily and yet bring me to Omocqua in season for a stroll about the neighborhood with the Doctor and Harry before nightfall. Some miles of my way are difficult with tree-stumps and brush; a part of it is sandy; the last third is hilly. I have never been farther on that road than Ossian, about three miles beyond Quickster; but the country between Ossian and Omocqua is, I know, very much like that between Quarleston and Cyclops, which you found so beautiful and so tiresome.
I do not mean that my parting with Harry shall be a sad one. After that day at Omocqua, I shall not meet his smile,—his hand will not clasp mine again; but he will leave with me something of himself which will not go from me. His courage,the energy of his straightforward will, shall still nerve and brace me, though his cordial voice may never again convey their influence to my heart. Wherever he is, I shall know we are thinking, feeling together, and working together; for I shall surely do what he asks of me: that he thinks it worth doing is enough.
And Dr. Borrow does not leave me what he found me. It was with a continual surprise that I learned how much there is of interest and variety in our uniform neighborhood for a man who knows the meaning of what he sees. How many things are full of suggestion now that were mute before! He has given me glimpses of undreamed-of pleasures. A practical man, following him in his walks, and gathering up the hints he lets fall, might turn them to great real use.
What a part the Doctor and such as he, disciples and interpreters of Nature, would have in the world, how warmly they would be welcomed everywhere, if these were only times in which men could live as they were meant to live, happy and diligent, cherishing Earth and adorning her, receiving her daily needful gifts, and from time to time coming upon precious ones, which she, fond and wise mother, has kept back for the surprise of some hour of minuter search or bolder divination!
But now, how can we be at ease to enjoy ourown lot, however pleasantly it may have been cast for us, or to occupy ourselves with material cares or works, even the most worthy and the most rational?
We are taught to pray, "Thy kingdom come," before we ask for our daily bread.
To pray for what we do not at the same time strive for, is it not an impiety?
Dr. Borrow says that Harry is out of place in our time. I should rather say that it is he himself who is here a century, or perhaps only a half-century, too soon. Our first need now is of men clear-sighted to moral truths, and intrepid to announce and maintain them.
It was through the consciousness, not yet lost, of eternal principles, that primitive poetry made Themis the mother of the gracious Hours,—those beneficent guardians, bringers of good gifts, promoters and rewarders of man's happy labor. When Justice returns to make her reign on earth, with her come back her lovely daughters, and all the beautiful attendant train.
When that time arrives, the Doctor will have found his place, and Harry will not have lost his.
Perhaps I shall not come back until Saturday. According to their plan, Dr. Borrow and Harry are to leave Omocqua again to-morrow afternoon; but I shall try to persuade them to remain until thenext morning. While they stay, I shall stay. When they go, Brownie and I take our homeward road. In any case, I will write to you Friday night, and send off my budget on Saturday without fail.
To-day has not given me anything to tell of it yet, except that it has opened as it should, fresh and cloudless. In five hours I shall be on the road.
My paper is blistered and the writing blurred with wet drops. It is only that some freshly gathered flowers on my table have let fall their dew upon the page. You, with the trace of mysticism that lurks in your man of the world's heart, would be drawing unfavorable auguries. I am too happy to accept any to-day. If fancy will sport with this accident, let it feign that these morning tears are of sympathy, but not of compassion; that they fall, not to dim my hopes, but to hallow them.
Evening.
"In five hours I shall be on the road." So I wrote at six o'clock. I wrote too confidently.
At eleven I had mounted my horse, had sent my last good-bye through the open window, and had caught the last soft answer from within. I lingeredyet an instant, held by those links of tenderness and solicitude that bind to home and make the moment of parting for any unusual absence, even though a pleasant and desired one, a moment of effort. A heavy, dragging step, which I almost knew before I saw the lounging figure of Phil Phinn, warned me of a different delay. I watched his slow approach with a resignation which had still a little hope in it; but when he at last stood beside me and began his ingratiating preamble, I felt my sentence confirmed. His woe-begone face, his quivering voice, announced the suppliant before he reached the recital of his wrongs; while the utter self-abandonment of his attitude conveyed renunciation of all cares and responsibilities in favor of his elected patron. I will not give you the details of the difficulty of to-day,—an absurd and paltry one, yet capable of serious consequences to him. I obeyed instinctively the old-fashioned New-England principle I was brought up in, which requires us to postpone the desire of the moment to its demands. Sadly I led my horse to the stable, took off the saddle and put him up. "I cannot be back until two," I thought, "perhaps not before three. I shall lose our walk and our sunset; but even if it is as late as four, I will still go." I ran into the house to say a word of explanation to my mother; but she had heard and understood. She gave me a look of sympathy, and I did not wait for more.
I set out resolutely in a direction opposite to that in which my own road lay. Phil Phinn followed, already raised to complacency, though not to energy. I outwalked him continually, and was obliged to stop and wait for him to come up. He plainly thought my haste unseasonable, and did not disguise that he was incommoded by the sun and the mud. It was a tedious way, a long five miles for him and for me.
We arrived at last at the house of his adversary, who, having, besides the advantage of being in a superior position, also that of justice on his side, could the more easily give way. I should soon have come to an understanding with him, if my client, while leaving me the whole responsibility of his case, had not found himself unable to resign its management: he must lend me the aid of his argumentative and persuasive gifts. After some hours of wrangling and pleading, the matter was accommodated, and Phil Phinn, without a care in the world, or the apprehension of ever having one again, sauntered away toward his home. I set off for mine, already doubtful of myself, remembering that I was not the only disappointed one.
When I reached home, it was half-past six o'clock. I felt strongly impelled to go, even then. My mother did not offer any objection, but her look showed so plainly the anxiety the thought of anight-ride caused her, that I gave it up without a word. I could not, indeed, have arrived at Omocqua before midnight, and Harry would long have done expecting me.