Morton had been for some time of opinion that he had better leave New Baden; yet still the philosophic youth staid on,—a week longer,—a fortnight longer,—and still he lingered. It would be too much to say that he was in love with his handsome, dare-devil cousin; but his mind was greatly troubled in regard to her—shaken and tossed with a variety of conflicting emotions. The multiplied and constantly changing phases of her character, its strong but utterly ungoverned resources, its frankness, enthusiasm, detestation of all deceit or pretension, and, in spite of her wildness, a deep vein of womanly tenderness which now and then betrayed itself, all conspired to keep his interest somewhat painfully excited.
One evening he left the crowded piazza of the hotel, and, intending to flirt with solitude and a cigar, walked towards a rustic arbor, overgrown with a wild grape vine, and standing among a cluster of young elms at the foot of the garden. As he drew near, he saw the gleam of ladies' dresses, and found the seats already occupied by Miss Fanny Euston and two companions. Morton knew them well, and joined the party. As neither the affected graces of the one companion nor the voluble emptiness of the other had much interest in his eyes, he directed his conversation chiefly to Fanny. In a few minutes the two girls exchanged glances, rose, and alleging some pretended engagement, returned to the hotel, bent on making this casual interview assume the air of a flirtation.
Morton and his companion sat for a moment in silence.
"We are cousins—are we not?" said the former, at length.
"At least they would call us so in the Highlands."
"Then give me a cousin's privilege, and allow me to be personal. Are you not out of spirits to-night?"
"Why do you think me so?"
"From your look and manner."
"Are you not tired to death of New Baden?"
"Not yet."
"I am. What is it all worth?—weary, and vapid, and flat, and stale, and unprofitable! I have had enough of it."
"Then why not change it?"
"To find the same thing in a new shape!"
"Pardon me if I call that a freak of the moment. You are the gayest of the gay."
"No, I am not."
"You are a belle here; a centre light. The moths flutter about you, though you do, now and then, singe their wings. You frighten them, and they repay you with fine speeches."
"I am weary of them. For Heaven's sake, abuse me a little. I know you have it often in your heart."
"Abuse is sometimes nothing but flattery in disguise."
"Why do you smile? That smile was at my expense."
"Why should you imagine so?"
"I insist on your telling me its meaning."
"I was only thinking that when tribute in an old shape has become wearisome, one may like to have it paid in a new one."
"That certainly is not flattery. Do you know I am beginning to be afraid of you?"
"I could not have thought you afraid of any one."
"Yes, I am afraid of you."
"Why?"
"Because you are always observing me. Because you penetrate my thoughts and understand me thoroughly."
"I am less deep than you suppose."
"At least you know all my faults. You are always, in a quiet way, making gibes and sarcasms at my expense, and touching upon my weakest points."
"Does it make you angry?"
"No; I rather like it; but I wish to repay you. I wish to find your weaknesses, but cannot. Have you any?"
"Yes, an abundance."
"And will you tell me what they are?"
"What, that you may use them against me! The moment you know them, you will attack me without mercy; and if you see me wince, it is all over with me."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that you cease to like one as soon as you find that you can gain the least advantage over him. If I could really make you a little afraid of me, you would like me all the better for it. No, I will show you none of my weaknesses; and perhaps, if I did, you would not find them of a kind that you could use against me. I can strike at you, but you cannot hurt me. I am armed in proof. I defy you."
In saying this, at least, Morton showed some knowledge of his companion's character. To defy her successfully was a great step towards gaining her good graces; for with all her wildness she was very sensitive to the good or ill opinion of those who could compel her to respect them. She became very anxious to know what Morton thought of her.
"You say that you do not understand me thoroughly. What is there in me that you do not understand?"
"You may say that I do not understand you at all."
"That is mere evasion."
"Who can understand the language of Babel?"
"Do you mean that I speak the language of Babel?"
"Who can understand chaos?"
"And am I chaos? You are beginning your peculiar style of compliment again."
"Do not be displeased at it. All the power and beauty of the universe rose out of chaos."
"Now you are flattering in earnest."
"You are difficult to satisfy. What may I call you? A wild Arab racer without a rider?"
"That will answer better."
"Or a rocket without a stick?"
"I have seen rockets; but I do not know what the stick is. What is it? What is it for?"
"To give balance and aim to the rocket—make it, as the transcendentalists say, mount skyward, and end in stars and 'golden rain.'"
"Very fine! And how if it has no stick?"
"Then it sparkles, and blazes, and hisses on the ground; flies up and down, this way and that, plays the deuse with every thing and every body, and at last blows itself up to no purpose."
"Ah, I see that the stick is very necessary. I will try to get one."
"You speak in a bantering tone," said Morton, "but you are in earnest."
"I am in earnest!" exclaimed Fanny Euston, with a sudden change of voice and manner. "Every word that you have spoken is true. I am driven hither and thither by feelings and impulses,—some bad, some good,—chasing every new fancy like so many butterflies or will-o'-the-wisps,—without thinking of results—restless—dissatisfied—finding no life but in the excitement of the moment. Sometimes I have hints of better things. Glimpses of light break in upon me; but they come, and they go again. I have no rule of life, no guiding star."
Morton looked at his companion not without a certain sense of victory. He saw that he had gained, for the moment at least, an influence over her, and roused her to the expression of feelings to which, perhaps, she had never given utterance before. Yet his own mind was any thing but tranquil. Something more than admiration was stirring within him. He felt impelled to explore farther the proud spirit which had already yielded up to him some of its secrets. But he felt that, with her eyes upon him, he could not speak without committing himself farther than he was prepared to do. In this dilemma he determined to retreat—a resolution for which he was entitled to no little credit, if its merit is to be measured by the effort it cost him. He rose from his seat.
"Find your star, Fanny, and you may challenge the world. But I see people coming down the garden towards us. We shall be invaded if we stay here. Let us walk back towards the house."
When he found himself alone again, he paced his room in no very enviable frame of mind.
"What devil impelled me to speak as I did? It was no part of mine to be telling her of her faults. Am I turning philanthropist and busybody? If I wished to gain her heart, I suspect I have been taking the right course. What with any other lady would have been intolerable presumption and arrogance, is the most effectual way to win her esteem. And why should I not wish to gain her heart? There is good there in abundance, if one could but depend on it. No; I am not blinded yet. This last outburst was a momentary impulse, like all the rest; and to-morrow she will be reckless as ever. She delights in lawlessness, and rejoices in the zest of breaking established bounds. Her wayward will is like a cataract, and may carry her, God knows whither. No; I will not walk in this path; I will not try to marry her. Her heart is untouched—that is clear as the day. I wish she could say as much of mine. I will leave this place to-morrow, cost what it will."
A letter from Boston gave him a pretext; and bidding farewell to his cousin and her mother, he took the early train homewards. The newsboy brought him a paper, and his eyes rested on the columns; but his thoughts centred on Fanny Euston and his last evening's conversation with her at the foot of the garden.
All day the train whirled along, and Morton's troubled thoughts found no rest.
"Matherton!" cried the conductor, opening the door of the car, as the engine stopped in a large station house, at five o'clock in the afternoon. Several passengers got out; two or three came in; the bell rang, and with puffing and clanking, the train was on its way again. A newsboy passed down the car with a bundle of newspapers and twopenny novels. Morton bought one of the latter as an anodyne; but even "Orlando Melville, or the Victim of the Press Gang," failed to produce the desired soporific effect, and his thoughts soon recurred to their former channel. Suddenly a violent concussion, a crashing, thumping, and grating sound, the outcries of a hundred passengers,—the women screaming, and some of the men not silent,—with a furious rocking and tossing of the car, ejected every thought but one of his personal safety. All sprang to their feet, he among the rest. The first distinct impression which his mind received was that of the man in front of him making a flying leap out of the open window of the car, carrying the sash with him—a dexterous piece of gymnastics, only to be accounted for by the fact that the performer was a distinguished artist of the Grand National Olympic Circus. His boots twinkled at the window, and he was gone, alighting on his feet like a cat, but Morton was too much frightened to laugh. In a few moments the car came to a rest, without being overturned, though the front was partly broken in, and the whole swung off the rails to an angle of forty-five degrees. On looking out at the window, the first object that met Morton's eye was the baggage car, thrown on its side, with the door uppermost. As he looked, the door opened, and a head emerged—like a triton from the deep, or Banquo's ghost from a trap door—white with wrath and fright, and swearing with wonderful volubility. Then appeared another, rising by the side of the first, equally pallid, but much less profane. The heads belonged to two men, who had been seated in the compartment of the baggage car allotted to the mails, and when it was flung off the track, had been rattled together like dice in a box, suffering various bruises, but no serious harm. The breaking of the defective cast iron axle of the tender had caused the whole disaster, which would doubtless have produced fatal consequences had not the train been moving at a very slow rate. As it happened, a few contusions were its worst results, and one of the morning papers,
"for profoundAnd solid lying much renowned,"
"for profoundAnd solid lying much renowned,"
solemnly averred that none but Providence was responsible for it.
There was abundant noise and vociferation. The passengers left the train, some lending their bungling aid to repair the mischief, while others withdrew to an inn which chanced to be in the neighborhood. After looking for a time at the downfallen tender and the uprooted rails, Morton, from some idle impulse, entered the car which he had lately left. It was empty; and, passing through it, he looked into that immediately behind, which had remained safely upon the rails. This also was empty, with the exception of a single person, a young female figure, seated at one of the windows. She was closely veiled, yet there was in her air that indefinable something which told Morton at a glance that she was a lady. He stepped to the ground, conjecturing whether or no she had a companion.
Five minutes after, glancing at the window, he saw the solitary traveller seated in the same position as before, and became convinced that she was unattended. The women in the train had left it at the outset. The busy and clamorous throng of men alone remained; and Morton easily conceived that her situation must be an embarrassing one. He therefore reëntered the car and approached her.
"I am afraid we shall be detained here for two or three hours, and perhaps till late at night. There is a public house a little way off, to which the ladies in the train have gone. If you will allow me, I will show you the way."
So he spoke; or, rather, so he would have spoken; but he had scarcely begun when the veiled head was joyfully raised, and the veil was thrown aside, disclosing to his astonished eyes the features of Edith Leslie. She explained that she was on her way from her father's country seat at Matherton; and that he was to meet her at the station on the arrival of the train. When the accident took place, she had been led to suppose, from the conversation of two men near her, that the train would not be very long detained, and had preferred remaining in the car to mingling with the tumultuous throng outside.
"It is too fine an afternoon," said Morton, as they left the spot, "to be mured in that tavern. This lane has an inviting look. Have you a mind to explore it?"
They walked accordingly in the direction he proposed; and, as they did so, Morton cast many a stolen glance at the face of his companion. The mind of the young philosopher was that day in a peculiarly susceptible state. It seemed as if Fanny Euston had kindled within him a flame which could not fix itself upon her, yet must needs find fuel somewhere; and as his eye met that of Edith Leslie, he began to feel that she held a deeper place in his thoughts than he had ever before suspected.
By the side of the lane stood an ancient abode, whose rotten shingles supported a rich crop of green mosses; and in the yard an old man, who looked like a relic of Bunker Hill fight, was diligently chopping firewood.
"What does this lane lead to?" asked Morton, looking over the fence.
The woodchopper leaned on his axe, wiped his brows with the tatters of a red handkerchief, and seemed revolving the expediency of communicating the desired information.
"Well," he returned, after mature reflection, "if you go fur enough, it'll take you down to the Diamond Pool."
"The Diamond Pool," said Miss Leslie; "that has a promising sound."
The lane soon began to lead them down the side of a rugged hill, between barberry bushes and stunted savins, with neglected stone walls, where the striped ground squirrels chirruped as they dodged into the crevices. In a few moments they had a glimpse of the water, shining between the branches of the trees below.
"Upon my word," said Morton, as they stood on the margin, "the Diamond Pool is not to be despised. We have chosen our walk well, and found a tempting place of rest at the end of it."
"A grassy bank,—a clear spring, with cardinal flowers along the edge—a cluster of maple trees——"
"And a flat rock at the foot of one of them, for you to rest upon. We are well provided for."
"Except that a seat for you seems to have been forgotten."
"No, if I wish to rest, this mound of grass will serve my turn. I am used to bivouacs."
The sun had just vanished behind the rocky hill on the farther side of the water; a sea of liquid fire, clouds blazoned in gold and crimson, betokened his recent presence. The lake lay like a great mirror framed in green. Another sunset glowed in its depths; rocks, hills, and trees grew downward; and the kingfisher, as he flitted over it, made a dash at the surface, as if to peck at the adversary bird, which seemed shooting upward to meet him.
"One might imagine," said Miss Leslie, "that we were a hundred miles away from railroads, factories, and all abominations of the kind."
"They will follow soon," said Morton; "they are not far off. There is no sanctuary from American enterprise."
"I know it is omnipotent at spoiling a landscape; but I hope that this one may escape,—at least if there is no mill privilege in the neighborhood."
"There is—an excellent one—at the outlet of the pond, beyond the three elms yonder. I prophesy that in five years there will be a brick factory on that meadow, with a row of one story houses for the operatives."
"It will be a scandal and a profanation. It is too beautiful for such base uses. But at least that old cedar tree, rooted in a cleft of the precipice, has found a safe sanctuary. There it was growing in King Philip's time; in its younger days it saw Indian wigwams standing on this bank; and there its offspring will grow after it, safe from Yankee axes."
"One cannot be sure of that. A time will come yet, when those rocks will be blasted to build a town hall, or open another railroad track."
"But they cannot build railroads and factories in the clouds. Our New England sunsets will still remain to remind one that there is an ideal side of life—something in it besides locomotives and cotton gins."
"There it is that you are wiser than we are. You are mistresses of a domain of which men, for the most part, know little or nothing."
"Pray what domain may that be?"
"One that is all mystery to me—a world of thoughts and sentiments which to most men is a cloudland, an undiscovered country, of which they may possibly recognize the existence, but of whose geography they know nothing."
"Why should they be more ignorant of it than women?"
"Because they are commonly given over to practicalities, mixed hopelessly with rivalries and ambitions. Even in their highest pursuits, they propose to themselves some definite point to be gained, some object to be achieved; but women are left to the world of their own minds—there they can expatiate at will."
"That is a dangerous privilege."
"They have leisure to muse on the joys and troubles of life, and explore depths which we bridge over."
"Either your mind has very much changed, or I have very much mistaken it. Pardon me, but I fancied that you were like Iago, 'nothing if not critical;' or at least that you sympathized with his slanderous opinions of womankind."
"Heaven forbid! What treasonable thought did you suppose me to harbor against the better part of humanity?"
"At all events, I never supposed you to believe that the better part of humanity passed their leisure time in metaphysical reveries and abstruse meditations."
"You were speaking, just now, of ideals. May not I have mine?"
"So your ideal woman is a transcendental philosopher, seated in the midst of your undiscovered cloudland."
"Deliver me from such a one! My ideal is full of thought and of feeling; but no one yet ever dreamed of branding her as a philosopher. But why did you think me so very critical? I am hardly old enough yet to make an Iago or a Rochefoucault."
"And yet you used always to have some saying of Rochefoucault at your tongue's end."
"I detest him, nevertheless, for a French Mephistopheles,—and all his tribe with him."
"When I said as much, you always told me that his sayings had a great deal of truth in them."
"And have they not a great deal of truth?"
"I cannot pretend to know mankind well enough to answer; but I sincerely hope, not much. Life would be worse than a blank if men and women were what he represents them to be."
"I think not; for if one cannot learn to be enthusiastic in regard to the actualities of human nature, he can console himself by a boundless faith in its possibilities. And now and then, thank God,—Rochefoucault to the contrary notwithstanding,—one finds the possibility realized."
His companion made no reply; and Morton stood for a moment with his eyes bent upon her face, which, to his enamoured fancy, seemed to reflect the calm beauty of the landscape on which she was gazing. He thought of Fanny Euston; he recalled his last evening's conversation with her, and felt blindly impelled to give some form of expression to the feeling which began to master him.
"Miss Leslie, were you ever in a storm at sea?"
"Yes, in a slight one; but the ship was strong; there was very little danger."
"Then you were never flung about, as I have been, in an indifferent egg shell of a craft, out of sight of land, at the mercy of winds and waves."
"I did not know that you had been at sea. Ah, yes, you were at school in France, when you were a boy—were you not?"
"Yes; but this happened since I have become a man, and not long ago. I think I shall never forget it. The sun was bright at one moment, and all was black as a hurricane the next. The wind came from every point of the compass—always shifting, never resting. I had not an instant's peace. It was all watching—all anxiety—and yet there was a kind of pleasure in it. If I had had wings, I doubt if I should have found heart to use them. It was a strange gale. It blew hot and cold by fits; I thought I should lose my reckoning altogether, and be blown away, body and soul."
"Really, I cannot imagine where your tempest is going to carry you."
"Nor could I; when, of a sudden, I found myself safe on shore. My good star led me to a place beautiful as the May sunshine could make it; a scene where art and nature were blended so harmoniously, that they seemed to have grown together from the same birth; full of repose, and tranquil, graceful power; such a scene, in short, as made me wish that Nature would embody herself in a visible form, that I might swear homage to her forever."
Had an interpreter been needed, Morton's look and voice must have betrayed, at least, some part of his meaning. The color deepened slightly on his companion's cheek, but she replied, without any further sign of consciousness,—
"I never knew that you were quite so ardent a votary of nature. You had better put your emotions into verse, and sell them to the magazines, after the true poetic custom. In a little time, I don't doubt, Dr. Griswold would find a place for you in his constellation of poets."
"Ah," said Morton, "it is cruel of you to fling cold water on my rhapsodies. But my flight is over. And now I will try my best to gain the esteem in your eyes of a man of sense and a sound mind."
"And now those night-hawks over head are beginning to tell us that we had better go back to the railroad. I suppose you will place it among the other frailties of women; but I cannot help being a little afraid that if we stay longer, that crippled train will run away and leave us behind."
"Then good night to the Diamond Pool," said Morton, as they left the place. "I shall not forget it; I owe it double thanks. It has shown me a pretty landscape, and made me a wiser man."
"I can hardly see how that may be."
"It has taught me not to speak too earnestly with my friend, lest she should banter me; and by no means to be drawn into any absurdity, lest she should laugh at me outright."
"Do you mean that you thought that I laughed at you?"
"Did you not?"
"If I gave you cause to think that I did, I can only say, frankly and heartily, that I am very sorry for it."
"Now I am emboldened to be absurd again, and speak more parables. I have found a locked-up treasure—a sealed fountain. I long to open it, but cannot."
"Your figures are too deep for me. I can make nothing of them."
"Then I will sink to plain prose. I have a friend whose heart is full of warm feeling and earnest thought; but, out of reserve, or Heaven knows what, she will express it to nobody but one or two intimate companions. She tantalizes the rest with a bantering word; and sometimes, when she is most in earnest, she seems to be most in jest. But why do you smile?"
"Ask your friend Mr. Sharpe. He is your friend—is he not?"
"I suppose so, though he is old enough to be my father. But why should I ask him?"
"Because he once described to me a person very much like the one you have just described."
"Who was the person?"
"Mr. Sharpe said that, though he was in general quite frank and undisguised, yet, if he were particularly in earnest on any subject, he was apt to speak lightly of it, or perhaps ridicule it, to hide his real feeling."
"Pray, who was this person? What was his name?"
"Mr. Vassall Morton."
"Did Sharpe say that of me? It is not a month since I was walking with him,—his evening constitutional,—and he said the very same thing of you. Now, as I hope to live an honest man, I was never half so much flattered in my life, as by being slandered in such company."
Here he was interrupted abruptly, for, turning a corner, they came full upon the inn, or hotel, as its sign proclaimed it to be. Discontented male passengers were lounging about the bar room; disconsolate female passengers sat, in bonnets and shawls, in the parlor; and an unspeakable air of uneasiness and discomfort pervaded the whole place.
"Our walk is over," sighed Morton; "I wish it had a more propitious ending. And now let me be your courier, or do your commands in any other capacity in which I can serve you."
At eleven o'clock that night the train rolled into the station house at Boston, some four hours behind its time.
"My father will certainly be here," said Miss Leslie; but her father was nowhere to be seen. Morton conducted her to a carriage. Her trunks and his own had already been placed upon it, when, by the lantern of one of the porters, Morton descried the agitated colonel threading the crowd in anxious search of his daughter. He had been waiting nervously since seven o'clock, and, when the train came in, had looked for her in every place but the right one. Morton hastened to relieve his fears.
"What do you mean to do with yourself to-night?" Leslie asked, as the carriage drove towards his house.
"Drive to my house in the country."
"Your people will not expect you, and will be in bed before you can get there. You had much better come home with me."
Morton was but too glad to accept the invitation.
Having bade good night to his host and his host's daughter, he passed some hours in dreamy cogitation; then tried to sleep; but sleep long kept aloof, the consciousness of being under the same roof with Edith Leslie brought with it so strange a sensation. But as delicate health, that grand auxiliary of sentiment, was quite unknown to him, nature prevailed in the end, and at seven the next morning, a servant's knock wakened him from a deep sleep, a vision of Mount Katahdin, and an imaginary moose hunt.
Descending to the breakfast room, he found Leslie, as usual, quiet, cordial, and gentlemanly, beguiling the moments of expectancy with a newspaper, while his daughter presided at the coffee urn. Leslie happened to be in a garrulous mood, and talked incessantly about his former military frontier life, of which, though he had detested it in the experience, he was very fond in the retrospect. Morton, who had some acquaintance with such matters, was a tempting auditor, though he would gladly have exchanged the profuse anecdotes of white-wolf running and deer shooting for a few moments' conversation with Miss Edith Leslie. This her father's busy tongue put out of the question; but Morton consoled himself with the thought that to bask in her presence was, in itself, no mean privilege.
His cup of nectar, such as it was, was in a few minutes dashed with gall; for the street door opened without a summons from the bell, a man's step sounded in the hall, and Horace Vinal came in, with a bundle of papers in his hand.
Vinal had become of late all-important to his former guardian. He was his chief business agent, and Leslie was never tired of expatiating on his talents, energy, application, and elevated character. In short, he was fast becoming dependent on him, and felt towards him the affection which a weak and kindly man may feel towards one of far greater force and capacity, whom he believes sincerely attached to him and devoted to his interests.
Vinal, as he entered, had the air of a man versed in affairs, and acquainted both with that vast and various theatre which men call the world, and with those conventional circles which ladies call the world. He had been absent for a few days on a mission of business, from which he had returned the evening before. Leslie received him with a most warm greeting, and his daughter with a smile of easy friendship, which was wormwood to the troubled spirit of Morton. The two rivals—for such, by a common instinct, each felt the other to be—regarded each other with faces of courtesy and hearts of wrath.
"How came this fellow here?" thought Vinal, as he smilingly grasped his classmate's hand.
"The devil take him!" thought Morton, as he returned the greeting, but with a much worse grace.
They seated themselves on opposite sides of the table, while the Helen who had kindled this covert warfare in their breasts dispensed a cup of coffee to each in turn.
There was a singular contrast between the adversaries. On the one side, the self-dependent Vinal, with little health and no other wealth than his busy and able brain; with thin features, wan cheek, and pale, firm lip; with piercing observation and rapid judgment; self-contained, self-controlled, self-confiding. But for his measuring five feet ten, he might have stood for Dryden's Achitophel:—
On the other side sat the pet of fortune, fondled, if he could have endured such blandishment, in the very lap of affluence; with a cheek brown with wind and weather, and an eye which, as he often boasted, could look the sun in the face. His nature was so happily tempered, that to the degree of nervous stimulus which engenders, or is engendered by, an energetic character, he joined an indefinite capacity both of endurance and enjoyment; and yet the possessor of all these gifts was just now in a mood of extreme dissatisfaction and discomfort.
Leslie began to speak with Vinal upon business. Morton snatched the opportunity to converse with the person most interesting to him. Vinal glanced at him askance. Each began to hate the other, after his own fashion. Morton would gladly have come to open rupture, and flung defiance at his rival; but Vinal was far remote from any wish of the kind.
Morton remained at the house as long as he in decency could, and then bade them good morning, execrating Vinal as he went down the steps.
That very afternoon, as he was walking near his cottage in the country, ruminating on Edith Leslie and Horace Vinal, he raised his head and saw a lady and gentleman, on horseback, emerging into view from a wooded bend of the road. A thrill ran through him from head to foot. They were the two persons of whom he was thinking. He bowed to Miss Leslie. She replied with a frank bow and smile; and Vinal, as he passed, made an easy nonchalant gesture of recognition. The jealous pedestrian turned and looked after them. They had ridden a few rods when Vinal also turned his head, but, catching Morton's eye, instantly averted it again. Morton fairly ground his teeth with anger and vexation. To be jealous was bad enough; but that Vinal should be conscious of his jealousy, and perhaps triumph in it, goaded him beyond endurance. He went home, saddled and bridled a horse with his own hands, mounted, and ranged the country for an hour or two, to get rid of the vulture that was preying on him. At length he grew more rational, and was able to reflect that Vinal's riding with Miss Leslie did not necessarily imply that he stood, in any special sense, within her favor, since he was the near relative of her mother-in-law, and had formerly been for years an inmate of her father's house.
On the next day, at a time when he thought that Vinal must be safe in his office, Morton took heart of grace, and called on Miss Leslie. An old woman, an ancient dependant of the family, raised, as she would have phrased it, in the backwoods of Matherton, opened the door.
"Is Miss Leslie at home?"
"No; she was took sick yesterday, very sudden."
"Miss Leslie!" ejaculated the visitor.
"Yes; the doctor says she's goin' to die, sartin; right away, may be."
"What?" gasped Morton.
"It wasn't only this morning we heered on it," said the old Yankee housekeeper, "and Miss Edith's gone up to Matherton, to tend on her."
"O, you mean Mrs. Leslie."
"Yes; Miss Leslie, Miss Edith's mother-in-law; she never was a well woman, ever since I've knowed her."
And the old woman closed the door; while Morton walked away, without knowing in what direction he was moving.
Sganarelle. O, la grande fatigue quo d'avoir une femme, et qu'Aristote a bien raison quand il dit qu'une femme est pire qu'un démon!—Le Médecin Malgré Lui.
It was nine years since, in an evil hour, Leslie had first seen Miss Cynthia Everille, playing on a harp, and accompanying herself in a thin, sweet voice, with words of her own composing. His weak heart succumbed: he fell in love off hand; and within a year after the death of his first wife, Edith's mother, her picture was taken from the wall, and a second Mrs. Leslie reigned in her stead.
"Sweet,"—"charming,"—"fascinating,"—were the least of the adjectives lavished on the interesting bride. Some of his lady acquaintance felicitated him that he had espoused an angel, an embodied beatitude not more than half pertaining to this world. In fact, there was a certain aerial grace in her movements, a certain translucency in her small alabaster features, which might countenance such a notion. The winning smile, too, with which she met her visitors on her reception Thursdays, savored wholly of the angelic. She breathed courtesies around her as the beneficent royalty of Naples scatters sugar plums among his loving subjects at the carnival, and, on the next day, sends them to prison by the cart load.
The tyranny of the strong is bad enough; but the tyranny of the weak is intolerable; and this latter visitation came upon Leslie in its most rueful form—that, namely, whose weapons are sobs, sighs, vapors, and the dire coercion of hysteric fits. He was a soft-hearted fool, and a fair subject for such oppression. Not that his newly-installed mistress—his mistress, since she made him her slave—was naturally of an ill temper. On the contrary, she was somewhat amiable, or, at least, much given to tears and tenderness; but in process of time, this profuse sensibility had all centred on herself. In short, she was profoundly selfish, though nothing could have astonished her more than to tell her so; for, in her own eyes, she seemed a miracle of sensibility, as indeed she was, though her sensibility had learned to give little response to any woes but her own. What these woes might be would be hard to say: she had a wonderful talent for finding and inventing grievances. She was submerged and drowned in a sentimental melancholy, which wore in turn ten thousand different aspects, each worse than the other. She was a sea-anemone, covered with a myriad of filaments, all more shrinking and sensitive than a snail's horns.
One reads of famished wretches who have tried to nourish life from the current of their own veins. So, in a figurative sense, did she. She was always anatomizing her own ridiculous heart; groping among the depths of her own sickly fancies, and making them her daily food. She was a busy gatherer of tokens, souvenirs, and mementoes, and was beset with blighted hopes, vain longings, sad remembrances, and all the spectral ills engendered between a frail mind and a depraved stomach. She was a great reader, and floated rudderless through a sea of books, fishing out of it all that was tender, morbid, and despairing, and stowing it up in albums.
It may be thought that some disconsolate memory, some affection nipped in the bud, or the like catastrophe, had brought her to this pass. Far from it. She mourned that her fate had been too flat and sterile; that the rapturous emotions of her heart had never been awakened; that no sentimental passion, in short, had ever stirred her soul from its depths. This was the grievance which rankled most in her reveries. To give her her due, she never told it to her husband; but she brooded upon it in secret; and the result was, a multitude of affecting verses, which she treasured in her album as anonymous.
Leslie, though none of the wisest of men, was one of the most amiable; and, under his wife's discipline, he learned to be one of the most discreet. It behooved him to be watchful and circumspect. His married life was a voyage through shoals and shallows, and needed sagacious pilotage; for no common eye could see where the danger lay. There was an endless variety of subjects tabooed to him; matters to all appearance quite indifferent, but to which he must never allude, because, Heaven knows how, they touched some trembling susceptibility, or wakened some grievous memory from its blessed sleep. The penalty, if the case were mild, would be a deep-drawn sigh; if more aggravated, a flood of tears; if extreme, an hysteric fit. And if, in his efforts to console her, he ventured to add any thing in the form of remonstrance, or let fall any word which might intimate that her conduct was not quite reasonable, the outraged sufferer would cease weeping, cast up her eyes reproachfully, and murmuring, "O William, is it come to this?" relapse again instantly into the depths of sobbing affliction. It was only by the most abject submission, coupled with all the resources of conjugal eloquence, that Leslie could succeed at length in purchasing a look of resignation and a faint smile of forgiveness.
Use, it is said, will blunt the sharpest of troubles. In time, he became acclimated to his fate; yet, on one or two occasions, his equanimity was quite overset. He thought that his wife was losing her wits; for, as he came into her room, she fixed on him a melting gaze, sank on his shoulder, and flooded him with such a freshet of tears, that he might have complained with De Bracy, that a water fiend possessed her. The truth was, she had just been musing on her own dissolution, and imagining, in a luxury of woe, her own funeral, with all the circumstance of that sad event. As she looked around and bethought her how desolate that chamber would be when she was gone, and how each trifle that had once been hers would be treasured by those she left behind, her sensitive heart had dissolved in tenderness, and produced the hydraulic demonstration just mentioned.
This libel on womankind became the mother of a pair of twins—the same infant prodigies whom Morton had seen at the White Mountains. Both perished at the age of seven, their precocious brains having by that time usurped all the vitality of their miserable little bodies. She was inconsolable at their death, though, while they lived, her delicate nerves could seldom abide their presence for five minutes at a time.
There was once an idiot, who, being of a conciliating temper, thought to appease a fire and persuade it to go out by feeding it with fuel till it should be satisfied, and crave no more. On the same principle Leslie tried to satisfy the exacting spirit of his wife by a most watchful and anxious devotion to all her whims; but the greater his devotion, the more exacting she grew. She felt her power, and used it without mercy. She was, withal, intolerably jealous, not so much of any living rival, as of the memory of a dead one, Leslie's former wife. Here, indeed, she had some show of reason; for the poles are not wider asunder than were the characters of herself and her predecessor.
Those who had known the latter in her maidenhood—she married young, or perhaps she would never have married Leslie—knew her as the dominant belle of the season, conspicuous for her beauty, her position, and for a degree of culture rare in America at that time; devoted and ardent towards a few close friends, haughty and distant towards the many; greatly loved by her few intimates, and either greatly admired or greatly disliked by most others around her. Those who knew her in the last years of her life knew her as one who had passed through a fiery ordeal. Of her many children, only one was left. They had fallen around her in a sudden and sharp succession, till it seemed to her that a destroying doom had gone forth against her race, and that the world of her affections was turned to a field of carnage. Leslie felt the shock acutely, not to say intensely, for a while; but the storm passed, and left on him very little trace. It sank into the deeper nature of his wife with such a penetrating sense of the vanity of life and the rottenness of mortal hope, as, in the olden time, drew saints and anchorites to renounce the world and give themselves to penance and seclusion. It made no anchorite of her. She rose from her baptism of fire saddened, but not broken nor unstrung; with a rooted faith and an absolute resignation; a nice perception of all human suffering; sympathies broad and embracing as the air; a benevolence pervading as the sunshine; and a spirit so calm in its elevation that no wind of calamity had power to ruffle it.
Edith Leslie was a child when her mother died, yet old enough to feel the loss profoundly, and to be greatly shocked and cast down at the alacrity with which her father contrived to forget it. Having reduced Leslie to obedience, his bride essayed the same experiment on his daughter, but failed notably. There was something in the nature of the latter which revolted so impatiently against the selfish caprices and morbid fooleries which were played off hourly before her,—she was so indignant, moreover, at seeing her father sunk inch by inch in the slough of matrimonial thraldom,—that the issue might easily have been a protracted household feud. None but herself could know with how costly an effort she schooled herself to patience. With a caustic wit, and a fervent fancy which haunted her with images of an ideal life brighter than the work-day world around her, a nature with impulses which, less curbed and tempered, might have carried her through all the mazes of morbid rebellion, she still bent herself to accept her lot as she found it, in the full faith that flowers may be taught to grow on the flintiest soil. And now that the imagined maladies of a lifetime were turned at last into a mortal reality, and her step-mother lay on her death bed, Edith Leslie watched by her side with as much care as if this wretched piece of perverted sensibility had deserved her affection and esteem.