Matherton, renowned through both hemispheres for the manufacture of glass ware, stands, unless this history errs, on the line of the Northern Central Railroad, the distance from its post office to the post office at Boston being just thirty-three miles. Four miles from the village is the tract of land which Leslie's forefather, far back in New England antiquity, bought of the Indians. The original purchase covered several square miles, since dwindled to some two hundred acres. Here, in a sequestered and very beautiful spot, stands the mansion which Leslie's grandfather built some eighty-five years ago. In its day it was reputed of matchless elegance, and, with Leslie's repairs and improvements, it might still pass as a very handsome old country residence. Sagamore Pond, or Lake Sagamore, as the last Mrs. Leslie, who had lived in England, insisted on calling it, washes the foot of the garden; and along the northern verge of the estate, Battle Brook steals down to the pond, under the thick shade of the hemlock trees. Here King Philip's warriors once lay in ambush, through a hot summer's day; here many pious Puritans were butchered, and many carried off into doleful captivity.
At the house at Battle Brook, Leslie, during spring, summer, and autumn, had always spent every leisure moment that he could snatch from his affairs. Since his connection with Vinal, these intervals had become both long and frequent. And, since grief has a privilege, and since, moreover, a somewhat alarming cough had lately begun to trouble him, he now committed all to Vinal's hands, and, on the day after his daughter's return, repaired with her to his favorite homestead, there to remain till the autumn frosts should warn them back to town. Forthwith Matherton became the focus to which all the thoughts of Morton concentred.
Thither, pretext or no pretext, he resolved to go. He went, accordingly, and made his quarters at the grand hotel of Matherton. Fortunately, Battle Brook was then the best trout stream in Massachusetts; and this would give, he flattered himself, some faint color to his proceeding. He arrived in the afternoon, and, mounting a horse, rode to the inn at the edge of Sagamore Pond, a mile or more from Leslie's house.
He had scarcely reached it, when a brief sharp thunder shower came up, and passed away as quickly. As the sun was setting, he rowed out in a small boat upon the pond. Here, skirting the brink of a sequestered cove, which the beech and tupelo trees overhung, and where every thing was still but the evening singing of a robin, and the mysterious whisper of the rain-drops, falling from innumerable leaves, with countless tiny circles on the breathless water,—here, where his boat glided as if buoyed on a liquid air, while, over the pebbly bottom, the perch and dace fled away from under the shadowing prow,—he lingered dreamily for a while, and then, bending to his oars, bore out into the middle of the pond. The west was gorgeous with the sunset, while, far in front, glimmering among the trees, he could see the shrine of his idolatry, the roof that sheltered Edith Leslie.
A light breeze crisped the water, the ripples murmured with a lulling sound under his boat, and, lying at ease, he gave himself up to his reveries.
His passion-kindled fancies ranged earth, sea, and sky; wandered into the past, lost themselves in the future; evoked the shadows of dead history; mixed in one phantom conclave the hairy war gods of the north, the bright shapes of Grecian fable, the enormities of Egyptian mythology; and, looking into the burning depths above him, he mused of human hopes, human aspirations, human destiny. That oddly compounded malady which had fastened on him had brought with it the intense yet tranquil awakening of every faculty with which it will sometimes visit those of the ruder sex whom it attacks with virulence.
The magic of earth and sky; the black pines rearing their shaggy tops against the blazing west; the shores mingling in many-tinted shadow; the fiery sky, where three little clouds hovered like flaming spirits; the fiery water, where he and his boat floated as in a crimson sea; the whole glowing scene, glowing deeper yet in the fervid light of passion,—penetrated him like an enchantment. He scarcely knew himself; and in his supreme of intoxication, the familiar world around him was sublimed into a vision of Eden.
It was a day of cloudless sunshine when Morton set forth for the house at Battle Brook; but his mind was far from sharing the brightness of the world without. The hope that flowed so full and calmly the night before had ebbed and left him dry. He was shaken with doubts, misgivings, perturbations. He walked his horse up the avenue, till he came within view of the house, a large, square mansion, with a veranda on three sides, a quiet-looking place enough, but in Morton's eyes priceless as Aladdin's palace, and sacred as Our Lady's house at Loretto. A monthly honeysuckle twined about one of the columns of the porch; the hall door stood open, and the air played freely through from front to rear.
He gave his horse to the charge of an old Scotchman who was mowing the lawn, rang at the door, asked for Miss Leslie, and was shown into the vacant parlor. With its straw carpeting and light summer furniture, it was bright and cheerful as every thing else about it. Engravings from Turner and Landseer, framed in black walnut, hung against the walls; and on a small table in a corner stood a bird cage, with the door left purposely open. The inmate was hopping about the room, without attempting to escape, though the windows also were open.
"No wonder it will not leave her," thought the visitor.
He seated himself by the window, and looked out on the fields and the groves beyond. Far down in the meadow, the yellow-tufted rye was undulating in the warm summer wind, wave chasing wave in graceful succession. The birds would not sing,—the afternoon was too hot,—but the buzz, and hum, and chirrup of a myriad of insects rose from their lurking-places in the grass, while now and then the cicala raised its piercing voice from a neighboring apple tree.
Suddenly Morton's heart began to beat; a light step on the staircase reached his ear, and the rustling of a dress. Miss Leslie came in with her usual natural and quiet ease of manner, while he rose to receive her with his heart in his throat. And now, when he needed them most, his wits seemed to fail him. He tried to converse, and produced nothing but barren commonplace. Again and again the conversation flagged; and the hum and chirrup of the insect world without filled the pauses between.
He glanced at his companion.
"Be a man, you idiot," he apostrophized himself.
He looked at her again, as she bent over the embroidery with which her fingers were employed.
"I must speak out, or die," he thought.
He rested his arm on the table. He leaned towards her. Heaven knows what nonsense was on his lips, when the sound of a man's footstep in the hall made him subside into his chair, and do his best to look nonchalant. Leslie entered, cast an uneasy glance at the visitor, and greeted him with somewhat cool courtesy.
"I have just met Miss Weston and her sister," said Leslie to his daughter; "I think they will be here in a few minutes."
Morton looked at a Landseer on the wall, and gnawed his lip with vexation.
Leslie took a turn or two about the room, looked out at the window, remarked that it was a hot afternoon, said that the hay crop had been the heaviest ever known, in consequence, he opined, of the joint effects of heat, moisture, and guano; and was descanting on the ravages committed by the borers on a certain peach tree, when Miss Weston and her sister appeared.
"It's all up with me. She does not care for me a straw," thought Morton, as he saw the easy cordiality with which Miss Leslie received her guests. He was introduced. Miss Weston complimented him on the affair of the railroad. His reply was cold and constrained. Leslie soon left the room. Morton felt himselfde trop, yet could not muster strength of mind to go. Conversation flagged. Every body became constrained. Miss Weston suspected the truth, and glanced at her sister that they should take their leave, when, at this juncture, a servant came to announce tea.
The ebbs and flows of the human mind are beyond the reach of astronomy. As they went into the next room, Morton became conscious of a faint and indefinite something in the face of his mistress, which, he could not tell why, cast a gleam of light into his darkness, and lifted him out of the slough of despond in which he had been floundering for the last half hour. A flush of hope dawned on him. His constraint passed away, and Miss Weston's opinion of him was wonderfully revolutionized. At length, much to his delight, one of the visitors remarked to the other, that they had better go home before it grew too dark. But here a new alarm seized him. Might he not be expected to offer them his escort? Terrified at this idea, and oblivious of all gallantry, he made his escape into the garden, impelled—so he left them to infer—by a delicate wish to free them from the restraint of his presence. Here he walked to and fro behind the hedge, in no small agitation, but with all his faculties on the alert.
In a quarter of an hour, he heard voices at the hall door; and approaching behind a cluster of high laurels, saw Edith Leslie accompanying her two friends down the avenue. After walking with them a few rods, she bade them good evening, and turned back towards the house. Morton went forward to meet her.
"There is a beautiful sunset over the water, beyond the garden. Will you walk that way?"
They turned down one of the garden paths.
"What did you think of me this afternoon?" asked Morton—"did you think me ill, or bewitched, or turned idiot?"
"Neither. I thought you a little taciturn, at first."
"I am fortunate if that was your worst opinion. I believe I was under a spell. Did you never dream—all people, I believe, have something in common in their dreams—of being in some great peril, without power to move hand or foot to escape?—of being under some desperate necessity of speaking, without power to open your lips?—or of seeing before you some splendid prize, without power to make even an effort to grasp it? Something like that was my case." Here he came to an abrupt stop, walked on a pace or two, then turned to his companion with a vehemence which startled her—"Miss Leslie, you heard your friend praise me for humanity—courage—what not? It was all a mistake—all a delusion. I thought you were in the train. I was wild with agony; and when the people were crowding after me, I thought that all had been for nothing, because I had not saved you. I can hardly tell what I did; it was mere blind instinct. I could have ridden into the fire, and perhaps not have felt the burning. Thereisa spell upon me. I am changed—life is changed—every thing is changed. I scarcely know myself. It mans me, and it makes me a child again. The world puts on a new face; just as this sunset lights the earth with purple and vermilion, and turns it to a fairy land. Forgive me; I don't know what I am saying. I am in fear that all this brightness will change of a sudden into winter and night, and cold, rocky commonplace. You know what I would say. I have no words fit to say it. You are my judge, to lift me up, or cast me down."
Here he stopped again abruptly, and looked at his companion in much greater agitation than he would have felt if he had just thrown the dice for life or death. She stood for a moment with her eyes fixed on the earth, as if waiting for him to go on, then slowly raised them to his face.
"You risked your life to save mine. You need not believe that I could ever forget it."
Morton's heart sprang to his lips. Nature had not been liberal to him in the gift of tongues, but the energy of his emotion supplied the defect. Nor were his words thrown away; for with all its outward calm, the nature that responded to them was earnest and ardent as his own.
It was an hour or more since the whippoorwills had begun their evening cries, when they returned to the house. Candles were lighted, and Leslie was sitting with two persons from the neighborhood, an agent of the Matherton factories and a lawyer, conversing upon railroad stocks. He looked very uneasily at his daughter and Morton, but said nothing. The latter was engrossed with one idea; but he forced himself to join in the conversation, and favored the company with his views—not very lucid on this occasion—upon the topic under discussion. He soon, however, contrived to whisper to Miss Leslie, "I shall go in five minutes—will you meet me in the hall?" She left the room in a few moments; and Morton, after a short interval, took his leave, in much alarm lest his intended father-in-law should strain courtesy so far as to follow him. Leslie, however, remained quiet; and he found his mistress waiting for him at the hall door. Their interview was short, but Morton never forgot it. After bidding her good night some eight or ten times, he compelled himself to leave the house, mounted his horse, waved his hand to Edith Leslie, whom he saw watching him from a side window, wheeled, rode down the avenue, turned as he reached the entrance of the trees, and waved his hand again towards the window. His heart was full to overflowing, and tears, not of sorrow, ran down his cheeks. "Good Heaven!" laughed Morton, as he brushed them away, "this has not happened to me before these twelve years." He waved a farewell once more, and spurring his horse, rode down the avenue into the high road.
It was a soft, warm, starlight evening, and, as he passed along, he heard the voices of the whippoorwills from far and near, while the meadows, the orchards, and the borders of the woods sparkled with fireflies. With loosened rein, he suffered his horse to canter lightly forward, and gave himself up to the enchantment of his dreams. A thousand times in his after life did he recall the visions of that evening's ride.
About a mile before reaching the town, the road passed, for a few rods, through a belt of thick woods. While riding through the darkest of the shadow, a strange cry startled him—a shriek so wild and awful that the blood curdled in his veins, and his horse leaped aside with fright. There was a rustling among the branches over his head, a flapping and fanning of broad pinions, and the dusky form of some great bird sailed away into the innermost darkness of the woods. Morton knew the sound. It was the voice of the great horned owl, rarely found in that part of the country, though he had once or twice before heard its midnight yells in the lonely forests of Maine.
The cry long rang in his ears. It seemed fraught with startling portent, clouded his spirits, and umbered the rose-tint of his reveries. He turned his face to the stars, and breathed a prayer for the welfare of his mistress.
Nobody knew Vinal but Vinal himself.Know thyselfwas his favorite maxim. He practised upon it, as he flattered himself, with a rigorous and unsparing logic, applying the dissecting knife and microscope to the secrets of his mind, probing, testing, studying, pitilessly ripping up all that would fain hide itself. The aim of all this scrutiny was, thoroughly to comprehend the machine, in order to direct and perfect it to its highest efficiency.
Vinal, as men go, knew himself very well; and yet there were points of his character which escaped him, or which, rather, he misnamed. He knew perfectly that he was ambitious, selfish, unscrupulous: this he confessed in his own ear, pluming himself much on his philosophic candor. But he never would see that he was envious. In his mental map of himself, envy was laid down as pride and emulation. The wrestlings of human nature are not all of the sort figured in the Pilgrim's Progress and set forth in the Catechism. Vinal had an ideal; he had cherished it from boyhood, and battled ever since to realize it. He would fain make himself the finished man of the world, the unflinching, all-knowing, all-potential man of affairs, like a blade of steel, smooth and polished, but keen, searching, resistless. This was his aim; but nature was always balking him. He was the victim of a constitutional timidity, his scourge from childhood. He had been known to swoon outright, on being run away with in a chaise, and he never could muster nerve enough to fire a gun. Against this defect his pride rose in revolt. It thwarted him at every turn, and conflicted with all his aspirations. In short, he could not endure its presence, and fought against it with an iron energy of will. Thus his life was a secret, unremitting struggle, whose mark was written on his pale, nervous, resolute features. It's an ill wind that blows no good. This painful warfare achieved a singular vigor and concentration of character, and would have led to still better issues, had the assailing force been marshalled under a better banner. A lofty purpose may turn timidity to heroism; but a purpose like Vinal's is by no means so efficacious, and the man remains, if not quite a coward, yet something very like one.
It would have been well for Vinal if, like Morton, he had been born to a fortune. In that case—for he had no aptitude for pleasure hunting—his restless energies would probably have spurred him into some creditable field of effort, natural science, mathematics, or philology, to all of which he inclined. But Fate had not been so propitious; and to achieve the task which she had forgotten was the zenith of his aspirations.
There was one person who had always been an eyesore to him, and a stumbling block in his way. This was Vassall Morton. Morton, at twenty-three, was, in feeling, still a boy; Vinal, at twenty-three, was a well-ripened man. But the man hated the boy; and the boy retorted with a dislike which was largely dashed with scorn. Vinal felt the scorn, and it cut him to the quick, the more so, that he could not hide from himself that he stood in awe of Morton. He hated him, too, because he had that which he, Vinal, lacked—fortune, good health, steady nerve. He hated him, because he thought that Morton understood him; because the frankness of the latter's nature rebuked the secrecy of his own; and, above all, because he saw in him his most formidable rival in the affections of Edith Leslie.
Vinal's nature, self-drilled as it was, could not be called a cold one. It had in it spots and veins of sensitiveness. When a child, this sensitiveness had often been morbidly awake, and had caused him much suffering; but as he grew towards manhood, it had been overlaid and hidden by very different qualities, not often found in connection with it. Of late, however, he had been in love,—with Edith Leslie, as well as with her money,—and the dormant susceptibilities of his childhood had been in some sort reawakened.
His mind, inharmonious and unhappy as nature and himself had jointly made it, had never yet felt a pang so sharp as when, arriving at Matherton, he learned privately from Colonel Leslie the engagement which had passed between Morton and his daughter. Miss Leslie's twice rejected suitor compressed his thin lips in silence; it was his usual sign of strong emotion. Leslie pressed his favorite's hand,—he would fain have called him son-in-law,—and, turning away abruptly, Vinal left the house.
The man whom he envied and hated had triumphed; robbed him of fortune, and robbed him of happiness; happiness of which Morton had had already his full share, and a fortune which would but swell the ample bulk of his possessions. Vinal was frenzied with grief, rage, and jealousy.
Morton sat in the reading room of the National, the grand hotel of Matherton. It was by no means an elegant apartment. In the middle was a table covered with newspapers; at the sides were desks, likewise covered with newspapers, padlocked together in files. The walls and the ceiling glared a drear monotony of white, broken, however, by sundry ornaments, worthy the attention of the curious. Here, framed in birdseye maple, was the engraved likeness of "Old Hickory," with hat and cane in hand, a cloak to hide the gauntness of his figure, and hair bristling in electrified disorder. Here, too, was a colored print of the favorite steamboat "Queen of the Lake;" Niagara Falls, by a license of art, forming a blue curtain in the background. At its side was a lithograph of the Empire Hotel, New York, the sidewalk in front being embellished with groups of pedestrians, dressed with matchless elegance, after the fashion plates; and, over against this, an advertisement of Jessup's steel, encircled with a lithographed halo, composed of chisels, axes, hammers, saws, and ploughshares.
The apartment, thus furnished and thus adorned, had, besides Morton, but two occupants; the one a factory agent, who stood at a desk, absorbed in the New Orleans Picayune; the other a country tailor, who displayed the sign of the "Full-dressed Man" at the neighboring village of Mudfield, and was now seated at a window, busied in polishing a huge garnet ring, which he wore, with a red silk handkerchief.
In a window recess, aloof from the tailor's, sat Morton, scarcely conscious of any presence but that of his own thoughts. He had found a philosopher's stone; and through the rest of his life, this comfortless reading room of the Matherton Hotel, this sanctuary of dry and weary Yankeedom, was linked in his memory with dreams of golden brightness.
A firm, quick step crossed the threshold, and paced the sanded floor. Till this moment, Morton had remained absorbed, shut in from the outer world; but now an influence, which believers may call magnetism, made him look up and bend forward from the recess to see who the sudden stranger might be. The stranger turned also, and showed the pale, fixed face of Horace Vinal.
Morton was disposed to be on good terms with all the world, and more especially with his defeated rival.
"Good morning, Vinal," he said, holding out his hand, which Vinal took, his cold, thin fingers trembling in the warm grasp of Morton. He had had no thought of finding him there; the encounter was unlooked for as it was unwelcome; and, as he muttered a few passing words of commonplace, his features grew haggard with the violence of struggling emotion. He turned away, went to a desk, pretended to read a newspaper for a few moments, and then left the room.
Morton looked after him. He had no doubt that Vinal had heard of his misfortune; and the first sense of pain which, since the evening before last, the successful lover had felt, now crossed his mind.
"It's devilish hard for him, poor fellow," he thought, as, measuring Vinal's passion by his own, a vivid image of the latter's suffering rose upon him.
Vinal strode along a corridor of the hotel. There was no one to see him. His forehead was knit, his nostrils distended, his jaws clinched. A man, whom he knew, came from a side passage. Instantly Vinal's face was calm again, and as the other passed he greeted him with a smile. He went out into the main street of the town, along which he walked for a few rods with his usual air of alert composure; then turned down a narrow and unfrequented by-way. Here his whole bearing changed. He trod the gravelled sidewalk with a fierce, nervous motion; and with hands clinched and eyes fixed on the ground, muttered through his set teeth,—
"Fair or foul, by G—, I'll be even with him."
A slave whose gall coins slanders like a mint.—Troilus and Cressida.
"Your proposal flatters me, Mr. Morton; and, in many points of view, the connection you offer would be a desirable one,—a very desirable one. But I must say to you plainly, that if my wishes alone were consulted, my daughter would bestow her hand elsewhere. Perhaps I need not tell you that Horace Vinal, who was my ward, and my late wife's relation, and who has been my partner in business for a year or more, is a young man whom I have looked upon as my son, and whom it was my very earnest hope to have seen such in reality. You who have had an opportunity of knowing him can hardly be surprised that, after so long an intimacy, I should prefer this connection to any other. I have seen him in all the relations of life, and the more I have seen the more I have learned to esteem him."
"You speak with a good deal of emphasis of his character. May I ask if any part of your objection to me rests on that score."
"In a matter like this, I am bound to be frank with you. In many quarters, I hear you very highly spoken of,—so highly, in fact, that I am disposed to take with every qualification what I have heard to your disadvantage."
"Pray, what is that?"
"I was a soldier once, and don't incline to inquire too closely into the way young men may see fit to amuse themselves. But on a point where my daughter's happiness might be involved——"
"Upon my word, sir, I don't understand you."
"Well, Mr. Morton, I hear—that is, I have learned—that, like other young men of leisure, you have had yourbonnes fortunes, and winged other game than partridges and woodcock."
Morton looked at him in surprise. The truth was, that, some time before, the discreet and far-sighted Vinal had contrived to inoculate his patron with this calumny, which he thought the species most likely to take readily. And such had been his tact, that Leslie, though well imbued with the idea, would have been puzzled to say whence he had received it. A man of shallow-brained uprightness like his, if he yields too easy a belief to falsehood, has the advantage of yielding also an easy belief to truth. A few words from Morton sufficed to carry conviction to the frank-hearted auditor, who, feeling that, at least as regarded its worst features, his charge must be groundless, hastened to make theamende.
"Your word is enough, Mr. Morton, and I owe you an apology for imagining that you could be false or heartless in any connection whatever. I think, however, that you can see how, without disparagement to you, I should still regret that Horace Vinal, who is personally so near to me, so devoted to my interests, and so strongly attached to my daughter, should be disappointed. I advised him, yesterday, to go to Europe, to recruit his health. I am told that you had yourself some plan of the kind."
"A very indefinite one, sir; in fact, amounting to none at all."
"Go this autumn; be absent a year,—that is not too long for seeing Europe,—and if at the end of that time you and my daughter should remain as earnest in this matter as you are now, why, I am not the man to persist in opposing her inclination."
The sentence was hard; but there was no appeal. Leslie had told Vinal the day before that he would despatch Morton on his travels, intimating a hope that a long separation might bring about a change in his daughter's feelings. Morton saw nothing for it but acquiescence; to which, indeed, Miss Leslie urged him, confiding in the strength of his attachment, and happy to reconcile adverse duties and inclinations at any price.
Meanwhile, he had not the smallest suspicion of the subtle trick which his rival had played him. "This is a charitable world!" he thought; "one must keep the beaten track, look demure, and talk virtue, or, in one shape or another, it will be the worse for him."
Then loathed he in his native land to dwell.—Childe Harold.
Then loathed he in his native land to dwell.—Childe Harold.
Slend. A gentleman born, Master Parson, who writes himselfArmigero;in any bill, warrant, quittance, or obligation,Armigero!Shal. Ay, that I do; and have done any time these three hundred years.—Merry Wives of Windsor.
The engagement of Miss Leslie and Morton was to be kept secret till the latter's return. None knew it but Leslie and Vinal. Vinal, within a few weeks, sailed for Europe, meaning, however, to be absent only three or four months. Other motives apart, he felt, and Leslie saw, that his health, always shivering in the wind, demanded the change.
Meanwhile, Morton made the best of a six weeks' reprieve; and hampered as he was by the injunction of secrecy, and the precautions which it demanded, he crowded the short interval with half a lifetime of mixed pleasure and pain, expectation and anxiety.
It was past but too quickly; in three days more he must set sail. Walking the street in a rueful mood, he met his classmate, Chester, who, having made the tour of Europe, had lost his obsolete ways, and grown backward into a man of the present world.
"Good morning, Morton. Making calls?—I see it by your face."
"Yes; it's a thing that must be done sometimes."
"Pour prendre congé, I suppose. I hear you are off very soon."
"The day after to-morrow."
"You couldn't do a wiser thing. When a man finds himself in a scrape, he had better get out of it as soon as possible; therefore, if he finds himself born in America, he had better forswear his country."
"Patriotic sentiments those."
"I can't answer for the patriotism; but they are the sentiments of a true son of the Pilgrim Fathers, who renounced their country because they couldn't stand it, and came over here. I mean to follow their example, and go back again. They fled—so the story goes—from persecution. I mean to fly from persecution too,—the persecution of a social atmosphere that I find hostile to my constitution, and a climate not fit for a reasonable being to live in."
"I don't know why you should be so fierce against the climate. By your look, you seem to thrive in it."
"The bodily man thrives passably well. It's the immortal part that suffers. Fierce! why, the climate makes me fierce. Who can be a philosopher in such a climate?—or a poet?—or an artist?—any thing but a steam engine? It is a perpetual spur, an unremitting goad. Nobody is happy in it except the men who ride on locomotives and conduct express trains,—always on the move. O, so you go in here, do you?"
"Yes, to see Mrs. Primrose. Will you come too?"
"No, thank you," replied Chester, walking away, with a comical look.
Morton rang the door bell, and found Mrs. Primrose at home.
There was a book on the table. He took it up. It was a novel, lately published.
Morton praised it.
Mrs. Primrose dissented, with great emphasis.
"You are severe upon the book."
"Not more so than it deserves," replied Mrs. Primrose; "it is too coarse to be permitted for a moment."
"And yet the moral tone seems good enough."
"I do not blame the morality so much as the bad taste. It is full of slang dialogue, and was certainly written by a very unrefined person."
"It makes its characters speak as such people speak in real life."
"It is not merely that," said Mrs. Primrose, slightly pursing her mouth; "it contains, besides, expressions absolutely reprehensible."
"One does not admire its good taste; but a little blunt Saxon never did much harm."
"No daughter of mine shall read it," said Mrs. Primrose, with gravity.
"I imagine that if literature is to reflect human life truly, it can hardly be limited to the language of the drawing room."
"Then it should be banished from the drawing room," said Mrs. Primrose, with severity.
Here several visitors appeared, and Morton presently took leave.
He was but a few rods from the door, when a quick step came behind him.
"Hallo, colonel, where are you going at such a rate?"
Morton turned, and saw his classmate, Rosny.
"Why, Dick, I'm glad to see you."
"They tell me you're bound for Europe."
"Yes."
"Well, it's a good move. If a man has money, he had better enjoy it."
"I shall be driving out of town in an hour. Come and dine with me."
"Sorry, colonel, but it can't be done. I'm out on the stump in the cause of democracy. Shall be off westward in two hours, and shake the dust from my shoes against this nest of whiggery and old fogyism."
"Democracy is under the weather just now, Dick."
"Just now, I grant you. What with log cabins and hard cider, and coons, the enlightened people are pretty well gammoned. But there's a good time coming. Before you know it, democracy will be upon you again like a load of bricks. Why, what can you expect of a party that will take a coon for its emblem? I saw one chained up this morning in the yard of Taft's tavern, a dirty, mean-looking beast, about half way between a jackal and an owl. He looked uncommonly well in health, and could puff out his fur as round as a muff. But, when you looked close, there was nothing of him but skin and bone; exactly like the whig party. He put up his nose, and smiled at me. I suppose—damn his impudence—he took me for a whig. That coon is going into a decline. It won't be long before he is taken by the tail and tossed over Charles River bridge; and there he'll lie on the mud at low tide, for a genuine emblem of the defunct whig party, and a solemn warning to all coon worshippers."
"Let the whigs alone, Dick; and if you won't dine with me, come in here and drink a glass of claret."
"That I'll do." And they went into the hotel accordingly.
As Rosny took up his glass, Morton observed a large old seal ring on his finger.
"Do you call yourself a democrat, and yet always wear that ring of yours?"
"Why, what's the matter with the ring?"
"Nothing, except that it is a badge of feudalism, aristocracy, and every thing else abominable to your party."
"Pshaw, man. Look here: do you see that crest, cut in the stone? That crest followed King Francis to Pavia, and when Henri Quatre charged at Ivry, it wasn't far behind him. It is mine by right. It comes down to me, straight as a bee line, through twenty generations. And do you think I'm going to renounce my birthright? No, be gad!"
"I wouldn't. But what becomes of your democracy?"
"Democracy is tall enough to take care of itself. I wear that ring; but it don't follow that I stand on my ancestry. You needn't laugh: the case is just this. If the blood in my veins makes me stand to my colors where another man would flinch, or hold my head up where another would be sprawling on his back; if it gives me a better pluck, grit, go-ahead; why,that'swhat I stand on,—that'smy patent of nobility. What the deuse are you laughing at?—the personal quality,—don't you see?—and not the ancestry."
"If you stand on personal merit, you'll be sure to go under before long. The democracy are growing as jealous of that as of ancestry, or of wealth either."
"Why, what do you know about politics? You never had any thing to do with them. You are no more fit for a politician than for a fiddler."
"I'm glad you think so. If I must serve the country in any public capacity, I pray Heaven it may be as a scavenger sooner than as a politician. Who can touch pitch and be clean? I'll pay back your compliment, Dick. You are a great deal too downright to succeed in public life."
"I'll find a way or make one. But I tell you, colonel,"—and a shade of something like disappointment passed over his face,—"if a man wants the people's votes, it's fifty to one that he's got to sink himself lower than the gutter before he gets them."
"Yes, and when the people have turned out of office every man of virtue, honor, manliness, independence, and ability, then they will fling up their caps and brag that their day is come, and their triumph finished over the damned aristocracy."
"You are an unbeliever. You haven't half faith enough in the people. Now I put it to your common sense. Isn't there a thousand times more patriotism in the laboring classes in this country—yes, and about as much intelligence—as in the rabble of sham fashionables at Saratoga, or any other muster of our moneyed snobs and flunkeys?"
"Exceptions excepted, yes."
"War to the knife with the codfish aristocracy! They are a kind of mongrel beast, expressly devised and concocted for me to kick. I don't mean the gentlemen with money; nor the good fellows with money. I know what a gentleman is; yes, and a lady, too, though I do make stump speeches, and shake hands all round with the sovereign people. That sort are welcome to their money. No, sir, it's the moneyed snobs, the gilded toadstools, that it's my mission to pitch into."
"Excuse me a moment, Dick," said Morton, suddenly leaping from his seat, as a lady passed the window.
"A lady, eh! Then I'll be off."
"No, no, stay where you are. I'll be back again in three minutes."
He ran out of the hotel, and walked at his best pace in pursuit of Fanny Euston, who, on her part, was walking with an earnest air, like one whose thoughts were engaged with some engrossing subject. He reached her side, and made a movement to accost her; but she seemed unconscious of his presence.
"Miss Fanny Euston, will you pardon me for breaking in upon your reveries?"
She turned and recognized him, but her smile of recognition was a very mournful one.
"I have stopped you to take my leave,—a good deal more in short hand than I meant it should have been. I shall sail for Europe the day after to-morrow."
"Yes? Is not that a little sudden?"
"More sudden than I wish it were. I am not at all in a travelling humor. I have been too much pressed for time to ride out, as I meant to do, to your father's house."
"We are all in town now. My father came from New Orleans yesterday, very ill."
"I did not hear of it. I trust not dangerously ill."
"He is dying. He cannot live a week."
Morton well knew the strength and depth of her attachment to her father. He pressed her hand in silent sympathy.
"It grieves me, Fanny," he said, after a moment, "to part from you under such a cloud."
"Good by," she replied, returning the friendly pressure. "I wish you with all my heart a pleasant and prosperous journey."
Morton turned back, wondering at the sudden dignity of manner which grief had given to the wild and lawless Fanny Euston.
Ham. Thou wouldst not think how ill's all here about my heart, but it is no matter.Hor. Nay, good my lord——Ham. It is but foolery; but it is such a kind of gain-giving as would perhaps trouble a woman.Hor. If your mind dislike any thing, obey it.Ham. Not a whit. We defy augury.
Morton's day of departure came. It was a comfortless, savage, gusty morning, an east wind blowing in from the bay. The hour to set sail was near; he should have been on board; but still he lingered with Edith Leslie. The secrecy on which her father insisted made it impossible for her to go with him to the ship.
Morton forced himself away; his hand was on the door, but his heart failed him, and he turned back again. On the mind of each there was something more than the pain of a year's separation. A dark foreboding, a cloud of dull and sullen portent, hung over them both. The smooth and bright crusting with which habit and training had iced over the warm nature of Edith Leslie was broken and swept away; and as Morton seized her hands, she disengaged herself, and, throwing herself on his neck, sobbed convulsively. Morton pressed her to his heart, and buried his face in her clustering tresses; then, breaking from her, ran blindly from the house. He repaired to the house of Meredith, who met him at the door.
"You've no time to lose. Here's the carriage. Your trunks are all right. Come on."
They drove towards the wharf.
"I'd give my head to change places with you," said Meredith.
"I wish you could."
There was so much pain and dejection in his look, that his friend could not fail to observe it.
"You don't want to go, then? I have noticed all along that you seemed devilish cool about it."
"Ned," said Morton, "I never used to think myself superstitious; but I begin now to change my mind. Heaven knows why, but I have strange notions running in my brain. My dog howled all last night; and not long ago, an owl yelled over my head, and that, too, at a time—— But you'll think I have lost my wits."
Meredith, in truth, was greatly amazed at this betrayal of a weakness of which, long and closely as he had known his companion, he had never suspected him.
"Why, colonel, I have seen you set out on a journey as long and fifty times as hazardous as this, as carelessly as if you were going to a dinner party."
"I know it; but times are changed with me. I am not quite the child, though, that you may suppose."
"If you have such a feeling about going, I would give it up. It's not too late."
"No, I haven't sunk yet to that pass." And, as he spoke, the carriage stopped at the pier.