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Vassall Morton: A Novel

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Title: Vassall Morton: A Novel

Author: Francis Parkman


        
Release date: May 23, 2012 [eBook #39768]

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by Ron Swanson (This file was produced from images
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VASSALL MORTON: A NOVEL ***




Produced by Ron Swanson (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Archive/American
Libraries)






VASSALL MORTON.

A Novel.




BY

FRANCIS PARKMAN,

AUTHOR OF "HISTORY OF THE CONSPIRACY OF PONTIAC," AND "PRAIRIE AND
ROCKY MOUNTAIN LIFE."




  Ecrive qui voudra! Chacun a ce metier,
  Peut perdre impunement de l'encre et du papier.
                                             BOILEAU.




BOSTON: PHILLIPS, SAMPSON AND COMPANY.

1856.




Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the Year 1856, by

PHILLIPS, SAMPSON AND COMPANY,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.




STEREOTYPED AT THE BOSTON STEREOTYPE FOUNDRY.




Vassall Morton.




CHAPTER I.

  Remote from towns he ran his godly race.--_Goldsmith_.


"Macknight on the Epistles,--that's the name of the book?"

"Yes, sir, if you please. I am desirous of consulting it with a
view--"

"Well, this way, Mr. Jacobs. Here's the librarian. Mr. Stillingfleet,
let me introduce my friend, the Reverend Mr. Jacobs, of West
Weathersfield."

"I am proud to make your acquaintance, sir," said Mr. Jacobs, taking
the librarian's hand with an air of diffident veneration.

"Mr. Jacobs wishes to consult Mackwright on the Epistles."

"Macknight, if you please, Dr. Steele."

"O, Macknight. Will you be so kind as to let him have the use of it in
my name?"

"If you will go with Mr. Rubens, sir," said the librarian, "he will
show you the book."

"Thank you, sir," replied Mr. Jacobs, to whom the words were
addressed; and he followed the assistant among the alcoves in a timid,
tiptoe progress, for, to him, the very air he breathed seemed redolent
of learning, and the dust beneath his feet consecrated to science.

Dr. Steele remained behind, conversing with the librarian.

"My friend has something of the ancient apostolic simplicity hanging
about him still. He looks with as much awe at Harvard College library
as I did myself forty-five years ago, when I came down from Steuben to
join the freshman class."

"So you came from Steuben! Did not old John Morton come from the same
place?"

"To be sure he did. He was the glory of the town. He pulled down the
old clapboard meeting house that his father used to preach in, and
built a new one for him: besides giving a start in business to half
the young men of the village."

"Do you see that undergraduate at the end of the hall, standing by the
last alcove, reading?"

"Yes; what about him? He seems a hardy, good-looking young fellow
enough."

"He is John Morton's son."

"Is it possible? I remember him when he was a child, but have not seen
him for these ten years. After his father's death, his mother took him
to Europe, to be educated; but she never came back; she died in
Paris."

"He is Mr. Morton's only child--is he not?"

"Yes; his first wife had no children; and after he had buried
her,--which, by the way, I believe was the happiest hour of his
life,--he married a very different sort of person, Margaret Vassall,
this boy's mother."

"What, one of the old Vassall race?"

"Exactly; and, I suppose, the last survivor. I used to know her. She
was a handsome woman, and, bating her family pride, altogether a very
fine character. She managed her husband admirably."

"Why, what need had John Morton of being managed?"

"O, Morton was a noble old gentleman, a merchant of the old school,
and generous as the day; but he had his faults. He made nothing of his
three bottles of Madeira at dinner, and besides-- Ah, Mr. Jacobs, so
you have found Macknight."

"Yes, sir," said Mr. Jacobs, coming up, "I have the volumes."

"See that young man, yonder. That's the son of your old friend, Mr.
Morton."

"Really! upon my word! Ah! Mr. Morton _was_ a friend to me, sir--a
very kind friend."

And, in the simplicity of his heart, Mr. Jacobs glided up to the
student, and blandly accosted him.

"How do you do, young gentleman? I knew your worthy father. I knew him
well. I have often sat at his hospitable board on anniversary week."

Thus addressed, Vassall Morton looked up from his book,--it was
Froissart's Chronicle,--inclined his head in acknowledgment, and
waited to hear more.

"Ahem!" coughed Mr. Jacobs, a little embarrassed: "your father was a
most worthy and estimable gentleman: a true friend of the feeble and
destitute. Ahem!--what class are you in, Mr. Morton?"

"The junior class," said the young man, a suppressed smile flickering
at the corner of his mouth.

"Ahem! I hope, sir, that, like your father, you will long live to be
an honor to your native town."

"Thank you, sir."

"I wish you good morning."

"Good morning, sir," said Morton, divided between an inclination to
smile at the odd, humble little figure before him, and an
unwillingness to wound the other's feelings.

"Are you ready to go, Mr. Jacobs?" said Dr. Steele.

"If you please, sir, we will now take our departure;"--gathering the
four volumes of Macknight on the Epistles under his arm;--"Good
morning, Mr. Stillingfleet; good morning, Mr. Rubens. I am indebted to
your kindness, gentlemen--ahem!"

"This is the way out, Mr. Jacobs," said Steele to his diffident friend
from West Weathersfield, who, in his embarrassment, was going out at
the wrong door.

"I beg your pardon, sir--ahem!" replied Mr. Jacobs, with a bashful
smile. And Dr. Steele, pointing to the true exit, ushered his rustic
and reverend protege from the sacred precinct of learning.




CHAPTER II.

  Richt hardie baith in ernist and play.--_Sir David Lyndsay_.


"Morton, what was the little old fogy in the white cravat saying to
you just now in the library?"

"Telling me that my father was a worthy man, and that he hoped I
should make just such another."

"Ah, that was kind of him."

"What a pile of books you are lugging! Here, let me take half a dozen
of them for you. You look as if you were training to be a hotel
porter."

"I am laying in for vacation."

"What sense is there in that? Let alone your Latin, Greek, and
mathematics; what the deuse is vacation made for? Take to the woods,
as I do, breathe the fresh air, and see the world at large."

"Do you call it seeing the world at large, to go off into some
barbarous, uninhabitable place, among mosquitoes, snakes, wolves,
bears, and catamounts? What sense is there in that? What can you do
when you get there?"

"Shoot muskrats, and fish for mudpouts. Will you go with me?"

"Thank you, no. There's no one in the class featherwitted enough to go
with you, except Meredith, and he ought to know better."

"Stay at home, then, and improve your mind. I shall be off to-morrow."

"Alone?"

"Yes."

Mr. Horace Vinal shrugged his shoulders, a movement which caused
Sophocles and Seneca to escape from under his arm. Morton gathered
them out of the mud, and thrusting them back again into their place,
left his burdened fellow-student to make the best of his way towards
his den in Stoughton Hall.




CHAPTER III.

  O, love, in such a wilderness as this!--_Gertrude of Wyoming_.


Morton, _en route_ for the barbarous districts of which Vinal had
expressed his disapproval, stopped by the way at a spot which, though
wild enough at that time, had ceased to be a wilderness. This was the
Notch of the White Mountains, perverted, since, into a resort of
_quasi_ fashion. Here, arriving late at the lonely hostelry of one Tom
Crawford, he learned from that worthy person, to whom his face was
well known, that other guests, from Boston, like himself, were seated
at the tea table. Accordingly, descending thither, he saw four
persons. The first was a quiet-looking man, with the air of a
gentleman, and something in his appearance which seemed to indicate
military habits and training. Morton remembered to have seen him
before. At his side, and under his tutelary care, sat two personages,
who, from their dimensions, must have been boys of some seven years
old, but from the solemnity of their countenances, might have passed
for a brace of ancient philosophers. They looked so much alike that
Morton thought he saw double. Each was seated on a volume of Clark's
Commentaries, to raise his chin to the needful height above the table
cloth. Both were encased in tunics, strapped about them with shining
morocco belts. Their small persons were terminated at one end by
morocco shoes of somewhat infantile pattern, and at the other by
enormous heads, with chalky complexions, pale, dilated eyes, wrinkled
foreheads, and mouths pursed up with an expression of anxious care,
abstruse meditation, and the most experienced wisdom.

In amazement at these phenomena, Morton turned next towards the fourth
member of the party; and here he encountered a new emotion, of a kind
quite different. Hitherto, in his college seclusion, he had not very
often met, except in imagination, with that union of beauty, breeding,
and refinement which belongs to the best life of cities, and which he
now saw in the person of a young lady, a year or two his junior. He
longed for a pretext to address her, but found none; when her
father--for such he seemed--broke silence, and accosted him.

"I beg your pardon; is it possible that you are the son of John
Morton?"

"Yes."

"He was my father's old friend. I thought I could scarcely mistake
your likeness to your mother."

"I believe I have the pleasure of speaking to Colonel Leslie."

Leslie inclined his head.

"My title clings to me, I find, though I have no right to it now."

He had left the army long before, exchanging the rough frontier
service for pursuits more to his taste.

"Upon my word," pursued Leslie, after conversing for some time with
the new comer on the scenery and game of the mountains, "you seem to
be _au fait_ at this sort of thing."

"At least I ought to be; I have spent half my college vacations here."

"It is unlucky for us that we must set out for home in the morning.
You might have given us good advice in our sightseeing."

"Crawford will tell you that I am tolerably well qualified to be a
guide."

"You do not look like a collegian. They are generally thin and pale
with studying."

"Oftener with laziness and cigar smoke."

"Very likely. You seem too hardy and active for a student."

Morton's weak point was touched.

"I can do well enough, I believe, in that way. Crawford was boasting,
last year, that he could outwrestle any man in New England. I
challenged him, and threw him on his back."

"You! Crawford is twice as heavy and strong as you are."

"I am stronger than I seem," replied Morton, with great complacency.

And Leslie, observing him with an eye not unused to measure the thews
and sinews of men, saw that, though his frame was light, and his
shoulders not broad, yet his compact proportions, deep chest, and
muscular limbs, showed the highest degree of bodily vigor.

"You are quite right. I would enlist you without asking the surgeon's
advice."

Here the nurse, attendant on the two philosophers, appeared at the
door; and they, obedient to the mute summons, scrambled gravely from
their seats, and, with solemn steps, withdrew. Miss Leslie presently
followed, and Morton and her father were left alone.

"You are from Harvard--are you not?"

"Yes."

"Do you know Horace Vinal?"

"Very well; he is my classmate."

"Is he not thought a very promising young man?"

"He is our first scholar."

"I hear him spoken of as a young man of fine abilities."

"And he knows how to make the best of them."

"Not at all dissipated."

"Not at all."

"And a great student."

"Digs day and night."

"A little ambitious, I suppose."

"A little."

"But very prudent."

"Uncommonly so."

"An excellent young man," exclaimed Leslie; "I think very highly of
Horace Vinal."

Morton cast a sidelong glance at him, and there was a covert smile in
his eye. He began to see a weak spot in his companion.

"He will certainly make his way in the world," pursued Leslie.

"No doubt of it."

"He is not so fond of out-door exercises as you seem to be."

"He is good at one kind of exercise."

"What's that?"

"He can draw the long bow."

Leslie did not see Morton's meaning, and took the words literally, as
the latter intended he should.

"What, have you an archery club at college?"

"No; but there are one or two among us who use the long bow, now and
then, and Vinal beats them by all odds. But he is very modest on the
subject, and never alludes to it. In fact, there are very few who know
his skill in that way."

"It is all the better for his health to have some amusement of the
kind."

"Yes, it would be a pity if his health should suffer."

"I have often thought that his mind was too active for his
constitution."

Morton cast another sidelong look at Leslie. Though he admired the
daughter, he refrained with difficulty from quizzing the father.

"You seem to know Vinal very well."

"Yes, thoroughly; I have known him from childhood; he is the son of my
wife's sister, and I am his guardian. I watch his progress with great
interest."

"You will see him, I dare say, reach the top of the ladder. At least,
it will be no fault of his if he does not."

"I am very glad to hear my good opinion of him confirmed by one who
has seen so much of him."

And, rising, he left the room.

"A very good young man, this seems to be," he thought to himself, as
he did so.

"Amiable, good natured, and all that; but very soft, for a man who has
seen hard service," thought Morton, on his part.

The party reassembled in the inn parlor. Masters William and
Marlborough, having gained a reprieve from their banishment, busied
themselves at the table, the one in poring over Brewster on Natural
Magic, the other in solving a problem of Euclid. Leslie viewed these
infant diversions by no means with an eye of favor, and soon banished
the students to a retirement more suited to their tender years. The
sentence overcame all their philosophy, and they were carried off
howling.

Morton, meanwhile, was breathing a charmed air; and though diffident
in the presence of ladies, and not liberally endowed by nature with
the gift of tongues, his zeal to commend himself to the good opinion
of Miss Edith Leslie availed somewhat to supply the defect. He had
never mixed with the world, conventionally so called, and knew as much
of ladies as of mermaids. But having an ardent temperament and a
Quixotic imagination; being addicted, moreover, to Froissart and
kindred writers; and, indeed, visited with a glimmering of that
antique light which modern folly despises, he would have been ready,
with the eye of a handsome woman upon him, for any rash and ridiculous
exploit. This extravagance did him no manner of harm. On the contrary,
it went far to keep him out of mischief; for in the breast of this
youngster a chivalresque instinct battled against the urgency of
vigorous blood, and taught his nervous energies to seek escape rather
in ceaseless bodily exercises, rowing, riding, and the like, than in
any less commendable recreations.

The close of the evening found him with an imagination much excited.
In short, decisive symptoms declared themselves of that wide-spread
malady, of which he had read much and pondered not a little, but which
had not, as yet, numbered him among its victims. Among the various
emotions, novel, strange, and pleasurable, which began to possess him,
came, however, the dismal consciousness that, with the morning sun,
the enchantress of his fancy was to vanish like a dream of the night.




CHAPTER IV.

  What pleasure, sir, find we in life, to lock it
  From action and adventure?--_Cymbeline_.


Morning came, and the Leslies departed. Morton watched the lumbering
carriage till it disappeared down the rugged gorge of the Notch, then
drew a deep breath, and ruefully betook himself to his day's sport. He
explored, rod in hand, the black pools and plunging cascades of the
Saco; but for once that he thought of the trout, he thought ten times
of Edith Leslie.

Towards night, however, he returned with a basket reasonably well
filled; and, as he drew near the inn, he saw a young man, of his own
age, or thereabouts, sitting under the porch. He had a cast of
features which, in a feudal country, would have been taken as the sign
of noble birth; and though he wore a slouched felt hat and a rough
tweed frock, though his attitude was careless, though he held between
his teeth a common clay pipe, at which he puffed with much relish, and
though he was conversing on easy terms with two attenuated old Vermont
farmers, with faces like a pair of baked apples,--yet none but the
most unpractised eye would have taken him for other than a gentleman.

As soon as Morton saw him, he shouted a joyful greeting, to which Mr.
Edward Meredith, rising and going to meet his friend, replied with no
less emphasis.

"I thought," said Morton, "that you meant to do the dutiful this time,
and stay with your father and family at the sea shore."

"Couldn't stand the sea shore," said Meredith, seating himself again;
"so I came up to the mountains to see what you were doing."

"You couldn't have done better; but come this way, out of earshot."

"Colonel," said Meredith, in a tone of melancholy remonstrance, "this
seat is a good seat, an easy seat, a pleasant seat. Why do you want to
root me up?"

"Come on, man," replied Morton.

"Show the way, then, Jack-a-lantern. But where do you want to lead me?
I won't sit on the rail fence, and I won't sit on the grass."

"There's a bench here for you."

"Has it a back?"

"Yes, it has a back. There it is."

Meredith carefully removed a few twigs and shavings which lay upon the
bench, seated himself, rested his arm along the back, and began
puffing at his pipe again. But scarcely had he thus composed himself
when the tea bell rang from the house.

"Do you hear that, now? Another move to make! Didn't I tell you so?"

"Not that I remember."

"Please to explain, colonel, what you expect to gain by always bobbing
about as you do, like a drop of quicksilver."

"To hear you, one would take you for the laziest fellow in the
universe."

"There's reason in all things. I keep my vital energies against the
time of need, instead of wasting them in unnecessary gyrations. Ladies
at the table! New Yorkers in full feather, or I'll be shot! Now, what
the deuse have lace and ribbons to do in a place like this?"

During the meal, the presence of the strangers was a check upon their
conversation.

"Crawford," said Meredith, when it was over, "have you had that sofa
taken into my room?"

"Yes, sir."

"And the arm chair?"

"Yes, sir."

"And the candles?"

"Yes, sir."

"All right. Now, then, colonel, _allons_."

The name of _colonel_ was Morton's college sobriquet. Meredith led the
way into a room which adjoined his bed chamber, and which, under his
direction, had assumed an air of great comfort. Morton took possession
of the sofa; his friend of the arm chair.

"What's the word with you?" began the latter; "are you bound for the
Adirondacks, the Margalloway, or the Penobscot?"

"To the Margalloway, I think. You mean to go with me, I hope."

"To the Margalloway, or the antipodes, or any place this side of the
North Pole."

"Then, if you say so, we'll set off to-morrow."

"Gently, colonel. One day's fishing here. We have six weeks before us.
What sort of thing is that that you are smoking?"

"Try, and judge for yourself," said Morton, handing his cigar case.
Meredith took a sample of its contents between his fingers, and
examined it with attention.

"I always thought you were a kind of heathen, and now I know it. Where
did you pick up that cigar?"

"Do you find it so very bad?"

"It would not poison a man, and perhaps might pass for a little better
than none at all. But nobody except a pagan would touch it when any
thing better could be had."

"I forgot to bring any from town, and had to supply myself on the
way."

"That goes to redeem your character. Fling those away, or give them to
the landlord; I have plenty of better ones. But a pipe is the best
thing at a place like this, and especially at camp, in the woods."

"So I have often heard you say."

"Mine, though, made a sensation, not long ago."

"How was that?"

"The whole brood of the Stubbs, bag and baggage, passed here this
afternoon."

"Thank Heaven they did not stop."

"They came in their private carriage. I nodded to Ben, and touched my
hat to Mrs. S. You should have seen their faces. They thought there
must be something out of joint in the mechanism of the universe, when
a person of their acquaintance could be seen smoking a pipe at a
tavern door, like a bog-trotting Irishman."

"You should have asked Ben to go with us."

"It would be the worst martyrdom the poor devil ever had to pass
through. Ben seemed displeased with the scenery. He says that the
White Mountains are nothing to any one who, like himself, has seen the
Alps."

"Pray when did Stubb see the Alps?"

"O, the whole family have seen the Alps,--the Alps, Italy, the Rhine,
the nobility and gentry, and every thing else that Europe affords.
They all swear by Europe, and hold the soil of America dirt cheap. You
can see with half an eye what they are--an uncommonly bad imitation of
an indifferent model."

"Let them pass for what they are worth. Have you come armed and
equipped--rifle, blanket, hatchet, and so forth?"

"Yes, and I have brought an oil cloth tent."

"So much the better; it is more convenient than a birch bark shanty."

"I give you notice that I mean to take my ease in that tent."

"I hope you will."

"One can be comfortable in the woods, as well as elsewhere. Remember,
colonel, that we are out for amusement, and not after scalps. Last
summer, you drove ahead, rain or shine, through thickets, and swamps,
and ponds, as if you were on some errand of life and death. For this
once, have mercy on frail humanity, and moderate your ardor."

Morton gave the pledge required. They passed the evening in arranging
the details of their journey, set forth and spent three or four weeks
in the forest between the settled districts of Canada and Maine,
poling their canoe up lonely streams, meeting no human face, but
smoking their pipes in great contentment by their evening camp fire.
They chased a bear, and lost him in a _windfall_; killed two moose,
six deer, and trout without number; and underwent, with exemplary
patience, a martyrdom of midges, black flies, and mosquitoes. And
when, at last, they turned their faces homeward, they wiled the way
with plans of longer journeyings,--more bear, more moose, more deer,
more trout, more midges, black flies, and mosquitoes.




CHAPTER V.

  Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm;
  Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's sway,
  That, hushed in grim repose, expects his evening prey.--_Gray_.


It was a week before "class day,"--that eventful day which was
virtually to close the college career of Morton and his
contemporaries. The little janitor, commonly called Paddy O'Flinn, was
ringing the evening prayer bell from the cupola of Harvard Hall,--its
tone was dull and muffled, some graceless sophomore having lately
painted it white, inside and out,--and the students were mustering at
the summons. The sedate and the gay, the tender freshman and the
venerable senior, the prosperous city beau and the awkward country
bumpkin, one and all were filing from their respective quarters
towards the chapel in University Hall. The bell ceased; the loiterers
quickened their steps; the last belated freshman, with the dread of
the proctor before his eyes, bounded frantically up the steps; and for
a brief space all was silence and solitude. Then there was a
murmuring, rushing sound, as of a coming tempest, and University Hall
disgorged its contents, casting forth the freshmen and juniors at one
door, and the sophomores and seniors at the other.

Of these last was Morton, who, with three or four of his class, walked
across the college yard, towards the great gateway. By his side was a
young man named Rosny, carelessly dressed, but with a lively,
dare-devil face, and the look of a good-natured game cock.

"I shall be sorry to leave this place," said Morton; "I like it. I
like the elms, and the gravel walks, and the scurvy old brick and
mortar buildings."

"Then I am not of your mind," said Rosny; "gravel or mud, brickbats or
paving stones, they are the same to me, the world over. Halloo, Wren,"
to a mustachioed youth who just then joined them; "we are bound to
your room."

"That's as it should be. But where are the rest?"

"Coming--all in good time; here's one of them."

A dapper little person approached, with a shining beaver, yellow kid
gloves, a switch cane, and a very stiff but somewhat dashing cravat,
surmounted by a round and rubicund face.

"Ah, Chester!" exclaimed Wren; "the very man we were looking for. Come
and take a glass of punch at my room."

"Punch, indeed!" replied Chester, whose face had changed from a prim
expression to one of great hilarity the moment he saw his
friends--"no, no, gentlemen, I renounce punch and all its works. The
pure unmixed, the pure juice of the grape for me."

"But, Chester," urged Wren, "won't the pure mountain dew be a
sufficient inducement?"

"The good company will be a sufficient inducement," said Chester,
waving his hand,--"the good company, gentlemen,--and the good liquor.
But what have we here? Meredith and Vinal walking side by side. Good
Heavens, what a conjunction!"

The objects of Chester's astonishment, on a flattering invitation from
Wren, joined the party, which, however, was weakened by the temporary
secession of Rosny, who, pleading an errand in the village, left them
with a promise to rejoin them soon. His place was in a few moments
more than supplied by a new party of recruits, among whom was Stubb.
Arrived at Wren's room, the desk and other appliances of study were
banished from the table; bottles and glasses usurped their place, and
the company composed themselves for conversation, most of them
permitting their chairs to stand quietly on all fours, though one or
two, like heathen Yankees from the backwoods, forced them to rear
rampant on the hind legs, the occupant's feet resting on the ledge
over the fireplace.

A few minutes passed, when a quick, firm step came up the stairs, and
Rosny entered.

"How are you again, Dick?" said Meredith.

"Good evening, Mr. Rosny," echoed Stubb, who sat alone on the window
seat.

"Eh? what's that?" demanded Rosny, turning sharp round upon the last
speaker, with a face divided between indignation and laughter.

"I said, 'Good evening,'" replied Stubb, much disconcerted.

"And why didn't you say, 'Good morning,' yesterday, eh?--when I met
you in Boston, eh? He gave me the cut direct," turning to the company.
"Mr. Benjamin Stubb, here, gave me the cut direct! It was the
pepper-and-salt coat and the thunder-and-lightning breeches that Stubb
couldn't think of bowing to when he was walking in ---- Street, with a
lady. Look here, Stubb,"--again facing the victim,--"what do you take
me for? and what the devil do you take yourself for? I know your dirty
family history. Your grandfather was a bricklayer, and the Lord knows
who your great grandfather was. The best Huguenot blood of France runs
in _my_ veins! My ancestors were fighting at Ivry and Jarnac, while
yours were peddling coal and potatoes about London streets, or digging
mud in a ditch, for any thing you or I know to the contrary." Stubb
gasped. "Your father has a crest painted on his carriage; but where
did he get it? Why, Cribb, the engraver, stole it for him out of the
British peerage."

Stubb, who was weak and timorous, here rose in great confusion,
muttered something about conduct unbecoming to a gentleman, and
meaning to require an explanation, and abruptly left the room.

"That job is finished," said Rosny, composedly seating himself. "_His_
bill is settled for him."

"But, Dick," said Morton, who had been laughing in his sleeve during
the scene, "do you want to be considered as a Frenchman or an
American?"

"I'm an American," answered Rosny--"an American and a democrat, every
inch."

Rosny had adopted democratic principles and habits partly out of spite
against the class to which Stubb belonged, and which he was pleased to
designate as the "codfish aristocracy," and partly because he thought
that he could thus most effectually gain the ends of his impatient,
hankering ambition. His ancestor, the head of an eminent Huguenot
race, had been driven to America by the persecutions which followed
the revocation of the edict of Nantes. The family had lived ever since
in poverty and obscurity; yet this fiery young democrat nourished an
inordinate pride of birth, and never forgot that he was descended from
a line of warlike nobles.

"No, no," said Rosny, as Morton pushed a glass towards him, "drinking
is against my rule-- Well, as it's about the last time,"--filling the
glass,--"here's to you all."

"The last time!" said Morton; "that's a dismal word. If my next four
years are as pleasant as these last have been, I will never complain
of them."

"I tell you, boys," said Meredith, who was tranquilly puffing at his
cigar, "the cream of our lives is skimmed already. Rough and tumble,
hurry and worry--that will be the story with most of us, more or less,
to the end of our days."

"Rough and tumble!" exclaimed Rosny; "so much the better. 'Scots play
best at the roughest game'--that's just my case. Who wants to be
always paddling about on smooth water? Close reefed topsails, a gale
astern, and breakers all round--that's the game."

"Every one to his taste," said Chester, shrugging his shoulders. "I
suppose a salamander loves the fire, but I don't. 'The race of
ambition'--'the unconquerable will'--pshaw! _Cui bono?_ One chases
after his object, and when he has got it, he turns from it, and chases
another. I profess the philosophy of Horace--enjoy the hour as it
flies. Ah! he was a model man, a man after my own heart, a gentleman
and a man of the world. He could drink his Falernian, and thank the
gods for their gifts."

Rosny whispered in Morton's ear, "Chester ought to have been born a
century ago, among the John Bulls, up in the cockloft of Brazen Nose
College, or some such antediluvian hole."

In spite of these derogatory remarks, Chester, besides being one of
the best scholars in the class, was noted for a social, jovial
disposition, which, though, like Fluellen's valor, a little out of
fashion, made him a general favorite.

"Speaking of the next four years," said Wren, "I wonder what plans
each of us has made for that time. For my part, I have no plan at all,
and should be glad to profit by the suggestions of the rest. Come,
Chester, what do you mean to do?"

"Expatiate," said Chester, expanding his hands, and thereby revealing
an odd little antique ring which he wore; "take mine ease, roaming,
like the bee, from blossom to blossom. I will leave the earnest
men--bah!--the men with a mission--to grub on in their vocation. I
will renounce this land of cotton mills and universal suffrage. First
for Paris, to walk the Boulevards, and go to the masked balls and the
opera;--_vive la bagatelle!_--then for Rome, to saunter through the
Vatican and the picture galleries,--but not to moralize with a long
face over fallen grandeur, and the mutability of human affairs. No,
no, gentlemen, I belong to another school of philosophy. I will sit
among the ruins of the Forum, and laugh, like Democritus, at the image
of Death. Then I will recreate myself at Capri, like the Caesars before
me; then enjoy the _dolce far niente_ at Florence, and read the Tuscan
poets in the shades of Vallombrosa."

"But, Chester," interposed Wren, "don't you ever mean to marry and
settle down?"

"I object to that phrase, 'settle down.' It calls up disagreeable
images. It reminds one of the backwoods, log cabins, men in shirt
sleeves, and piles of pine boards and lumber. Yes, certainly, I mean
to marry. What man of taste would leave matrimony out of his scheme of
life? One likes to gather his treasures round him, his pictures, his
vases, and statues; and how can he adorn his rooms with an ornament
more exquisite--where can he find a piece of furniture more charmingly
moulded--than a beautiful woman?"

This flourish, between jest and earnest, he pronounced with a graceful
wave of his hand.

"If, when you have married your beautiful woman," said Morton, "you
find you have caught a Tartar, it will serve you right."

"Hear him," said Chester; "hear the barbarian. He will always be
conjuring up some image of disquiet. 'Rest, rest, perturbed spirit.'"

"He could not rest, if he tried," said Horace Vinal.

"No, he is one of those unfortunates who lie under a sentence of
endless activity. It is a disease, with which men are afflicted for
the sins of their ancestors; and for the sins of mine I was born among
a whole nation of such. Perpetual motion, bustle and whirl,--I grow
dizzy to think of it. They cannot rest themselves, and will not let
any one else rest. Always pursuing, always doing, never enjoying. A
true American cannot enjoy. He would build a steam saw mill in
Arcadia, and dam up the four rivers of Paradise for cotton factories."

"But, Chester," said Wren, "that is not at all like Morton; you know
he hates utilitarianism."

"Yes, but still he cannot rest. He would not build saw mills and dams;
but he would be sure to fire his rifle at some of Adam's live stock,
and set all Eden by the ears. Come, Morton, I have told the company my
plans. Let us hear what yours are."

"My guardian wishes me to enter the law school."

"You are twenty-one now," said Vinal, "and can do as you please."

Vinal was a very tall and slender young man, with a strongly marked
face, though thin and pale; a grave, thoughtful eye, and compressed
lips, expressing a kind of nervous self-control. His dress was very
elaborate and scrupulous, though without the smallest trace of
foppery. He was less popular in the class than Morton, but had the
reputation of greater talents. This he owed, perhaps, to his habitual
reserve; for every one thought that he understood Morton thoroughly,
while few pretended to fathom the silent and self-contained Vinal.

"I should like well enough to study law," was Morton's non-committal
answer.

"I thought, Morton, that you were more of a philosopher. Here you are,
a young fellow, full of blood, and worth half a million, and yet you
speak of buckling down to the law. That is all well enough for poor
dogs like me, who go into the mill from necessity. We drudge on for
twenty years or more, till we have scraped together a competency, or
something better, perhaps, and then we find that we have forgotten how
to enjoy it. We have grown so used to harness that we are good for
nothing out of it, and sacrifice body and soul to our profession. You
have reached already the point that we are straining for. The world is
all before you, man; launch out and enjoy yourself."

"Didn't you just say," asked Rosny, "that Morton couldn't rest, if he
tried?"

"I said he could not rest, but I did not say he could not enjoy
himself. Look at him: his cheek is ruddier and browner than any of us.
Nobody would believe that a fellow like that was not made to enjoy
life. I know Morton. He could roam from blossom to blossom, as Chester
says, with as good a will as any body. He has an eye for the fair sex,
correct as he is at present. He knows a pretty face from a plain one.
The devil will catch him yet with a black eye and a rosy cheek."

"Then," said Morton, "he will show his good opinion of my taste."

Rosny, who had his own reasons for disliking Vinal, here broke in
without ceremony,--

"Be gad, Vinal, he will bait his hook differently when he fishes for
you."

"How will that be, Dick?" said Meredith.

"With a five dollar bank note, and a lying puff in a newspaper; and
Vinal will jump at it like a mackerel at a red rag."

Vinal laughed, but with a bad grace.

"Riches and fame!" said Chester, anxious to smooth away all traces of
irritation--"riches and fame! I call those legitimate objects of
pursuit; and the black eye is positively praiseworthy. Come, Morton,
let us hear your plan. You have not told it yet."

"I defer to Rosny--he is my senior. Dick, some ten or twelve years
from this, I suppose I shall vote against you for the presidency."

"Thank you. By that time you will have no whig party left to vote
with. The democrats will have it all their own way."

"I have often wondered what could have induced a driving man of the
world like you to come to college at all. You have been here more than
a year; and in the same time, with your previous knowledge, you might
have learned as much any where else at half the cost. You are not the
fellow to regard a degree of A. M. with superstitious veneration."

"You are right there, colonel. I am of no kith nor kin to some of your
New England old fogies, who would give their souls for a D. D. or an
LL. D.--and get it, too, though they know no more Greek or Hebrew than
I know of Choctaw, and can barely manage to stumble along through the
Latin Testament. What's a piece of sheep's skin to me? Humbug is the
current coin all the world over, and just as much in this free and
enlightened country as any where else. I have schemes on foot,--not
political,--no matter what they are,--out in the western country; and
I happen to know that a degree from Harvard University is the medicine
that suits my case; with that for my credentials, I shall carry it
over all competitors. Yes, boys, gammon is the word; and the man who
would rise in the world must use the stepping stones."

"You're a victim of the national disease, Rosny," said Chester.
"Rising in the world!--that's the idea that ruins us. It's that that
makes us lean, starveling, nervous, restless, dyspeptic,
hypochondriac,--the most prosperous and most uncomfortable people on
earth. Sit down, man, and take your ease. What garden will thrive if
every plant in it must be dug up every day, and set out in a better
place?"

"Ah, that's good doctrine for you. You have got nothing to gain, and a
good deal to lose. Stand up for the _status quo_, old boy; I would, in
your place. Look at me, though. I was cut adrift at fourteen,--parents
dead,--not a cent in my pocket,--and since then I have tumbled along
through the world as I could. You can't kill me. I have more lives
than a cat. I have been thrown on my back a dozen times; but the
harder I was flung down, the higher I bounced up again. Why, I have
known the time when I was glad to earn a shilling by shovelling snow
off a sidewalk. I have tried my hand at every thing,--printer's work,
lecturing, politics, editing, keeping school,--and do you suppose I
shall be content to rest in the mud all my days? Not a bit of it. I
know my cue better. The time will come when you'll see me shooting up
like a rocket."

Here a broad glare against the window interrupted him, and, looking
out, his auditors saw a bonfire blazing with peculiar splendor under
the windows of the chamber where the Faculty were at that moment in
solemn session. Three proctors and a tutor were hastening towards the
scene of outrage, when a stentorian voice from the adjacent darkness
roared forth a warning that there was a canister of gunpowder in the
fire expected every moment to explode. The prudent officers therefore
kept their distance, busying themselves with noting down the names of
several innocent spectators, while the bonfire subsided to a natural
death, the gunpowder hoax having perfectly succeeded.

Mr. Wren's guests resumed their seats, mingling with graver matters
the usual badinage of a college gathering; and when at length they
separated, only a lonely light or two glimmered from among the many
windows of the academic barracks which overlook the college green.




CHAPTER VI.

  As if with Heaven a bargain they had made
  To practise goodness--and to be well paid,
  They, too, devoutly as their fathers did,
  Sin, sack, and sugar, equally forbid;
  Holding each hour unpardonably spent
  That on the leger leaves no monument.--_Parsons_.


Mr. Erastus Flintlock sat at his counting room, in his old
leather-bottomed arm chair. Vassall Morton, his newly emancipated
ward, just twenty-one, stood before him, the undisputed master of his
father's ample wealth.

"What, no profession, Mr. Morton? None whatever, sir?"

"No, sir, none whatever."

The old man's leathery countenance expressed mingled wrath and
concern.

Flintlock was a stanch old New Englander, boasting himself a true
descendant of the Puritans, whose religious tenets he inherited, along
with most of their faults, and not a few of their virtues. He was
narrow as a vinegar cruet, and just in all his dealings. There were
three subjects on which he could converse with more or less
intelligence--politics, theology, and business. Beyond these, he knew
nothing; and except American history and practical science, he had an
indistinct idea that any thing more came of evil. He distrusted a
foreigner, and abhorred a Roman Catholic. All poetry, but Milton and
the hymn book, was an abomination in his eyes; and he looked upon
fiction as an emanation of the devil. To the list of the cardinal
virtues he added another, namely, attention to business. In his early
days, he had come from his native Connecticut with letters to Morton's
father, who, seeing his value, took him as a clerk, placed unbounded
trust in him, and at last made him his partner. He was a youth of slow
parts, solid judgment, solemn countenance, steady habits, and a most
unpliable conscience. He had no follies, allowed himself no
indulgences, and could enjoy no other pleasures than business and
church-going. He attended service morning, afternoon, and evening, and
never smiled on Sundays. His old age was as upright and stiff-necked
as might have been augured from such a youth. He thought the rising
generation were in a very bad way, and once gave his son a scorching
lecture on vanity and arrogance, because the latter, who had been two
years at college, very modestly begged to be excused from carrying a
roll of sample cotton, a yard and a half long, from his father's store
at one end of the town, to the shop of a retail dealer at the other.

"What, no profession, Mr. Morton?"

"None whatever, sir."

Morton was prepared for the consequence of these fatal words, and
sought to arm himself with the needful patience. It would be folly, he
knew, to debate the point with his guardian, who was tough and
unmanageable as a hickory stump; who would never see any side of a
question but his own, and on whose impervious brain reasons fell like
rain drops on a tarpauline. Flintlock, therefore, opened fire
unanswered, and discoursed for a full hour on duty, propriety, and a
due respect for what he called the general sense of the community,
which, as he assured his auditor, demands that every one should have
some fixed and stated calling, by which he may be recognized as a
worthy and useful member of society. Sometimes he grew angry, and
scolded his ward with great vehemence; then subsided into a pathetic
strain, and exhorted him, for the sake of his excellent father, not to
grow old in idleness and frivolity. Morton, respectful, but obdurate,
heard him to an end, assured him that, though renouncing commerce and
the professions, his life would by no means be an idle one, thanked
him for his care of his property, and took his leave; while the old
merchant sank back into his chair, and groaned dismally, because the
son of his respected patron was on the road to perdition.

A moment's retrogression will explain the young man's recusancy.

On a May evening, some two months before the close of his college
career, Morton sat in lonely meditation on a wooden bench, by the
classic border of Fresh Pond. By every canon of polite fiction, his
meditation ought to have been engrossed by some object of romantic
devotion; but in truth they were of a nature wholly mundane and
sublunary.

He had been much exercised of late upon the choice of a career for his
future life. He liked none of the professions for itself, and had no
need to embrace it for support. He loved action, and loved study; was
ambitious and fond of applause. He had, moreover, enough of the
American in his composition never to be happy except when in pursuit
of something; together with a disposition not very rare among young
men in New England, though seldom there, or elsewhere, joined to his
abounding health and youthful spirits--a tendency to live for the
future, and look at acts and things with an eye to their final issues.

Thierry's Norman Conquest had fallen into his hands soon after he
entered college. The whole delighted him; but he read and re-read the
opening chapters, which exhibit the movements of the various races in
their occupancy of the west of Europe. This first gave him an impulse
towards ethnological inquiries. He soon began to find an absorbing
interest in tracing the distinctions, moral, intellectual, and
physical, of different races, as shown in their history, their
mythologies, their languages, their legends, their primitive art,
literature, and way of life. The idea grew upon him of devoting his
life to such studies.

Seated on the wooden bench at the edge of Fresh Pond, he revolved, for
the hundredth time, his proposed scheme, and summed up what he
regarded as its manifold advantages. It would enable him to indulge
his passion for travel, lead him over rocks, deserts, and mountains,
conduct him to Tartar tents and Cossack hovels, make him intimate with
the most savage and disgusting of barbarians; in short, give full
swing to his favorite propensities, and call into life all his
energies of body and mind. In view of this prospect, he clinched his
long-cherished purpose, devoting himself to ethnology for the rest of
his days.

He had a youthful way of thinking that any resolution deliberately
adopted by him must needs be final and conclusive, and was fully
convinced that his present determination was a species of destiny,
involving one of three results--that he should meet an early death,
which he thought very likely; that he should be wholly disabled by
illness, which he thought scarcely possible; or that, in the fulness
of time, say twenty or twenty-five years, his labors would have issue
in some prodigious work, redounding to his own honor and the
unspeakable profit of science.




CHAPTER VII.

  'Tis a dull thing to travel like a mill horse,
  Still in the place he was born in, round and blinded.
                                          _Beaumont and Fletcher_.


A novel-maker may claim a privilege which his betters must forego. So,
in the teeth of dramatic unities, let the story leap a chasm of some
two years.

Not that the void was a void to Morton. His nature spurred him into
perpetual action; but his wanderings were over at length; and he and
Meredith sat under the porch of Morton's house, a few miles from town.
The features of the latter were swarthy from exposures, while those of
his friend were somewhat pale, and had the expression of one
insufferably bored.

"Colonel, you are the luckiest fellow I know. Here you have been
following the backbone of the continent from Darien to the head of the
Missouri, mixing yourself up with Spaniards and Aztecs, poking sticks
into the crater of Popocatapetl, and living hand and glove with
Blackfeet and Assinnaboins, while I have been doing penance among
bonds and mortgages, and title deeds and leases. My father has thrown
up responsibility and gone to Europe--and so has every body else--and
left all on my shoulders."

"Your time will come."

"I hope so."

"But what news is there?"

"Nothing."

"What, nothing since I went away?"

"The old story. You know it as well as I. Now and then, a new
engagement came out. Mrs. A. approved it, and Mrs. B. didn't; and then
characters were discussed on both sides. Something has been said of
the balls, the opera, and what not; with the usual talk about the
wickedness of the democrats and the fanaticism of the abolitionists."

"You appear to have led a gay life."

"Very!--we need a war, an invasion,--something of the sort. It would
put life into us, and rid us of a great deal of nonsense. You were
born with a stimulus in yourself, and can stand this stagnant sort of
existence; but I need something more lively."

"Then go with me on my next journey."

"Are you thinking of another already? Rest in peace, and thank Heaven
that you have come home in a whole skin."

"I have done the North American continent; but there are four more
left, not to mention the islands."

"And you mean to see them all?"

"Certainly."

"Your science is a convenient hobby. It carries you wherever you fancy
to go."

"You could not do better than go with me."

"I know it; but, if wishes were horses---- I am training Dick to take
my place. I am a model elder brother to that youngster in the way of
cultivating his mind and morals; and when I have him up to the mark, I
shall gain a year's furlough for my pains. But when is your next
journey to begin--next week?"

"No, I mean to pin myself down here, and dig like a mole, for the next
ten months, at least."

"If I had not had ocular proof of what a determined dig you can be, I
should set down your studies as mere humbug."

"But I wish to hear the news."

"I would tell it willingly, if I knew any."

"Have the Primroses come home from Europe yet?"

"Yes."

"And the Everills?"

"I believe not."

"Nor the Leslies, I suppose."

"For a reasonably sensible and straightforward fellow, you have a
queer way of making inquiries. You question like a lady's letter, with
the pith in the postscript. You ask after the Primroses and the
Everills, a stupid, priggish set, for whom you care nothing, as
earnestly as if you were in love with them, and then grow indifferent
when you come to the Leslies, whom you like."

"Did I?" said Morton, in some discomposure; "I ask their pardon. Have
they come home?"

"Not yet, but I believe they mean to come as soon as they have staid
their year out."

"And that will be very soon--early in the spring, or sooner."

"Now I think of it, I made the acquaintance, a few evenings ago, of a
person who, I believe, is a relation or connection of yours--Miss
Fanny Euston."

"O, yes, she is my third, fourth, or fifth cousin, or something of
that sort; but I have not seen her since she was ten years old. She
was a great romp, then, and very plain."

"That last failing is cured. She has grown very handsome."

"The first failing ought to be cured, too, by this time."

"I am not so clear on that point. She is a girl with an abundance of
education, and a good deal of a certain kind of accomplishment--music,
and so on--but no breeding at all. If she had had the training of good
society, she would have been one of a thousand. As it is she cares for
nobody, and does and says whatever comes into her mind, without the
least regard to consequences or appearances."

"Does she affect naturalness, independence, and all that?"

"No, she affects nothing. The material is admirable. It only needs to
be refined, polished, and toned down. It's unlucky, colonel, but in
this world every thing worth having is broken in pieces and mixed with
something that one doesn't want. It's an even balance, good and bad;
there's no use in going off into raptures about any thing. One thing
is certain, though; this cousin of yours has character enough to
supply material for a dozen Miss Primroses, without any visible
diminution."

"I should like to see her. I'll go to-morrow."

"You'd better. But now tell me something more about your journey."

And, in reply to his friend's questions, Morton proceeded to relate
such incidents as had befallen him.




CHAPTER VIII.

                    Beauty is a witch
  Against whose charms faith melteth into blood.
  _D. Pedro_.--If thou wilt hold longer argument,
  Do it in notes.
  _Benedick_.--Now, _divine air_, now is his soul ravished.
                                           _Much Ado about Nothing_.


Morton visited his cousin, Miss Fanny Euston, a guest, for a few days,
at a friend's house in town. By good fortune, as he thought it, he
found her alone; and, as he conversed with her, he employed
himself--after a practice usual with him--in studying her character,
and making internal comments upon it. These insidious reflections,
condensed into a paragraph, would have been somewhat as follows:--

"A fine figure, and a very handsome face; but there is a lurking devil
in her eye, and about the corners of her mouth." Here some ten minutes
of animated dialogue ensued before his observations had shaped
themselves into further results. "She is exceedingly clever; she knows
how to think and act for herself. I should not like to cross her will.
There is fire enough in her to make a hundred women interesting. She
is none of our frosty New England beauties. She could love a man to
the death, and hate him as well. She could be a heroine or a tigress.
Every thing about her is wild and chaotic, the unformed elements of a
superb woman."

Here, the conversation having lasted a half hour or more, his
imagination began to disturb the deductions of his philosophy, and he
was no longer in a mood of just psychological analysis, when, to his
vexation, his cousin's hostess, Miss Jones, entering, brought his
_tete-a-tete_ to a close. She displayed a marvellous fluency of
discourse, and was eloquent upon books, parties, paintings, and the
opera.

"I need not ask you, Mr. Morton, if you have seen Tennyson's new
poem."

"Yes--at the bookseller's."

"But surely you have read it."

"No, I am behind the age."

"Then thank Heaven for it," exclaimed his unceremonious cousin; "for
of all insipidity, and affectation, and fine-spun, wire-drawn trash,
Tennyson carries away the palm. Every body reads him because he is the
fashion, and every body admires him because he is the fashion. But he
is a bubble, a film, a gossamer; there's nothing in him."

This explosion called forth a protest from the poet's admirer.

"May I ask," said Morton to his cousin, "who are your literary
favorites?"

"Not the latter-day poets--the Tennysonian school; their puling
mannerism is an insult to the Saxon tongue."

"But," urged Miss Jones, "you are not quite reasonable."

"Of course I am not. It's not a woman's province to be reasonable."

"Do you subscribe to these poetical heresies, Mr. Morton?"

"On the contrary, I think that Tennyson has often great beauties."

"If he sometimes wrote like an angel," pursued Fanny Euston, "I should
find no patience to see it in a man who could put upon paper such
parrot rhymes as these:--

  'Not a whit of thy tuwhoo,
   Thee to woo to thy tuwhit,
   Thee to woo to thy tuwhit,
   With a lengthened loud halloo,
   Tuwhoo, tuwhit, tuwhit, tuwhoo-o-o!'

Bah! it puts one in a passion to hear such twaddle."

"I see," said her friend, "that nothing less than your own music will
calm your indignation. Pray let us hear the ballad which you set to
music this morning."

"I will sing, if you wish it; but not that ballad."

And she seated herself before the open piano.

"What do you choose, Mr. Morton?"

"The Marseillaise. That, I think, is in your vein."

"Ah! you can choose well!"

And, running her fingers over the keys, she launched at once into the
warlike strains of the hymn of revolution. Her voice and execution
were admirable; and though by no means unconscious that she was
producing an effect, she sang with a fire, energy, and seeming
recklessness that thrilled like lightning through her auditor's veins.
He rose involuntarily from his seat. For that evening his study of
character was ended, and philosophy dislodged from her last
stronghold.

Half an hour later he was riding homeward in a mood quite novel to his
experience. He pushed his horse to a keen trot, as if by fierceness of
motion to keep pace with the fiery influence that was kindling all his
nerves.

"I have had my fancies before this," he thought,--"in fact I have
almost been in love; but that feeling was no more like this than a
draught from a clear spring is like a draught of spiced wine."

That night he fully expected to be haunted by a vision of Fanny
Euston; but his slumbers were unromantically dreamless.

Three days later, he ventured another visit; but his cousin had
returned to her home in the country. By this time he was conscious of
a great abatement of ardor; and his equanimity was little moved by the
disappointment. In a week he had learned to look back on his transient
emotion as an effervescence of the moment, and to regard his relative
with no slight interest, indeed, yet by no means in a light which
could blind him to her glaring faults. He summoned up all that he
could recall of herself and her family, and chiefly of her father,
whom he remembered in his boyhood as a rough, athletic man, whose
black and bushy eyebrows were usually contracted into something which
seemed like a frown. These boyish recollections were far from doing
Euston justice. He was a man of masculine and determined character.
His will was strong, his passions violent; he was full of prejudices,
and when thwarted or contradicted, his rage was formidable. His honor
was unquestioned; he was most bluntly and unmanageably honest. Yet
through the rock and iron of his character, there ran, known to but
few, a delicate vein of poetic feeling. The music of his daughter, or
the verses of his favorite Burns, could often bring tears to his stern
gray eyes. For his wife, whom he had married in a fit of pique and
disappointment, when little more than a boy, he cared nothing; but his
fondness for his daughter was unbounded. He alone could control her;
for she loved him ardently, and he was the only living thing of which
she stood in awe.




CHAPTER IX.

  Elle ne manque jamais de saisir promptement
  L'apparente lueur du moindre attachement,
  D'en semer la nouvelle avec beaucoup de joie,--_Le Tartufe_.


Among Morton's acquaintance was a certain Miss Blanche Blondel. They
had been schoolmates when children; and as, at a later date, Miss
Blanche had been fond of making long visits to a friend in Cambridge,
during term time, Morton, in common with many others, had a college
acquaintance with her, so that they were now on a footing of easy
intercourse. Not that he liked her. On the contrary, she had inspired
him with a very emphatic aversion; but being rather a skirmisher on
the outposts of society, than enrolled in the main battalion, she was
anxious to make the most of the acquaintance she had. She had the eyes
of an Argus, and was as sly, smooth, watchful, and _rusee_ as a
tortoise shell cat; wonderfully dexterous at finding or making gossip,
and unwearied in sowing it, broadcast, to the right and left.

One evening Morton was at a ball, crowded to the verge of suffocation.
At length he found himself in a corner from which there was no
retreat, while the stately proportions of Mrs. Frederic Goldenberg
barred his onward progress. But when that distinguished lady chanced
to move aside, she revealed the countenance of Miss Blondel, beaming
on him like the moon after an eclipse. She nodded and smiled. There
was no escape. Morton smiled hypocritically, and said, "Good evening."
Blanche, as usual, was eager for conversation, and, after a few
commonplaces, she said, turning up her eyes at him with an arch
expression,--

"I have a piece of news to tell you, Mr. Morton."

"Ah!" replied Morton, expecting something disagreeable.

"A piece of news that you will be charmed to hear."

"Indeed."

"Why, how cold you are! And I know that, in your heart, you are
burning to hear it."

"If you think so, you are determined to give my patience a hard
schooling."

"Well, I will not tantalize you any more. Miss Edith Leslie sailed
from Liverpool for home last Wednesday."

"Ah!"

"How cold you are again! Are you not glad to hear it?"

"Certainly--all her friends will be glad to hear it."

"Upon my word, Mr. Morton, you are worse and worse. When a gentleman
dances twice with a young lady on class day, and twice at Mrs.
Fanfaron's ball, and joins her in the street besides, has she not a
right to feel hurt when he hears with such profound indifference of
her coming home after a year's absence?"

Morton could hardly restrain the extremity of his distaste and
impatience.

"Miss Leslie, I imagine, would spend very little thought upon the
matter." And he hastened, first to change the conversation, and then
to close it altogether.

Having escaped from his fair informant, he remained divided between
pleasure at the tidings, and annoyance at the manner in which they had
been told.

In a few days Miss Leslie arrived. Her beauty had matured during her
absence. She was conspicuously and brilliantly handsome, and was
admired accordingly,--a fact which, though she could not but be
conscious of it, seemed to affect her very little. Morton found her
but slightly changed, with the same polished and quiet frankness, the
same lively conversation, not without a tinge of sarcasm, and the same
enthusiasm of character, betraying itself by an earnestness of manner,
and never by any extravagance of expression. He had many opportunities
of seeing her, Miss Blanche Blondel being but rarely present, and, in
his growing admiration of her, the charms of his unbridled cousin
faded more and more from his memory.




CHAPTER X.

  For three whole days you thus may rest
  From office business, news, and strife.--_Pope_.


When the summer heats set in, Meredith, one evening, drove to Morton's
house, and, arrayed in linen and grass-cloth, smoked his cigar under
his friend's veranda with as much contentment as the thermometer at
ninety would permit. The window at his side was that of the room which
Morton used as his study, and the table was covered with books.

"Colonel," said Meredith, "what a painstaking fellow you are! Ever
since you left college--except when you were off on that journey,
which was one of the most rational things you ever did in your
life--you have been digging here among your books, as if you were some
half-starved law student, with a prospect of matrimony."

"I've done digging for the present. It's against my principles to work
much in July and August."

"What do you mean to do?"

"Set out on a journey."

"I suppose so. You are a lucky fellow."

"Give yourself a vacation, and come with me."

"No, I'm in for it for the next two months; but I will have my revenge
before long."

"Three days from your office will never ruin you or your family. Come
with me to New Baden, if you can't do better."

"I think I can manage that,--and I will."

Accordingly, on Monday morning, they took the train thitherward.




CHAPTER XI.

  The company is 'mixed,' (the phrase I quote is
  As much as saying, they're below your notice.)--_Byron_.


On reaching New Baden, towards night, they learned that there was to
be a dance that evening, in the hall.

"The deuse!" ejaculated Meredith, as they entered; "have we come all
this distance to find old faces again at New Baden? Look at that
corner."

Morton looked, and beheld a solemn group taking no part in the
amusements, but scrutinizing the scene with the air of superior
beings. He recognized the familiar countenance of Mrs. Primrose, with
her daughter, Miss Constance Primrose, and her daughter's friend, Miss
Wallflower. There, too, was Mr. Benjamin Stubb, Morton's classmate,
and Miss Primrose's reputed admirer, with several other kindred
spirits. Stubb was a tall and very slender young man, with a grave and
pallid visage, and an uncompromising rigidity of cravat. Though his
brain was unfurnished, his morals were reasonably good, and he went
regularly to church, believing that there was, he could not tell how,
an inseparable connection between good society and the ritual of the
English church. He prided himself on his gentlemanly deportment, and
regarded a lady as a being who is under no circumstances to be
approached, except through the medium of certain prescribed forms and
ceremonies. He seldom noticed those whom he thought his inferiors, and
was very formal and exact towards the select few whom he acknowledged
as his equals. As to superiors, he confessed none, except in the
highest ranks of the English aristocracy, upon whom he looked with
great reverence. He thought that there was no really good society in
America, except the society of Boston, of which he regarded himself
and his connections as the _creme, de la creme_. He cherished a just
hereditary scorn of upstarts and parvenus; for already nearly half a
century had expired since the Stubbs began to rise on golden wings
from their native mud. Nor was this their only claim to ancestral
eminence; since a judicious investment of a little surplus income at
the College of Heralds had revealed the gratifying truth that the
Stubbs of Boston were lineal descendants of King Arthur.

Mrs. Primrose was a very benevolent and estimable person, who knew
nothing of the world beyond her own circle, and looked with dire
reprehension on any deviation from the standard of morals and manners
which she had been accustomed to regard as the correct and proper one.
Miss Constance Primrose realized Stubb's most exalted ideal of a young
lady. She was very pretty, but with a face cold and unchanging as
marble. She carried an unquestionable air of good, not to say of high
breeding; having in this point an advantage over her mother, whose
style savored a little of the simplicity of her early surroundings.
The material, indeed, was very slender; but it had received a
creditable polish; and though she had nothing to say, she said it with
an undeniable grace.

Morton and Meredith paid their compliments to the group, the former
hastening to mingle with the crowd again, while Meredith remained to
exchange a few words with the pretty, modest, and too-much-neglected
Miss Wallflower.

"Upon my word, Mr. Meredith," said Mrs. Primrose, "Mr. Morton has
found a singular pair of acquaintances."

"O, yes," said Meredith; "those are particular friends of his."

"Very singular!" murmured Mrs. Primrose.

Morton was walking slowly up the hall, conversing with an odd-looking
couple--a heavy, thick set man, in the fantastic finery of a Broadway
swell, and a woman of five feet ten, thin and gaunt, with a yellow
complexion, and a pair of fierce, glittering eyes, like an Indian
squaw in ill humor. She was gorgeous in silk, brocade, and diamonds,
and her huge, gloveless, bony fingers sparkled with jewelry. Her
husband, on his part, displayed a mighty breastpin, in the shape of a
war horse rampant, in diamond frostwork.

"Mr. Meredith," murmured the horrified Mrs. Primrose, "pray who are
those persons?"

"Aborigines from Red River. Mr. and Mrs. Major Orson, of Natchitoches.
He is a speculator, I believe, of more wealth than reputation."

"And _are_ they friends of Mr. Morton?"

"O, Morton is a student of humanity. He met them at the tea table, and
thinks them remarkable specimens of natural history."

Mrs. Primrose did not hear this explanation. The trio had now
approached within a few yards; and her whole attention was absorbed in
listening to the high, penetrating voice of the female ogre.

"There's one great and glorious thing about Natchitoches," remarked
Mrs. Orson.

"What's that?" asked Morton.

"You can get every thing there to eat that heart can wish."

"That's a fact," said the major; "there ain't no discount on that."

"Game, and fish, and fruit, and vegetables," pursued the lady; "any
thing and every thing. The north can't compete with it, I tell _you_.
There's the pompano! O, my! Did you ever eat a pompano?"

"Never."

"Then you _have_ got something to look forward to. That's a fish that
_is_ a fish. Why, sir, you can begin at the tail, and eat him clean
away to the head, and the bones is just like marrow! It makes my mouth
water to think of it!"

"O, hush!" cried the major, with sympathetic emotion.

"And then the fruit! Think of the peaches! They beat your nasty little
northern peaches all holler!"

"Yes," added the major, and to have your own boys to shin up the tree
and throw 'em down to you; and to sit under the shade all the
afternoon eating 'em;--that's the way to live!"

"It's all the little niggers is good for, just to pick fruit."

"Troublesome animals, I should think," observed Morton.

"Well, they be; and the growed-up niggers ain't much better. To think
of that girl, Cynthy, major. My! wasn't she one of 'em! The major is,
out of all account, too tender to his niggers, and if it warn't for
me, they wouldn't get a speck of justice done. Why, what are all those
folks moving for? My! supper's ready. I'll go in with this gentleman,
major, and you may foller with any pretty gal that you can get to come
with you. I ain't a jealous woman"--turning to Morton--"I let the
major do pretty much what he pleases."

Mrs. Primrose drew a deep breath. "There must be"--thus she communed
with herself--"something essentially vulgar in the mind of that young
man, if he can neglect a cultivated and refined young lady like
Constance, and at the same time find pleasure in the conversation of a
person like that." And she considered within herself whether it would
not be best to warn Constance not to encourage any advances which he
might in future make. On second thoughts, reflecting that his position
was unquestionable, his wealth great, and that she had never heard any
thing against his morals, she determined to suspend all action for the
present, keeping a close watch, meanwhile, on his behavior.

While Morton was thus brought to the bar in the matronly breast of
Mrs. Primrose, while the jury were bringing in a verdict of guilty,
joined to a recommendation to mercy, the unconscious young man was
leading his companion to the supper room; where, furnishing her with a
huge plate of oysters, he left her in perfect contentment.

Not long after, he encountered Meredith.

"How do you like your friend in the diamonds?"

"She's a superb specimen; about as civilized, with all her jewelry, as
a Pawnee squaw. She has a vein of womanhood, though. I saw her, in the
tea room, fondle a kitten whose foot had been trodden upon, as
tenderly as if it had been a child."

"If you had not been so busy with her, you would have met a person
much better worth your time."

"Who's that?"

"Miss Fanny Euston."

"Do you mean that she is here?"

"She _was_ here,--in that room adjoining. But she has gone; you'll see
nothing of her to-night."

"Will not her being here induce you to stay?"

The question, as he spoke it, had a sound of frankness; but the
shameful truth must be confessed, that, in spite of his friendship for
Meredith, and his admiration of Miss Leslie, he was a little jealous
of his friend.

"No," replied Meredith, "it's out of the question. I must be off the
day after to-morrow. By the way, you never told me how you liked Miss
Euston."

"A rough diamond, needing nothing but to be cut, polished, and set!"

"It's too late, I think, for that. The polishing should have begun
before eighteen. She is quite unformed, and quite unconscious of being
so. I'll leave you here to fall in love with her, if you like; but if
you do, colonel, you'll be a good deal younger than I take you for."

There was something in his friend's tone which led Morton half to
suspect the truth. Meredith had himself a _penchant_ for Miss Fanny
Euston, held in abeyance by a very lively perception of her faults.




CHAPTER XII.

  Will you woo this wildcat?--_Katharine and Petruchio_.


Meredith went away, as he had proposed, leaving Morton at New Baden.
The latter soon came to the opinion that he had never yet found so
interesting a subject of psychological observation as that afforded
him in the person of his relative, Miss Euston. She seemed to him the
most wayward of mortals; yet in the midst of this lawlessness,
generous instincts were constantly betraying themselves, and a certain
native grace, a charm of womanhood, followed her wildest caprices. She
often gave great offence by her brusqueries; yet those who best knew
her were commonly her ardent friends.

Mrs. Primrose looked upon her with her most profound and unqualified
disapprobation. Her daughter copied her sentiments; while Stubb
thought her an outside barbarian of the most alarming character. Fanny
Euston's perceptions were very acute. She saw the effect she had
produced, and seemed to take peculiar delight in aggravating it, and
shocking the prejudices of her critics still more.

One afternoon, Miss Primrose, Mr. Stubb, Fanny Euston, Morton, and
several others, set out on a horseback excursion, matronized by Mrs.
Primrose. At a few miles from New Baden, Morton found himself riding
at his cousin's side, a little behind the rest.

"Do you know, I came this morning, to ask you to join us on our walk
to Elk Ridge."

"Ah, I am sorry I was not there."

"You were there; but you seemed so deep in Ivanhoe, or some other of
your favorites, that I had no heart to interrupt you."

"But that was quite absurd. I should like to have gone."

"I am curious to know what book you were so busy with. Something of
Scott's--was it not?"

"Not precisely."

"Nor one of the new novels," pursued Morton--"those are not after your
taste."

"Not at all; they are all full of some grand reform or philanthropic
scheme, or the sorrows of some destitute, uninteresting little wretch,
with whom you are required to sympathize."

"You are not moulded after the philanthropic model. But may I ask,
what book was entertaining you so much?"

"Napier's Life of Montrose."

"And do you like it?"

"Indeed I do."

"And you like Montrose?"

"Certainly I like him."

"I could have sworn it. Do you remember his verses to the lady of his
heart?"

"That I do," said Fanny Euston,--

  "'Like Alexander I will reign,
      And I will reign alone;
    My heart shall evermore disdain
      A rival on my throne.
    He either fears his fate too much,
      Or his deserts are small,
    Who puts it not unto the touch,
      To win or lose it all.

  "'But if thou wilt be constant then,
      And faithful of thy word,
    I'll make thee famous by my pen,
      And glorious by my sword;
    I'll serve thee in such noble ways
      Was never heard before;
    I'll dress and crown thee all with bays,
      And love thee evermore.'"

"Admirable! I thought I had a good memory, but you beat me hollow. You
repeat the lines as if you liked them."

"Who would not like them?"

"And yet his fashion of wooing would be a little peremptory for the
nineteenth century."

"There are no Montroses in the nineteenth century."

"They are out of date, like many a good thing besides. Not long ago, I
saw some verses in a magazine--a kind of ballad on Montrose's
execution."

"Can you repeat it?"

"I cannot compete with you; but I think I can give you a stanza or
two:--

  "'The morning dawned full darkly,
      The rain came flashing down,
    And the jagged streak of the levin bolt
      Lit up the gloomy town:
    The thunder crashed across the heaven,
      The fatal hour was come;
    And ay broke in, with muffled beat,
      The 'larum of the drum.
    There was madness on the earth below,
      And anger in the sky,
    And young and old, and rich and poor,
      Came forth to see him die.

  "'But when he came, though pale and wan,
      He looked so great and high,
    So noble was his manly front,
      So calm his steadfast eye,--
    The rabble rout forbore to shout,
      And each man held his breath,
    For well they knew the hero's soul
      Was face to face with death.'"

Fanny Euston's eye kindled, as if at a strain of warlike music.

"Go on."

"I have forgotten the rest."

"Then pray find the verses and send them to me. Why is it that, as you
say, such men are out of date?"

"What place, or what career, could they find in a commercial country?"

"Then why were we born in a commercial country?"

"You seem to make an ideal hero of Montrose."

"Not I. I am not the school girl you take me for. I have no ideal
hero. I do not believe in ideal heroes. Montrose was a man, with the
faults of a man; full of faults, and yet not a bad man either."

"Very far from it."

"He had great faults, but grand qualities to match them,--worth a
thousand of the small, tame, correct virtues that one sees
hereabouts."

"Dangerous ideas, those, Mrs. Primrose would tell you."

"Deliver me from Mrs. Primrose!" ejaculated Fanny.

They rode in silence for a few minutes, Morton's companion murmuring
to herself fragments of the lines which he had just repeated.

"Look!" she cried, suddenly. "How slowly our horses have been walking!
The rest are almost out of sight. We had better join them. Will you
race with me?"

"Any thing you please."

"Come on, then."

She touched her horse with the whip, and they set forward at full
speed. Fanny, who was by far the better mounted, soon gained the day.

"Rein up," cried Morton, as they came near the party, "or your horse
will startle the others."

Fanny drew the curb, but not quite successfully; and her rapid arrival
produced some commotion. Stubb's horse, in particular, began to prance
and curvet in a manner which greatly disturbed his rider's equanimity.

"Whoa! Whoa, boy!" said Stubb. "Steady, now! steady, sir! Whoa!"

Fanny's eyes twinkled with malicious delight. She had a great contempt
for Stubb, who, on his part, was mortally afraid of her.

"That's a good horse of yours," pushing close to his side.

"Yes, a very fine horse, indeed. Steady, boy! Steady, now!"

"A capital horse; but he needs a spirited hand like yours to manage
him."

"Whoa! Quiet, now!--poor fellow!"

This last endearing address was checked by a sudden jolt, produced by
a spasmodic movement of the horse, which shook the cavalier to his
very centre.

"Punish him well with your spurs, Mr. Stubb, and let him run; that's
the way to cure him of his tricks. Suppose we try a race together."

"Thank you, Miss Euston, but the fact is-- Whoa, boy! whoa!-- I mean,
the stableman told me that he is rather short of breath."

"O, never mind the stableman. Come, let's go."

"Thank you, Miss Euston, I believe not to-day."

"You astonish me. I will lay any bet you like--you shall name the
wager--any thing you please."

"Really, this is a little too bad!" soliloquized the horrified Mrs.
Primrose. "Miss Euston, I entreat of you--I beg--that we may have no
more racing. It is very dangerous, besides being----"

"What is it besides being dangerous, Mrs. Primrose?"

"_Very_ indecorous."

"I am very sorry, for I have set my heart on a race with Mr. Stubb."

"Mr. Morton," said the distressed lady, aside to that young gentleman,
"you are a prudent and sober-minded person; pray use your influence."

She was interrupted by a most uncanonical ejaculation from the author
of her embarrassments, which, though couched in a foreign language,
petrified her into silence. A sharp gust of wind had blown away
Fanny's veil, and she was on the point of dashing off in pursuit of
it.

"Stop!" cried Morton, "you'll break your neck. Let me get it for you."

The veil sailed away before the wind, and Morton spurred in pursuit,
delighted to display his horsemanship before ladies, though it had no
other merit than a tenacious seat and a kind of recklessness, the
result of an excitable temperament. The ground was rough and broken,
and studded with rocks and savin bushes, and as he galloped at a
breakneck speed down the side of the hill, in a vain attempt to catch
the veil flying, even Fanny held her breath. He secured his prize, as
it caught against a bush, and returned to the road.

"Now, Miss Euston," said Mrs. Primrose, looking folios at the
offender, "I trust we shall be allowed to go on in peace."

There was an interval of repose. Stubb regained his peace of mind.
Miss Primrose, with whom he fancied himself in love, smiled upon him,
and his self-conceit, before shaken in its stronghold, was returning
in full force, when Fanny, who nourished a peculiar spite against this
harmless blockhead, and whom that afternoon a very Satan of mischief
seemed to possess, again rode to his side, and renewed her
solicitations for a race.

"Miss Euston," said Mrs. Primrose, "I am certain you would do nothing
so unladylike as to force Mr. Stubb to race against his will. Consider
the example you would set to Georgiana Gosling, who always imitates
what she sees you do."

The words were mild and motherly; but the countenance of the outraged
matron had an uncompromising look of reprehension, which exasperated
Fanny's wayward humor beyond measure. She began, it is true, a lively
conversation on general topics with the intelligent Stubb, but,
meantime, by alternately checking and exciting her horse, and urging
him to play a variety of antics, she contrived to infect her
companion's steed with the like contagion. He pranced, plunged, and
chafed, till his rider was brought to the verge of despair.

The road had become quite narrow, running through a thick forest,
frequented chiefly by woodcutters in the winter, and hunters of the
picturesque in summer. Fanny's imitator, the adventurous Miss Gosling,
a little girl of fourteen, had ridden a few rods in advance of the
rest, when suddenly they saw her returning, astonished and
disconsolate.

"We can't go any farther; there's a great tree fallen across the
road."

A severe thundergust of the night before had overthrown a hemlock, the
trunk of which, partly sustained by the roots and branches, formed a
barrier about four feet from the ground. It was impossible to pass
through the woods on either side, as they were very dense, and choked
with a tangled growth of laurel bushes.

"How very annoying!" said Miss Primrose.

"What shall we do?" inquired Miss Gosling.

"Why, jump over it, to be sure," said Fanny. "Mr. Stubb and I will
show you the way."

"You are surely not in earnest!" cried Mrs. Primrose.

"Of course I am. I have taken higher leaps at the riding school,
twenty times."

"You had better not," said Morton, who had alighted by the roadside to
draw his saddle girth.

"It is too dangerous to be thought of for a single moment," added Mrs.
Primrose.

"Our horses," pursued the indiscreet Stubb, "are not used to leaping,
and some of the ladies would certainly be hurt."

"The fool!" thought Morton. "He has done it now."

Fanny threw a laughing, caustic glance at her victim.

"_Mine_ will leap, I know; and you are not a lady. Come, Mr. Stubb."

"Miss Euston," interposed the excited Mrs. Primrose, "this must not
be. I am here in your mother's place, and she will hold me responsible
for your safety. I forbid you to go, Miss Euston."

Fanny looked for a moment in her face. Morton caught the expression.
It was one of unqualified, though not ill-natured, defiance.

"Come," cried Fanny again, and ran her horse towards the tree. She
leaped gallantly, and cleared the barrier; but it was evident that she
had lost control of the spirited animal, who galloped at a furious
rate down the road.

Morton was still on foot, busied with his saddle girth.

"The crazy child!" exclaimed Mrs. Primrose; "her horse is running
away. Go after her--pray!--Mr. Stubb--somebody."

"O, quick! quick!--do," cried little Miss Gosling, who idolized Fanny,
and was in an agony of fright for her.

Thus exhorted, the desperate Stubb cried, "Get up," and galloped for
the tree; but his horse balked, and, leaping aside, tumbled him into
the mud. The ladies screamed. Morton would have laughed, if he had not
been too anxious for Fanny.

"Get out of the way, Stubb," he cried, mounting with all despatch.

Miss Primrose's admirer gathered himself up, regained his hat, which
had taken refuge in a puddle, and looked with horror at a ghastly
white rent across his knee. Morton spurred his hack against the
barrier, which the beast cleared with difficulty, striking his hind
hoofs as he went over. After riding a short distance, he discovered
Fanny, and saw, to his great relief, that she was regaining control
over her horse. Half a mile farther on, the road divided. The larger
branch led to the right, Morton did not know whither; the smaller
turned to the left, and after circling through the woods for two or
three miles, issued upon the high road. Fanny, who was ignorant of the
way, took the right hand branch. In a few minutes after, she had
brought her horse to a trot, and Morton rode up to her side.

"You are wiser than I am, if you know where we are going."

"I thought you knew the way. You were to have been our guide."

"We are on the wrong road. You should have turned to the left."

"But have you no idea where this will lead us?"

"Into a cedar swamp, for what I know. Had we not better turn back?"

"O, don't speak of turning back. I am in no mood for turning back. Let
us keep on. I am sure this will bring us out somewhere."

"As you please," said Morton, knowing himself to be in the position of
an angler, whose only chance of managing his salmon is to give it
line.

"Where are all the rest?"

"Holding a convention behind the tree, I suppose. At least, I left
them there."

"And did not Mr. Stubb dare the fatal leap?"

"He tried, and was thrown into a mud puddle."

"No bodily harm, I hope."

"No; beaver and broadcloth were the principal sufferers. But his
conceit is shaken out of him for twenty-four hours, at least."

"Then I have wrought a miracle, and can claim to be canonized on the
strength of it."

"I hope you may be; but I never expected to see your name in the
calendar of saints."

"As you will not allow me to be a saint, I suppose you consider me as
mad. Sanctity and madness, they say, are of kin."

"A hair's breadth, or so, on this side madness."

"Then I am entitled to great credit for keeping my wits at all. What
reasonable girl would not be driven mad with Mrs. Primrose to watch
her, and disapprove of her, and correct her? Strange--is it not?--that
some people--if Mrs. Primrose will allow me to use so inelegant an
expression--are always rubbing one against the grain."

"To give you your due, I think you have paid off handsomely any grudge
you may owe in that quarter."

"There is consolation in that. Tell me--you are of the out-spoken
sort--are you not of my opinion? Let me know your mind. Mr. Stubb
is----"

"A puppy."

"And the Primroses are----"

"Uninteresting."

"For uninteresting, say insufferable. If Lucifer wishes to gain me
over to his side, let Mrs. Primrose be made my guardian angel, and his
work is done."

"Your horse has cast a shoe," said Morton, abruptly,--"yes; and he is
lame besides."

"It is this broken, stony road. I wish we were at the end of it."

"So do I. If the clouds would break for a moment, and show us the sun,
I could form some idea of the direction we are following."

"Why," said Fanny, in alarm, looking at her watch, "the sun must be
very near setting."

Morton began to be very anxious, for his companion's sake, when, a
moment after, they came upon a broader track, which intersected the
other, and seemed a main thoroughfare of the woodcutters.

"This looks more promising," said Morton; and turning to the left,
they pushed their horses to their best pace. Twilight came on, and it
was quite dark when they emerged at length upon the broad and dusty
highway. In a few minutes they saw a countryman, with his hands in his
pockets, and a long nine between his lips, lounging by the roadside.

"How far is it to New Baden?"

"Wal," replied the man, after studying his querist in silence for
about half a minute, "it's fifteen mile strong."

Morton looked at Fanny, whose horse was very lame, and who, in spite
of her spirit, began to show unmistakable signs of fatigue.

"Is there a public house any where near?"

"Yas; it ain't far ahead to Mashum's."

"How far?"

"Rather better nor a mile."

On coming to the inn, Morton commended Fanny to the care of the
landlady, an honest New Hampshire woman, remounted without delay, and
urged his tired horse to such speed that he reached the hotel before
half past nine. His arrival relieved the anxieties, or silenced the
tattle of the inmates; and in the morning Fanny's uncle drove to the
inn, and brought back the adventurous damsel to New Baden.




CHAPTER XIII.

  Men will woo the tempest,
    And wed it, to their cost.--_Passion Flowers_.

  Then fly betimes, for only they
    Conquer love that run away.--_Carew_.


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.




CHAPTER XIV.

  * * * One fire burns out another's burning,
    One pain is lessened by another's anguish;
  Turn giddy, and be holp by backward turning;
    One desperate grief cures with another's languish.
  Take thou some new infection to thine eye,
  And the rank poison of the old will die.--_Romeo and Juliet_.


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 profound
  And 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 reentered 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.




CHAPTER XV.

  Yet even these joys dire jealousy molests,
  And blackens each fair image in our breasts.--_Lyttleton_.


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:--

  "A fiery soul, which, working out its way,
   Fretted the pygmy body to decay,
   And o'er informed the tenement of clay."

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.




CHAPTER XVI.

_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
demon!--_Le Medecin Malgre Lui_.

  Thus day by day and month by month we past;
  It pleased the Lord to take my spouse at last--_Pope_.


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.




CHAPTER XVII.

  Beshrew me, but I love her heartily,
  For she is wise, if I can judge of her;
  And fair she is, if that mine eyes be true;
  And true she is, as she hath proved herself;
  And therefore, like herself, wise, fair, and true,
  Shall she be placed in my constant soul.--_Merchant of Venice_.


A week after he had heard the tidings from the old housekeeper, Morton
saw Dr. Steele coming out of a patient's door and getting into his
chaise.

"Good morning, Dr. Steele."

"Sir, your servant," said the old-fashioned doctor.

"I'm sorry to hear that Mrs. Leslie is so ill."

"It's very sad," said the doctor. "Now, what the deuse is this young
fellow stopping me for?"--this was his internal comment.

"I hope you don't despair of her."

"Well, sir, she will hold out to-morrow, and the next day, too."

"I beg your pardon. Your check rein is loose. Let me make it right."

"Thank you, Mr. Morton," said the doctor, somewhat mollified.

"Ahem!--Colonel Leslie is well, I hope."

"Apparently so, sir."

"And--ahem!--his family, too."

"I wasn't aware he had a family."

"I mean--that is to say--his daughter--Miss Leslie."

The shrewd doctor turned his gray eyes sideways on the querist.

"Ah, his daughter. What did you wish to know of her, sir?"

"Merely to inquire----" said Morton, stammering and blushing visibly.
"I mean only to ask if she is well."

"I know nothing to the contrary. She seemed very well when I brought
her down from Matherton last evening. I dare say, though, she can tell
you herself a great deal better than I can. Good morning, Mr. Morton."

And with a slight twinkle in his eye, Dr. Steele drove off.

Morton looked after the chaise, as it lumbered down the street.

"May I be hanged and quartered if I ever question you again; you are
too sharp, by half."

The doctor's information was very welcome, however; and, armed with an
anxious inquiry after her mother's health, Morton proceeded to call
upon Miss Leslie. She had come to the city, as he had already judged,
on some mission connected with the wants of the invalid, and was to go
back to Matherton, with Dr. Steele, in the afternoon.

Thenceforward, for a week or upwards, he saw her no more; but, during
the interval, he contrived, by various expedients, to keep himself
advised of the condition and movements of the family at Matherton.
Among other incidents, he became aware of two visits made them by
Vinal, and was tormented, in consequence, with an unutterable
jealousy. One morning he met the purblind old housekeeper, mousing
along in spectacles through the crowded street, and, stopping her, to
her great alarm and perplexity, he made his usual inquiry concerning
Mrs. Leslie's health. This investigation led to the discovery that
Miss Edith was coming from Matherton that very afternoon.

Morton, upon this, grew so restless, that he could not refrain from
going to the railroad station, a little before the train was to come
in. And here his worst fear was realized; for he beheld, slowly pacing
along the platform, the hated form of Horace Vinal. Morton retreated
unseen, went into a neighboring hotel, and seated himself, a little
withdrawn from a window, where he could see all that passed. The train
arrived; and soon after Vinal appeared, conducting Miss Leslie to a
carriage, with an air, as Morton thought, of the most anxious
devotion. He grasped his walking stick, and burned with a feverish
longing to break it across his rival's back.

He saw Miss Leslie on the next day, and thus added fuel to a flame
which already burned high enough. In short, he found himself in that
most profoundly serious and profoundly ridiculous of all conditions,
the condition of being over head and ears in love,--and his zeal for
science was merged utterly in a more engrossing devotion. By one means
or another, he contrived to keep pace with the course of things at
Matherton, and learned from day to day that Mrs. Leslie was
worse,--that she seemed to revive a little,--that she was on the point
of death,--that she was dead. By the time this sad climax was reached,
he had been starving a fortnight from the sight of his mistress,
having the consolation to know that meantime his rival had made at
least four visits to Matherton.

One morning Morton was pacing the street in an abstracted mood, his
looks bent on the bricks, when, chancing to look up, he saw those very
eyes which his fancy had been that moment picturing, employed in
guiding their owner's steps over a crossing towards him. As Edith
Leslie stepped upon the sidewalk, she saw him for the first time. He
bowed, joined her, spoke a few bungling words of condolence, and
walked on at her side. After the fashion of those who are peculiarly
anxious to appear at their best advantage, he appeared at his worst.
And when his companion bade him good morning on the steps of her
father's house, she left him in a most unenviable mood, muttering
maledictions against himself and his fate, and brought, indeed, to the
borders of despair. This depression, however, was not long in
producing its reaction, under the influence of which, adopting his
usual panacea against mental ailments, he mounted his horse, and
spurred into the country.

Here, about sunset, he beheld a horseman, slowly pacing along the road
in front. On this, he drew rein, and began to look about him for the
means of escape; for in the person of the rider he recognized his
classmate Wren, to whose society he was far from partial. Neither lane
nor by-road was to be seen.

"At the worst," he thought, "it is but a mile or two;" and, setting
forward at a trot again, he was in a moment at his classmate's side.

"How are you, Wren?"

"Ah, Morton, good evening," exclaimed Wren, with a graceful wave of
his hand. "I'm delighted to see you. A charming evening--isn't it?"

"Charming."

"That's a fine horse you have."

"Tolerably good."

"Did you ever observe this fellow that I'm riding? Do you see how long
and straight he is in the back? Well, that's the Arab blood that's in
him. His grandfather was a superb Arab, that the Pacha of Egypt gave
my uncle when he was travelling there;" and he proceeded to dilate at
large on the merits and pedigree of his horse, the truth being that he
and his ancestry before him had been born and bred in the State of
Vermont. Morton listened with civil incredulity, and wished his
companion at the antipodes.

"Ah, there's my cousin's house," exclaimed Wren, pointing to a very
pretty cottage and grounds which they were approaching--"Mary Holyoke,
you know--Mary Everard that was some three months ago. What a
delightful retreat for the honeymoon!"

"Very," said Morton.

"Stop there with me, will you? I'm going in for a few minutes, to wish
them a pleasant journey. They are going to Niagara to-morrow."

"Thank you, I believe I won't stop."

"As you please, my dear fellow. I think they are quite right to travel
now; it's a better season than the spring; and a honeymoon journey,
after all, isn't _all_ romance, you know. Besides, they are going to
have a charming companion--Miss Leslie."

"I thought that she had just lost her mother-in-law."

"That's the very thing. She's almost ill with watching night after
night; so Mary,--they used to be friends at school,--has been very
anxious that she should make the journey with them, for a change of
scene, you know,--and Colonel Leslie has persuaded her to go."

"When will they leave town?"

"To-morrow. They mean to spend a few days at Trenton, and then go to
the Falls. But here we are; won't you change your mind, and come in?"

"No, thank you. Good night."

"Good evening, then;" and waving his hand again, Wren trotted up the
avenue.

"Virtue never goes unrewarded," thought Morton; "if I hadn't joined
the fellow, I might not have known about this journey."

On the next day he discovered that they had actually gone, and that,
as Wren had said, Niagara was to be the ultimatum of their tour. On
the following morning, he himself took the western train, and made all
speed for the Falls.




CHAPTER XVIII.

  If folly grows romantic, I must paint it.--_Pope_.


On the American side of the Niagara, a few miles below the Falls, is a
deep chasm, bearing the inauspicious christening of the Devil's Hole.
Near it there is--or perhaps was, for things have changed
thereabouts--a path winding far down among rocks and forests, till it
leads to the brink of the river. Here, darkened by the beetling cliffs
and sombre forests, the Niagara surges on its way, like a compressed
ocean, raging to break free. At the verge of this watery convulsion
stood Holyoke and his wife, Miss Leslie, and Morton, whom they had
chanced to meet that morning.

"It is very fine, no doubt," said the good-natured, though very
shallow Mrs. Holyoke, "but I have no mind to take cold in these dark
woods. If we stay much longer, I believe I shall go mad, looking at
that rushing, foaming water, and throw myself in. Come, Harry, let us
go back to daylight again."

"Just as you please," said the model husband, offering his arm.

"Come, Edith;--why, she really seems to like it;--Edith!--she don't
hear me; no wonder, in all this noise;--Edith, we are going back to
the upper world. You can stay here, if you please, with Mr. Morton."

But Miss Leslie chose to follow her friend; while Morton aided her up
the rough path.

"I have observed," he said, as they came to smoother ground, "in our
excursions yesterday and to-day, that Mrs. Holyoke has not much of
your liking for rocks, trees, and water. I mean, that she has no great
taste for nature."

"At all events, she has an eye for what is picturesque in it. She is
an artist, you know, and paints in water colors extremely well."

"Yes, and whenever she sees a landscape, she thinks only how it would
look on paper or canvas, and judges it accordingly. That is not a
genuine love of nature. One does not value a friend for good looks, or
dress, or air; and so, in the same way, is not a true fondness for
nature independent, to some extent at least, of effects of form, or
color, or grouping?"

"It does not imply, I think, any artistic talent, or even a good eye
for artistic effect. And yet I cannot conceive of a great landscape
artist being without it, any more than a great poet."

"If he were, he would be no better than a refined scene painter. We
are in a commercial country; so pardon me if I use commercial
language. This liking for nature is a capital investment. She is
always a kind mistress, a good friend, always ready with a
tranquillizing word, never inconstant, never out of humor, never sad."

"And yet sometimes she can speak sadly, too."

Edith Leslie said no more; but there came before her the remembrance
of her long watchings in the room of the dying Mrs. Leslie, when,
seated by the window, open in the hot summer nights, she had listened,
hour after hour, mournfully, drearily, almost with superstitious awe,
to the chirping of the crickets, the plaintive cry of the
whippoorwill, and now and then the hooting of a distant owl.

"Here in America," continued Morton, "we ought to make the most of
this feeling for nature; for we have very little else."

"And yet there is less of it here than in some other countries; in
England, for instance."

"We are too busy for such vanities. Besides, we are just now in an
unlucky position. A wilderness is one thing; savageness and solitude
have a character of their own; and so has a polished landscape with
associations of art, poetry, legend, and history."

"And we have destroyed the one, and have not yet found the other."

"And so, between two stools we fall to the ground."

"If you have a liking for a wilderness and primitive scenery, I don't
think that you have much reason to complain; for you, at least, have
contrived to see something of them."

"And you of the other sort; art and history wedded to nature; at
Tivoli, for example,--at the Lake of Albano; where else shall I say?"

"Say, at Giardini, in Sicily."

"Why at Giardini? I never heard of it before."

"Not that the view there is finer than in some other places, though
towards evening it is very beautiful. You see the ocean on one side,
and the mountains on the other, covered to the top with orange, lemon,
and olive trees, and Mount Etna rising above them all, with a spire of
white smoke curling out of its crater, tinted with red, yellow, and
purple, where the sunset strikes it. On the mountain above you there
is an ancient theatre, where a Greek audience once sat on the stone
benches, and after them, in their turn, a Roman. On the peak of the
mountain over it is a Saracen castle, and, not far off, a Norman
tower."

"So that the whole is an embodiment of poetry and history from the
days of the Odyssey downwards."

"Nobody, I think, who has seen that eastern shore of Sicily can have
escaped without some strong impression from it. The Fourrierites, you
know, pretend to believe that the earth is a living being, with a
soul, only a larger one, like ours that creep on the outside of it.
One is sometimes tempted to adopt their idea, and fancy that the
changing face of nature is the expression of the earth's thoughts, and
its way of communicating with us."

"A landscape will sometimes have a life and a language,--that is, when
one happens to be in the mood to hear it,--and yet, after all,
association is commonly the main source of its power. The Hudson, I
imagine, can match the Rhine in point of mere beauty; but a few ruined
castles, with the memories about them, turn the tables dead against
us."

"You have always--have you not?--had a penchant for the barbarism of
the middle ages."

"Not for their barbarism, but for the germs of civilization that lay
in the midst of it. Religion towards God, devotion towards
women--these were the vital ideas of the middle ages."

"But how were those ideas acted on? Their religion was not much better
than a mass of superstitions."

"Not more gross and vulgar than the spirit rapping superstition, the
last freak into which this age of reason has stumbled. And, for the
other idea, the fundamental idea of chivalry, we are beginning to
replace it with woman's rights, Heaven deliver us!"

"Pardon me if I doubt whether ladies in the middle ages were better
treated than they are now. The theory was admirable, no doubt, but the
practice, if there were any, seems at this distance a little
ridiculous."

"Chivalry was like Don Quixote, who stands for it--fantastic and
absurd enough on the outside, but noble at the core."

"But you would not imply seriously that you would prefer the age of
chivalry to this nineteenth century."

"No, the reign of shopkeepers is better than the reign of cutthroats.
But the nineteenth century has no right to abuse the middle ages. The
best feature of its civilization is handed down from them. That
feeling which found a place in the rough hearts of our northern
ancestry, half savages as they were, and gave to their favorite
goddess attributes more high and delicate than any with which the
Greeks and Romans, at the summit of their refinement, ever invested
their Venus; the feeling which afterwards grew into the sentiment of
chivalry, and, hand in hand with Christianity, has made our modern
civilization what it is,--that is the heritage we owe to the middle
ages, and for which we are bound to be grateful to them. It was a
flower all the fairer for springing in the midst of darkness and
barbarism; and now that we have it in a kinder soil, we can only hope
that it is not fast losing its fragrance and brightness."

"Of that, I imagine, a woman is a very poor judge; but if it has lost
its antique freshness, at all events we can enjoy it in peace and
tranquillity, and be spared the risk of life and limb in gathering it.
Those sweetbrier blossoms that grow yonder, down the side of the
precipice, are very pretty, but it would require nothing less than a
paladin, or a knight errant, made crazy with the hope of a smile, to
get them and bring them up."

"Now it is you that asperse the present, and I that will defend it."
And the words were hardly spoken before the young fool was over the
edge of the cliff, scarcely hearing his companion's startled cry of
remonstrance.

The rock sloped steeply to a few feet below the spot where the brier
grew, and then sank in a sheer precipice of a hundred feet or more, so
that if hand or foot had failed him, his career would have ended
somewhat abruptly. To the spectatress above the danger seemed
appalling; but, with the climber's practised eye and well-strung
sinews, it was in fact very slight. Once, indeed, a fragment of stone
loosened under his foot, and fell with a splintering crash upon the
rocks below, followed by a shower of pebbles and gravel, rattling
among the trees. But he soon reached his prize, secured it in his
hatband, and grasping the friendly root of a spruce tree, drew himself
up to the level top of the cliff.

Here he saw the fruit of his Quixotism. Edith Leslie, pale as death,
seemed on the very verge of fainting. He sprang in great consternation
to her aid, supported her to a rock near at hand, on which she could
rest; and as her momentary dizziness passed away, she began to
distinguish his eager words of apology and self-reproach.

"You will think that I have grown backward into a child again. Think
what you will; I deserve your worst thought; only do not believe that
I could fancy such paltry exploits and paltry risks could be a tribute
worthy of you; or that you are to be served with such boy's service as
that. Here are the flowers: throw them away, or keep them as a memento
of my absurdity; but let them remind you, at the same time, that
wherever your wish points, there I would go, if it were into the jaws
of fate."

Here, looking up, he saw the expediency of curtailing his eloquence;
for not far off appeared their two companions, returning to look for
them. Both Miss Leslie and he had much ado to explain, the one why her
face was so pale, the other why his dress was so dusty and disordered.
The carriage was waiting for them on the road near by; and their
morning's excursion being finished, they proceeded towards it, Morton
leading the way in silence.

His first feeling had been one of compunction and indignation at
himself; but close upon it followed another, very different--a sense
of mixed suspense and delight. What augury might he not draw from the
pale cheek and fainting form of his companion?




CHAPTER XIX.

  For, in the days of yore, the birds of parts
  Were bred to speak, and sing, and learn the liberal arts.
                                        _The Cock and the Fox_.

  Thine is the adventure, thine the victory;
  Well has thy fortune turned the dice for thee.
                                        _Palamon and Arcite_.


During the rest of the journey, Morton, on Mrs. Holyoke's invitation,
was one of the party. Again and again he was impelled to learn his
fate; but recoiled from casting the die, dreading that his hour was
not come. Still, though every day more helplessly spell-bound, his
mood was not despondent.

They came to the town of ----, a half day from home.

"My household gods are not far off," said Morton. "My father was born
at Steuben, a few miles below, where my grandfather used to preach
against King George, and stir up his parish to rebellion. I have
relations there still, and have a mind to spend to-morrow with them."

This announcement proceeded much less from family affection than from
another motive. Mrs. Holyoke saw it in an instant.

"Excellent! Then Miss Leslie can accept her friend's invitation to
make a day's visit at this place; and you will meet her and escort her
to Boston."

And Morton, much rejoiced at this successful issue of his diplomacy,
repaired to his relatives at Steuben; Holyoke and his wife proceeded
homeward; while Miss Leslie remained to accomplish the visit with her
country friend.

Morton spent a quiet day in the primitive New England village, a place
of which boyish association made him fond. On the next morning, Miss
Leslie was to come to Steuben, with her hostess; but as there was an
abundance of time before the train would appear, he strolled along a
quiet road leading back into the country. He soon came to an old inn,
over whose tottering porch King George's head might once have swung.
Nothing human was astir. The ancient lilacs flaunted before the door;
the tall sunflowers peered over the garden fence; the primeval
well-sweep slanted aloft, far above the mossy shingles of the roof.
The rural quiet of the place tempted him. He sat under the porch, and
watched the swallows sailing in and out of the great barn whose doors
stood wide open, on the opposite side of the road.

A voice broke the silence--a voice from the barn yard. It was the
voice of a hen mother, the announcement that an egg was born into the
world. Not the proud, exulting cackle which ordinarily proclaims that
auspicious event, but a repining, discontented cry, now rising in
vehement remonstrance with destiny, now sinking into a low cluck of
disgust. Morton, skilled in the language of birds, construed these
melancholy cacklings as follows:--

"Whither does all this tend? Why is my happiness blighted, my
aspirations repressed? Why am I forever penned up within these narrow
precincts, amid low domestic cares, and sordid, uncongenial,
unsympathizing associates? And thou, my white and spotless offspring,
what shall be thy fate? To be steeped in hot water, and eaten with a
spoon? Or art thou to be the germ of an existence wretched as my own,
doomed to a ceaseless round of daily parturition? O, weariness! O,
misery! O, despair!"

And throwing her ruffled feelings into one indignant cackle, the hen
was silent.

The advent of a human biped here enlivened the scene. This was a young
gentleman on horseback, a collegian to all appearance, admirably
mounted, but bestriding his horse with the look of one who has just
passed his first course under the riding master, and rides by the
book, as Touchstone quarrelled. This important personage, with an air
oddly compounded of assumption and timidity, proceeded to call the
hostler, and order oats for his horse, after which he strutted into
the house, switching his leg with his whip.

As ample time remained, Morton continued his walk along the road, his
mood in harmony with the brightness of the morning. He was in a humor
to please himself with trifles. A ground squirrel chirruped at him
from a crevice of the wall. He stood watching the small, shy visage,
as it looked out at him. Then a red squirrel, a much livelier
companion, uttered its trilling cry from a clump of hazel bushes.
Morton seated himself on a stone very near it. The squirrel resented
the intrusion, ran out on a fence rail towards the offender,
chattered, scolded, swelled himself like a miniature muff, made his
tail and his whole body vibrate with his wrath; then suddenly dodged
down behind the rail and peered over it at the trespasser, his nose
and one eye alone being visible; then bolted into full sight again,
and scolded as before, jerking himself from side to side in the
extremity of his petulance; till at last, without the smallest
apparent cause, he suddenly wheeled about and fled, bounding like the
wind along the top of the stone wall.

This interview over, Morton looked at his watch, saw that it was time
to go back towards the village, and began to retrace his steps
accordingly. He had gone but a few paces, when he saw a countryman, a
simple-looking fellow, running at top speed, and in great excitement,
up a byway, which led to the railroad, the latter crossing it by a
high bridge, at some distance from the station.

"What's the matter?" demanded Morton.

"The railroad cars!" gasped the countryman.

"What of them?"

"They'll all go to smash, and no mistake."

"What!" cried Morton, aghast.

"Fact, mister. Some born devil has been and sawed the bridge timbers
most through in the middle."

"What!" cried Morton again.

"Sure as I stand here! I seen the heaps of sawdust on the road. That's
the way I come to take notice. The minute the locomotive gets on the
bridge, down she'll go, and no two ways about it."

Morton had no doubt that the man was right. The newspapers, within the
last few weeks, had contained various accounts of impediments, great
and small, maliciously placed on railroads. It was a species of
villany which was just then having its run, as incendiarism will
sometimes have; and a like case of a bridge partly sawed through had
lately occurred in a neighboring state.

"You fool!" exclaimed Morton, in anguish and despair; "why didn't you
get on the track, and stop the train?"

"I'd like to see you stop the train!" retorted the man.

Morton turned to run for the road, bent on stopping the engine, or
letting it pass over him. But as he turned, a new arrival caught his
eye. This was the cavalier who had baited his horse at the inn, and
who, seeing the excited looks of the two men, had checked his pace,
and was looking at them with much curiosity.

Crazed with agitation, and hardly knowing what he did, Morton leaped
towards him, seized his horse, a powerful and high-mettled animal, by
the head, and, with a few broken words of explanation, called on him
to dismount. The astonished collegian did not comply. Morton bore back
fiercely on the bit; the horse plunged and snorted; the rider clutched
the pommel; Morton took him by the arm, drew him to the ground,
mounted at a bound after him, and, as he touched the saddle, struck
his whalebone walking stick with all his force over the horse's flank.
The horse leaped forward frantically, and rushed headlong down the
road. His discarded rider saw his hoofs twinkling for an instant out
of the cloud of dust, and thought he had had a Heaven-directed escape
from a madman.

The small village above Steuben, at which Miss Leslie and her friend
were to take the train, was three miles off. The road ran almost
directly towards it for more than three fourths of the way, when it
made a bend to the right. Morton, with his furious riding, very soon
reached this point. He could see the station house before him, on the
left, and not more than a third of a mile distant. The space between,
though uneven, had no visible impediments but a few low fences and
scattered clumps of bushes. Morton pushed through the barberry growth
that fringed the road, galloped over the hard pasture, leaped one
fence, passed a gap in another, and half way to his goal, found
himself and his horse in a quagmire. At this moment, straining his
eyes towards the cluster of houses, he saw, with agony at his heart, a
white puff of vapor rising above the trees beyond. Then the dark
outline of the train came into view, checking its way, and stopping,
half hidden behind the buildings.

Morton knew that it would stop only for a moment, and plied his horse
with merciless blows. The horse plunged through the mire,--the mud and
water spouting high above his rider's head,--gained the firm ground,
and bounded forward wild with fright and fury. It was too late. The
bell rang, and with quicker and quicker pants, the engine began to
move. Morton shouted,--gesticulated,--still it did not stop, though
the passengers seemed to take alarm, for a head was thrust from every
window, while the occupants of an open carriage drawn up on the road
were bending eagerly towards him.

Morton wheeled to the left, and urged his horse up the embankment in
front of the train. With a violent effort, he reached the top. The
engineer was running against time, and cared for nothing but winning
his match. He blew the steam whistle; and as Morton dragged on the
curb with desperate strength, the horse reared upright, pawing the
air. But, as he rose, Morton disengaged his feet, slid over the
crupper to the ground, and let go the rein. The horse leaped down the
bank, and scoured over the meadow, mad with terror. Morton took his
stand in the middle of the track, and facing the advancing train,
stood immovable as a post. The engineer reversed the engine, brought
it to a stand within a few yards of him, and, with a profusion of
oaths, demanded what he wanted.

Before the breathless Morton could well explain himself, the
passengers began to leap out of the cars, and running forward,
gathered about him. He soon found words to make the case known. But
one object alone engrossed him. He pushed on among the throng of
questioning, eager men, mounted the foremost car, and made his way
through it, the crowd pushing behind and around him, and plying him
with questions, to which, in the confusion and abstraction of his
faculties, he gave wild and random answers. He looked at every face.
Edith Leslie was not there. He crossed the platform into the next car,
passed through it, and still could not find her. It was the last in
the train. And now a strange feeling came over him, a bitterness, a
sense of disappointment, as if his efforts and his pangs had been
uncalled for and profitless; for so intensely had his thoughts been
concentred on one object, that he forgot for the moment the hundred
men and women whom he had saved from deadly jeopardy.

The train rolled back to the station, the distance being only a few
rods. Morton got out and leaned against the wall of the house. Men
thronged about him with questions, exclamations, thanks, praises. The
reaction of his violent emotion produced in him a frame of mind almost
childish. He was restless to free himself from the crowd.

"It's nothing; it's nothing," he answered, as fresh praises were
showered on him. "I saw the train going to the devil, and did what I
could to save it. Any of you, I dare say, would have done as much. Be
good enough to let me have a little air."

The crowd gave way, and he walked forward past the corner of the
building. Here, standing on the road, close at hand, he suddenly saw
an open carriage, and in it, pale as death, sat Miss Leslie, with her
friend, and a boy of twelve, her friend's brother. He sprang towards
it with an irrepressible impulse.

"My God! Miss Leslie, I thought you were in the train."

"And so we should have been," said the boy, "but the cars came in
three minutes before their time."

Edith Leslie did not utter a word.

Some of the passengers were soon about him again. He repeated to them
what he knew of the danger, and told them how he had learned it. In a
few minutes, several men were seen at a distance on the railroad,
running forward with a handkerchief tied to a stick to warn off the
train. A few minutes later, a Connecticut pedler, one of the
passengers, came up to Morton.

"Mister, they're going to do the handsome thing by you. They're
getting up a subscription to give you a piece of silver plate."

"The deuse they are!" was Morton's ungrateful response.

Going into the room where the passengers were met, he found that the
pedler had told the truth; on which, for the first and last time in
his life, he addressed an assemblage of his fellow-citizens. He told
them that he thanked them for their kind intention; but that if he had
done them a service, he wished for no other recompense than the
knowledge of it, and urged them, if they did any thing in the matter,
to devote their efforts to gaining the arrest and punishment of the
scoundrel who had attempted the mischief. His oratory was much
applauded; many, who had thought themselves in for the subscription,
joyfully buttoned their pockets, and, instead of the plate, he
received a series of complimentary resolutions, to be published in the
newspapers.

Meanwhile, having made his speech, he had lost no time in making his
escape also. Going back to the carriage, Miss Leslie's friend asked
him to accompany them home, whence they could return to take the
afternoon train, when the bridge would, no doubt, be repaired. Morton,
however, declined the invitation, and, having sent two men to catch
the horse, with instructions to refer the distressed owner to him, he
drove in a farmer's wagon to Steuben. In a few hours, he rejoined Miss
Leslie and her friend; and having escorted both safely to town, took
leave of the former, that evening, at the door of her father's house.

Several of the newspapers next morning contained the resolutions
passed by the passengers, trumpeting Morton's humanity, presence of
mind, &c. He himself very well knew that the praise was undeserved,
since he had neither thought nor cared for the objects of his supposed
humanity, and, far from acting with presence of mind, had scarcely
known what he was about.

The bridge had been cut by an Irish mechanic in the employ of the
road, who, for some misdemeanor, had been reprimanded and turned out,
and who had passed half the night in preparing his demoniac revenge.
It afterwards appeared that he had been a state's prison convict in a
neighboring state, and that he would have been still in confinement,
had not the officious zeal of certain benevolent persons availed to
set him loose before his time.




CHAPTER XX.

  For true it is, as _in principio,
  Mulier est hominis confusio;_
  Madam, the meaning of this Latin is,
  That woman is to man his sovereign bliss.

       *       *       *       *       *

  A woman's counsel brought us first to woe,
  And made her man his paradise forego.--
  These are the words of Chanticleer, not mine;
  I honor dames, and think their sex divine.--_Dryden_.


On the day after their return, Morton visited Miss Leslie to learn if
she had suffered from the fatigues and alarms of yesterday; and, in
truth, she had the pale face of one whose rest has been short and
broken.

"It has been my fate to terrify you," said the anxious Morton.

During his visit, the door bell was most obtrusively busy. Messages,
parcels, notes, cards, visitors came in, and expelled all hope of a
_tete a tete_.

Soon after he left the room, Leslie entered.

"Who gave you those flowers, Edith?"

"Mr. Morton, sir."

"Humph!" ejaculated Leslie, with a look by no means of gratification.

Meanwhile, Morton, walking the street in an abstracted mood, overtook
unawares his bachelor friend Mr. Benedick Sharpe, jurist, philosopher,
and man of letters--a personage whose ordinary discourse was a
singular imbroglio of irony and earnest.

"Why, Morton, what problem of ethnology are you at now? the unity of
the human race, and the descent from Adam--science versus
orthodoxy--is that it?"

"Nothing so deep."

"What, nothing ethnological?"

"Nothing at all."

"Ah, then I begin to tremble for you. There's but one thing else could
lose you in such a maze. The flame of a candle is very pretty; but the
moth that flies into it scorches his wings, poor devil."

"I am too dull to see through your metaphors."

"There's another blind divinity besides Justice. Beware the shoal of
matrimony! Many a good fellow has been wrecked there."

"Harping on your old string! You are a professed woman hater."

"Who, I? Now that is a scandalous libel. I admire them,--of course."

"And yet there's not a lady of your acquaintance whom I have not heard
you analyze, criticise, cavil at, and disparage."

"My dear fellow!"

"You have no conscience to deny it."

"I protest I have the greatest--ahem!--admiration for the ladies of
our acquaintance. We have an excellent assortment,--we have witty
women; brilliant women; women of taste and genius; exact and
fastidious women,--a full supply,--accomplished women; finished and
elegant women,--not too many, but still we have them; learned women;
gentle, amiable, tender women; sharp and caustic women; sensible and
practical women; domestic women,--all unimpeachable,--all good in
their kind."

"Then why is matrimony so dangerous?"

"No, no, not dangerous, exactly,--thanks to discreet nurture and
northern winters; not dangerous hereabouts as it was in the days of
the old satirists. A wise man may be safe enough here from any climax
of matrimonial evil; but there are minor mischiefs, daily
_desagremens_."

"What, in spite of that catalogue of feminine virtues which you
delivered just now?"

"Vanity of vanities! Admirable in the abstract; excellent at a safe
distance; but to be tied to for life, bed and board, day light and
candle light,--that's another thing."

"Even the tender and amiable,--is there risk even there?"

"One cloys on perpetual sweetmeats."

"And the domestic women?"

"Who incarcerate themselves in their nurseries, and have no brains but
for their babies; who are frantic if the infant coughs, and are buried
and lost among cradles, porringers, go-carts, pills, and
prescriptions."

"The brilliant woman, then?"

"Brilliant at dinner tables and _soirees_; but, on the next day, your
Corinne is disconsolate with a headache. Her wit is for the
world,--her moods and mopings, caprices and lamentations,--those she
keeps for her husband."

"You are a cynic. The woman of taste and genius; where do you place
her?"

"What are the rude heart and brain of a man to such exalted
susceptibilities? What homage is too much for him to render? Be a bond
slave to the sweet enthusiast. Bow yourself before the delicate
shrine. Do your devoirs; she will not bate you a jot."

"But there are in the world women governed by reason."

"My dear Morton, are you demented? A woman always rational, always
sensible, always consistent; a logical woman; one who can distinguish
the relations of cause and effect, one who marches straight to her
purpose like a man,--who ever found such a woman; or, finding her, who
could endure such a one?"

"You fly into extremes; but women may be rational, as well as men."

"I like to see the organ of faith well developed,--yours is a miracle.
Granted, a rational woman; and with a liberal rendering of the word,
such, I admit, are now and then seen,--women always even, always
cheerful, never morbid, always industrious, always practical; busy
with good works,--charity, for example, or making puddings,--pious
daughters, model wives, pattern mothers----"

"At last you have found a creditable character."

"Very creditable; but far from interesting. The truth is, Morton, the
very uncertainty, the flitting gleams and shadows, the opalescent
light, the chameleon coloring of a woman's mind are what make her
fascination,--the fascination and the danger,--there lies the dilemma.
Shun the danger, and you lose the charm as well. A woman's human
nature is not our human nature; the tissue is more cunningly woven;
the string more responsive; the essence lighter and subtler,--forgive
the poetic style,--appropriate to the theme, you know. In their
virtues and their faults they shoot away into paths where we do not
track them. They can sink in a more abject abasement; and sometimes,
again, while we tread the earth, they are aeronauts of the pure ether.
Stable, stubborn, impassive man holds the steadfast tenor of his walk,
little moved by influences which, on the one hand, bury his helpmate
in ruin, or, on the other, wing her on a flight to the zenith. They
out-sin us, and they out-saint us; weak as a reed, and strong as an
oak; measureless in folly, profound in wisdom; for the deepest of all
wisdom springs, not out of a questioning brain, but out of a confiding
heart; and all human knowledge must find its root at last in a blind
belief. There, I have given you a sublime touch of eloquence; and, for
the moral to it,--shun matrimony. It is Satan's slyest mantrap. No,
not so, at all; it is a blessed institution for perfecting mankind in
patience, charity, and meekness, and booking their names in the
catalogue of saints. So be wise, in time. Good by. Look before you
leap!"

And, with an ironical twinkle in his eye, Sharpe vanished.




CHAPTER XXI.

Quelle diable de fantaisie t'es tu alle mettre dans la cervelle? Tu le
veux, amour; il faut etre fou comme beaucoup d'autres.--_Le Malade
Imaginaire_.


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.




CHAPTER XXII.

               If it were now to die,
  'Twere now to be most happy; for I fear,
  My soul hath her content so absolute,
  That not another comfort like to this
  Succeeds in unknown fate.--_Othello_.


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 himself _de 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. There _is_ a 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.




CHAPTER XXIII.

  L'ambition, l'amour, l'avarice, la haine,
  Tiennent comme un forcat son esprit a la chaine.--_Boileau_.


Nobody knew Vinal but Vinal himself. _Know thyself_ was 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.




CHAPTER XXIV.

  _Clo_. That she should love this fellow and refuse me!
         If it be sin to make a true election, she is damned.
                                                      _Cymbeline_.


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."




CHAPTER XXV.

  O, quha is this has done this deed,
    This ill deed done to me?
  To send me out this time o' the zeir,
    To sail upon the sea.--_Percy Reliques_.

  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 your _bonnes 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 the _amende_.

"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

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