Originally published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine (Harper and Brothers) vol.18 #104 (Jan 1859).
The coachman drew up the reins, with a long "Whoa!" and said, "Here we are, Sir;" and I stepped for the first time upon the pavement of Ilchester. It was dark out of doors, being eleven o'clock at night, the winter season, and foggy. There was a bright welcoming gleam through the open door-way of the inn, and a companionable radiance with it of all sorts of agreeable supper savors; but I paused on the sidewalk, and while the stage went under its moist archway to lie by till the morning, I turned considerately around several times, as one who has leisure for observation.
And it could not be denied I had leisure. For I had not come to Ilchester to try the sulphur water, to sell by samples for some jobbing-house, to pay a visit of friendship—to do any thing temporary—but to stay the rest of my life.
Not that I was an old man either. My hair was still glossy raven; my eye clear and piercing; my step, allowing for the cramp of a sixty miles' ride in the stage, resolute and elastic. In fine, as years go, I was thirty years old.
Yet, in arriving at Ilchester, I had come to the terminus of my life. My existence still a comparatively new book, but already at the beginning of its last long chapter. And this is such a strange fact in the history of so young a man that it demands explanation, and I give it.
From early childhood I had been looking upon trouble as a familiar household face. Trouble was the Lar of my poor poet-father's melancholy hearth-stone! debt, sickness, failure—yes, absolute want—these were the genii that hovered over his widowed head, and watched my motherless cradle. I was too young when she who bore me died to recall her face; but I ever heard her name mentioned in our sad house with a loving and respectful mournfulness which taught me she was one of the rarest, noblest of women. My father at one time had been well off. A year before my birth he had lived in a home far more comfortable, more luxurious than any thing my infancy knew. As poet, as author, he had been blessed with much more than the usual success of such people. His works had brought him more than fame—money; and I call that more than fame, believing that I will be sympathized with by even the most unselfish of bards and head-workers in this world who have felt how infinitely dearer love and home are than glory, and sighed to think how valuable that unattainable gold is, regarded as something which might make love and home possible to them.
Always economical and fond of those simple happinesses which are cheap in the market, my father had saved enough at twenty-nine to enable him to marry a woman of his own tastes, and take her to a cottage on the eastern bank of the Hudson and about forty miles above New York, which was not great in cost, profusely ornamental, or any thing except exquisite in the river view from its piazza and its warm heart-scenery within. His income was enough to give ample answer to the present wants of two such people; and both because God in His goodness might give them more mouths to feed, and because, like the birds, he could not help singing, he continued to make books, poems, reviews, and all the products which bring pay and pleasure. Under these circumstances my father called himself happy. He had reached that sweet place in life where a man meets rest while his day's sun is still behind him, coming up into the zenith, and so does not feel falling over him rest's bad shadow, idleness.
Then, three things happened to my father in one month.
In the first place—I was born. Of a bright June morning the little helpless creature of their love fell on those two young people's breast, and as my father lifted me up into the sunlight that sifted through the viny windows, I seemed so gladdened by it, so quickened, that his poetic mind was struck with the idea that it was a prophecy that I would be a sunbeam to them, a thing of happiness and sunshine to myself. And they called me "Eliodore"—a name scarce ever heard on this side of the sea—"the gift of the sun."
Hardly was the little Eliodore yet seven days old when event the second came to the house of the Armours.
The twenty thousand dollars which my father's industry had saved had been intrusted by him to the care of a man high in his confidence and of large credit with others who were far better financially educated, a broker and banker in New York. He had written my father that this whole sum was invested in bond and mortgage of the utmost reliability. He had made one quarterly payment of interest; but when the next became due, Lionel Armour discovered how, all the time, he had been the dupe of a liar and a villain. For, one happy evening, there was brought to his wife's bedside, where he was sitting with me, the babe, in his arms, a letter, which stopped his caresses and made him turn deathly pale with agony. His banker, turning every item of trust property in his hands into money, the all of widows and orphans, the scanty scrapings of day laborers, my father's long and painfully earned little fortune, had absconded, God knew whither—let us rather say, the Devil—to batten on his villainy.
Nobly did Lionel Armour keep the great darkness of that discovery from the eyes of the woman he loved. It might have killed her.
An old nurse, who staid many years after by the remnant of our family until it had no longer any name to shelter, told me once how my father bore it.
"He kept cheerful in his look," said she; "he used to laugh and play with you by the mother's bed more, if any thing, than he had before; but I used to hear him praying for you both, in his little study, before daybreak, by the hour together, with a voice all stopped up and shaky, which brought the tears into my eyes. Oh, many a time! many a time! First he'd say, 'O God! my poor wife!' and then, 'Pity—pity the little child!' I tell ye it was too much for me. And every night at nine o'clock he'd bid your mother 'good-night,' and make believe he was tired and must go to bed. Then he'd send the woman that staid to take care of her up to the room, and go and lock himself up in his study, and work among big books and papers, writing—writing often till the sun rose again. I caught him at it once, and took the liberty to ask if it wouldn't sicken him. But he only lifted his pale, painful face, and shook his finger at me and said, 'Not a word of this, Barbara—remember!' Oh, he must have written books on books, those times!"
Such was the story of my old nurse. And when I look at all the old MSS., and the magazines, and the books of that period which bear his impress, I can understand how the necessities of his dark hour burned out his mind and body, like a candle in oxygen, to give light and life to those unconscious unfortunates whom he loved. Well, he has gone to his reward!
Then came the third event. My mother was recovering—she had risen—the physician encouraged her with the hope that she would soon be out again. All at once a relapse took place—fever set in—and with the going out of the month of June she went out from us also—a spirit set free into God's endless summer, before earth's transient one could die and leave her behind for the frosts.
And after this I have heard that my father was a broken man. Her love had been enough for him; when all other things went he was able to say, "How far from the worst which might be!" But now the worst had come; and having no soul left that at the same time could love and understand him, he cared no longer to labor for the maintenance of a house which sheltered only vacancy; and taking me, the ignorant babe scarce yet a month among the troubles it did not know, he retired, with my nurse, to cheap and narrow lodgings in a country town, selling the cottage as one casts away the husk out of which all sweet and fruit have gone.
And in those lodgings did I begin to learn my first lessons of life.
As I had not had imparted to me any thing of the past, and probably should have comprehended it but little if I had, I passed my early childhood as happily as most boys. Naturally my father was no longer a buoyant man. He did not play with me like some fathers, but he was always kind, and taught me by his side far more than children learn generally until they are children no longer. With his help Latin and Greek became familiar to me. I grew to enjoy the marrow which was inside of those crooked characters that form the dry bones of the old poets and historians. I learned many of the most beautiful things by heart; and by the time I was fourteen, having never been to school nor mixed with boys, I was pretty well fitted for an opening manhood in any state of existence where simple pure-mindedness was a fashion, and bread came for the love of truth and beauty.
But Lionel Armour had cause enough to know that no such existence stood waiting for his son. And seeing him, at the age of fourteen, as I have said, with the promise in his character of such a life of sensitiveness and agony as he, the poet, had been always leading, he determined, as gently as he could, to open the eyes of his child, and prepare him for the future.
One day when he had kissed me approvingly, after a fair translation of Theocritus, and given me one of those gentle, sad smiles which in my good conduct now found almost their only occasion, he took me on his knee and told me this same story which I have been telling you; from beginning to end, interrupted only by my childish tears or outbursts of astonishment, and the choking of his own voice.
Having been reared in that atmosphere of most concentrated passion—books and solitude—when he finished I sat with my little pocketknife in my hand and its blade opened.
"Father," said I, in a stifled voice of emotion, "what is the name of the man who took away every thing you had in the world?"
"It will do no good to tell you, my son. You must not know. But why ask the question?"
"Because," I answered, my face pale and my lips trembling, "because I will look for him, and when I find him—though they kill me for it—I'll put this in his heart!" And bursting into tears, I held up my little knife.
"Oh, my son! don't speak—don't think so!" said my father, soothingly. "If what I have said affects you in this way, I shall be sorry I have told you. God takes care of vengeance. We must leave it to him. And even were it ours, it is now years since we have heard any thing of the man, and can not possibly find him. So peace, my boy, peace!"
I governed myself with a great effort, and my father went on to tell me a piece of news which was to be my first grief as well as my first start in life, and to which his story had been a preface. I was not to be such a man as he had been—so ignorant of the world, so unbusiness-like, so ideal, and therefore always poor, distressed, and heart-sick. I was to leave him, to enter the counting-house of a merchant in New York who had consented to take me, and I should gradually work my way up to a fortune, and be, oh! such a rich and happy, such a benevolent and useful man! I should come home every holiday I could get to see him, and then we would have such delightful times together. And meanwhile I must work hard, and try to please God, and my employer, and him; and he would see that I had every thing I needed to make me comfortable.
So my father proceeded, painting in as bright colors as he could the advantages, and lightening the shades of the pain of our separation, until, to my yet untried boy-mind, curiosity in regard to this novel change somewhat hushed the cries of the young heart that well-nigh broke to leave its only loved one.
In due time the change came. I know now as I could not then what it cost him to pack my little new trunk with a womanly care and tenderness, to see it strapped behind the stage, to hug me as if he would never let me go, and then to hurry from my last kiss into the house, not daring to trust himself with one smile at me from the window.
So I came to New York and began to acquire mercantile habits. I have no doubt that my master, his family, my fellows in business, every body, were as kind to me as the world ever is to boys. But just what to the ancient martyrs was the torture of being flayed and then dropped into boiling water, was the process to me, the shrinking, world-ignorant, unpractical child, of being brought in contact with the rough forms and hard souls of the life at large. It is an old agony; orphans are learning it every day; poor gentlemen's sons know it by heart; it is in the feuilleton, the book, the lecture, but it is not hackneyed of its agony yet.
I passed three years—the misery of each cut in two by a semi-annual visit to my father—and at the age of seventeen received my first promotion. I put off the errand boy and his jacket—I put on the collecting clerk and the business paletot appropriate to that youth.
I was proud for my father's sake of this advancement. I thought how cheerfully he would say, "One more step on the road up, my boy!" and as Christmas was approaching I looked forward rejoicingly to the week at home, and saved from my monthly allowance enough to get a present for him in the shape of a very handsome new German work upon Greek Literature, which, of all things, he would most admire.
With a letter, testifying his approval, from my employer, this present of mine for my father, and the same little trunk with which I had left home three years before, I went back to the old village of West-Alton.
The servant that came to the door stepped softly. The family that let the lodgings were in the parlor, but they all talked in undertones; and I felt the blood rush back to my heart as my nurse stole down stairs and kissed me tenderly, saying,
"He is very sick, dear, but we hope he will soon be better."
Ah! and before I went away my father was better; well—quite well—but after that sort which makes not the friends of those who love a man congratulate them, and which opens no mouth to say, "Thank God! thank God!"
Back from the ruins of all I lived for, too mad to know where I was going, I returned to New York, hugging to my breast through all the journey the book that he had never read, but which it seemed as if he must read, and which, therefore, was some sort of a solace to me as connected with him.
And the next day after my return I recommenced my duties as collecting clerk. It was a business which might seem ill suited to such a mourner as I; but I had reached such a state of almost unconsciousness through the stupefaction of the blow that I could have done any thing, great or trivial, without asking whether it was fitting—even without knowing that I did it.
There was a debtor of our house who was just about leaving that morning in a bark bound for Canton, and I must go to him on board the vessel to receive some payment which had been neglected up to this eleventh hour.
I made my way mechanically down to the foot of Old Slip, and passed on board the Arrow. All on deck was bustle and noise; the yards were being squared; stevedores were stowing the last parcels of cargo; provisions were passing down to the store-room; and here and there were groups of landsmen bidding good-by to sailors and passengers. Pushing through this throng without knowing, in my bitter abstraction, that I touched them, I entered the after-cabin and found my man. He made the payment I expected, and then, as I turned to go, said, abruptly,
"Young man, will you go to China with me?"
I don't remember whether I knew what I said, but as briefly I answered, "Yes."
There was no time to return to the office. I passed my collection-book ashore to a porter whom I recognized, with orders to leave it at the counting-room of the firm. And they told me on board, days afterward, that the next thing I said was—
"Let me lie down and sleep."
And then, from utter exhaustion, I fell to the deck.
When I woke we were two hours out of sight of land. My benumbed brain was quickened by the bracing air and the novel motion, and for the first time since my father's death I shed tears.
I believe that voyage saved me from death, or, worse still, insanity. Realizing that I had taken an utterly unconsidered step, whose results would be of the most serious bearing upon my future life, I was roused to a sort of compulsory activity of thought. I made inquiries of my friend of the abrupt question as to the place he wished to invite me to in China; and he answered me that he needed a shipping clerk in his office at Hong-Kong—had noticed me in my discharge of the duties of my last situation—was pleased with me, and therefore offered his vacancy. By that strange power of life which the thoughtless call chance was a stranger thus raised up to help me, and to lead me by a way I knew not of into the possibilities of success.
I spent twelve years in China. I reached the age of twenty-nine, and by slow degrees I had risen to a place in the firm, while by business operations of my own I had acquired about fifteen thousand dollars. I had no desire to be richer; I was weary of the barbarism around me; every muscle, mental and physical, was tired with the ceaseless struggle of amassing, and there was no one in the world whom I loved or who loved me. The only end I now proposed to myself was rest. Not love—not home; those desires had been harrowed out in childhood with their objects by the iron teeth of affliction. If I could but get back to America, seek out some place where I might stay unnoticed, and be quiet there until I had waited my time out—that was all I wished.
I settled my partnership affairs and left China. Reaching America, I heard of the town of Ilchester. It was dead as to business; its society was not disposed to be exacting on the subject of etiquette; and, moreover, it was not many miles from those graves whither, in reverence and mourning, I had resolved henceforward to make my only pilgrimages.
I determined, therefore, to make Ilchester the retreat of the rest of my days. And so I come back to the beginning of my story, where, as you may remember, I stood looking around me as far as I could see in the night, with the air of conscious leisure for a lifetime.
Even in the dark I began to be satisfied with Ilchester. In all the long, wide street—the only one in the place—there was no sound of rattling carriages or night wassailers, though eleven o'clock at night would have been still early and noisy in a city. The dim forms of the long-built houses lay far apart, remote from the sidewalk, at the backs of their deep, elm-shadowed yards, and they all wore a slumberous air—an air of never. being searched and vexed by the prying fingers of daylight. Their windows were all black and candleless, telling of dreamless sleep—and this seemed perfectly to fit my mood. What I wanted was at last to stop tossing—to lie down, finally, in forgetfulness of the rough world I had been always grinding against, and Ilchester promised me this oblivion.
Then I followed my baggage into the tavern. But, wonderful to say, even in Ilchester they dream. For in spite of the fatigue of that long stage-journey, and the all-suffusing atmosphere of quiet which characterized the place, as I lay buried in the vast gulf of my great country bed, I saw strange shapes begin to gather themselves out of the fire-light from the hearth which flickered through the shadows of the room, and they grew more and more distinct. At length a limitless sea disclosed itself rolling, tumbling lawlessly all about me, and in my horror I felt myself adrift—tossed I know not whither, without a shore, without a star. But suddenly a little strip of land appeared far in front as sight could reach—forward, still forward it grew toward me, broadening on the sea. At last I was floating in a shallow stream which a lamb might ford, and on the bank stood a pure young girl, with dove-like eyes, and against her bosom leaned a lofty cross. So patient was she, yet so slender—so frail to bear up that toppling weight alone—that my strong heart yearned toward her long-suffering weakness, and in a moment I was by her side, sharing her burden upon my own breast. And as we looked into each other's faces tenderly, lo, the cross began to grow! New beams stretched out from it on every side—it changed shape with weird quickness—it was no longer a cross but a house. And I cried out, in astonishment, "Woodbine Cottage!" Yes; over us both spread the roof under which I was born—the restored home of my father and my mother! Then the young girl and I joined hands, and began to sing a refrain which ran like this:
"Years unravel what years have spun;
The web of Ill shall be undone;
After the shadow comes the sun!"
I remember having dreamed several dreams in the course of my life in which I heard poetry. Once I recollect that I listened, delighted in my sleep, to several cantos of a heroic poem: I have heard songs also, and joined in them; but this is the only dream-rhyme that I was ever able to carry out into the waking life with me. And with this one still breaking, like a fountain, from my lips and my heart, I awoke from excess of joy. Awoke all alone, long after midnight, in that ghostly Ilchester tavern room, and felt myself a changed man. Awoke in all senses—to the rest of faith, sweeter far than the rest of sleep; to hope; to a conviction that something better, holier than I had yet known, was possible in life.
For several hours after I rose in the morning the outlines of that dream were more or less distinct. But they faded out with the growing sunlight, as such delicate night-pencilings always do. Is it well or ill that we so easily lose our conviction of the truthfulness of dreams? I have often asked myself this question, when I thought how the inevitable conclusions of midnight become mere remembered fanciful speculations at noon. The wicked man laughs in the sunshine of his drinking garden at the fearful vision of warning which froze his blood in last night's mysterious stillness and darkness. Perhaps, if its lineaments were still sharp-cut for a day longer, he might be awed into repentance. But, on the other hand, the hypochondriac would become incurably insane if the precipices of his dream yawned all day at his feet. The average of all facts is good—doubtless it is best that dreams should fade when we strike the balance of dreamers. In my particular case, however, it was a pity that the first sweet, peaceful thoughts I had known for years should be so transient. At breakfast I mused over their memory, and cherished them sadly, while I knew their promise could never be fulfilled.
Would I like to ride? The Sulphur Springs were but six miles off on a magnificent road; the company was all gone, of course, it being December, but it had cleared off finely since last night, and the drive might please the gentleman. No; I thanked the inn-keeper; I preferred to walk a little about Ilchester.
Should a boy go with me to show the way? Much obliged; but I preferred being alone.
So, with some astonishment at the idiosyncrasy of a man who preferred going on foot to a carriage, and solitude to company, Boniface let me have my own way.
The air was keen but deliciously clear and sweet, and the paths were firm and frosty. I took my walking-stick, wrapped myself in furs, and set out down the long street of the town for my first winter-day stroll since boyhood. Every thing seemed new to me after my dozen years in the tropics. The great, robust, bare elms owning no kindred with those perpetually green ailanthuses and oranges in their suits of papery leaves that I had been so long accustomed to—rosy, warm-clad children replacing the half-naked little sandal-wood urchins of the Sampan women—houses that would not blow over, not being sewed together of bamboos—farm-wagons instead of palanquins. Everybody, every thing was a surprise, a trait in a new world. This novelty was at least a diverting sensation, and I sought refuge in it from my long habit of introversion.
I came at last to the end of Ichester—the point where the street began to be the country-road again, and there was no longer any defined foot-path by its side. And just at this spot, inside of a neat fence of stone-colored pickets, a modest little house of one story lay half-hidden among bushes and clambering vines. It had an air of refinement and unpretentious reserve which did not characterize the rest of the Ilchester houses, and I began to think seriously of buying it for my hermitage.
I stood still for a moment and looked at it. The front door opened quietly and two persons came out upon the little veranda. I turned away, not to make my observation intrusive, and was about retracing my steps up the silent Ilchester street, when I heard a short, sharp cry of pain, and looked to see that one of the couple upon the veranda had fallen. Instinctively I opened the gate and ran in to offer my unasked assistance.
The prostrate figure was a man, apparently as old as seventy, very much crooked and wrinkled, and of an almost ghostly pallor. His eye, too, had that painful stare of vacancy which told of a mind just flickering in its socket. His unavailing efforts to rise were assisted by a young girl who bent over him, grasping his poor, lean, trembling hands, and trying with all her strength to lift his dead weight from the floor. As I ran toward her the ringing of my feet on the frosty stones of the yard caught her ear, and, throwing back the thick hood which hid her face, she stood erect to see who was coming. At first sight she would not have been called beautiful. Her features were delicate and regular, but they were toned into an expression of premature gravity—a look as of one who has patiently watched long and suffered much. And it takes a great while for a man, even if he can sympathize in the trials which form this style of face, to see any thing like beauty in it. We do not warm toward the saintly girl—a certain earthliness and air of having been in the dew and sunshine are necessary to charm us in a woman. Otherwise—she was perhaps twenty, of middle size, and very gracefully formed, in spite of the testimony given in her face of cares which might have bowed her too early.
I sprang up the steps, and saying, "Permit me!" lifted the decrepit old man in my arms as I would an infant, and followed her into the house.
"Please to lay him on the sofa, Sir," said the young girl, in a musical, almost childish voice. I obeyed, and she continued in a tone of sadness,
"My poor, dear father! I am very much afraid he will never be able to go out any more. For the first time in six weeks I thought it would do for him to take the air. He seemed strong enough to bear a little walk as far as the gate and back, leaning on my arm; but we had hardly got out of the door before his knees bent under him, and he fell as you saw. Oh, you're very kind, Sir, to take such pains. I hope he wasn't heavy?"
"Oh no! very light indeed. Do you think the fall hurt him?"
"I'm afraid it jarred him very much. Father, dear, this kind gentleman wants to know how you feel. Are you hurt, dear?"
The poor old wreck stared at us both, as if trying to collect his senses for a moment, and then uttering an incoherent word or two, became as vacant as ever.
"He's failed very much lately. I see it more and more every day," said the young girl; and though she tried hard to command herself, the tears came into her eyes, and she delicately turned half away to hide them.
"He has had two strokes of paralysis already. You can't think, Sir, how he's changed in the last year. He has been what they call an old man for several years now, but he's not the same being he was last winter. He could walk and speak, and his memory was good; and in the evening, when I read to him, he took as much interest in the books or the papers as I did."
And again the thought of the change was too much for her.
The old man was now beginning to forget his mishap in a quiet, childish sleep, and I saw the immediate necessity of my assistance was past. So fearing lest, the excitement of her distress being over, the young lady should begin to get embarrassed at the needless presence of a, total stranger, I begged her pardon for having been so abrupt with my help, and was bowing myself out, when she said, timidly, "May I ask the name of the gentleman who has been so very kind to my father? I thank you very much, and when he is well enough to speak, he will."
I handed the lady my card. She read it, and her face lighted up so that she was really beautiful, as she said,
"I have often seen that name before—the surname I mean. My father once had friends called so, who lived near Cold Spring on the Hudson. Were you ever there?"
"Is it possible? My father's first name was Lionel."
"I declare! just wait one minute, please;" and the lady's face exchanged its untimely saintliness for a happy, rosy beauty as she clapped her hands and bounded out of the room. In an instant she returned, and smilingly held out a book open by the title-page.
It was my father's first novel! And on the fly-leaf, in that well-known, beloved hand, was written: "With the love of Lionel Armour, the author, to his cherished friend, Stephen Gaston."
"So we are old acquaintances!" spoke we both together in glee, as we shook hands warmly; and I felt the first thrill of sweet, home feeling I had known since the bitter night I came back to New York with my ungiven Christmas present, a waif on the world.
"My name is Eliodore—"
"And mine is Annie."
"I shall always live at Ilchester. We will see each other very often."
"Oh, this is delightful! Before this morning my father and I were all, all alone."
"And so was I. We are none of us so any more."
Promising to come back in the afternoon or evening and see how Mr. Gaston was doing, I went briskly back to my inn, with several more leaves in the last—the Ilchester chapter of my life.
I kept my promise, and called at the Gastons that evening. Nor that alone; for when my stay in the quiet, dead town had grown to weeks, and in spite of overtures from many good and vulgar people who had heard I was a person of some fortune, I made few acquaintances and connected myself with no families, cliques, or congregational bodies. I rewarded myself for this general isolation by spending almost every evening in that little cottage at the end of the street.
And people said that Annie Gaston and myself were going to be married. By people I mean every body but ourselves. Old women, with from two to a dozen daughters lying on their hands in that flat, dull market of Ilchester, out of which, as out of every dead American town, all the enterprising young males who might have been buyers had gone to seek their fortunes in places yet alive, like New York or the "Out West." And these old women said it with a sneer. In their mouths I was somebody whom nobody knew; an adventurer; a person whose pretensions to property (this was true) were greatly exaggerated; and that stuck-up Gaston girl, who thought herself too good to go with Ilchester young ladies, would find out too late what a fool I had made of her. If I had capitulated by marrying the daughter of one of my aged female foes I should have gained nothing, the others being thereby made still more inveterate. Such is the pleasant peculiarity of social relations in Ichester.
The young girls said we were to be married. They talked of it at school, at their little parties, gossiping over the flounces they sewed the days "they had the dress-maker"—that village oracle, of such means of knowing, such universal circulation, such discreet and delicate mystery. And I had just as lief have the young creatures talk as not, they do it so prettily, so harmlessly. And the few men who, as rare specimens of a race almost extinct, were cherished for memory's and mild flirtation's sake at Ilchester—the little clerks of the two stores where they sold every thing, bedsteads, candy, plows, fans, molasses, and letter-paper—they talked about it, speculating whether the dresses would be bought at Dobb's or Cobb's.
In thus stating the fact that every body said we were to be married, how mortified I am; how much more so I should be! For looking at the matter with the uninitiated eyes of a stranger, how natural, how beneficial and proper does it seem on the face of it, that two persons, gentleman and lady, who liked and admired each other, should be able to walk, talk, and read together, be assisted by each other's counsel, and refined by each other's taste, just as freely and unsuspiciously as if they were of the same sex! And how astonished would this uninitiated one be to hear that, whenever the formation of any such beautiful relations of cultivation and support was attempted, it was not only the young lady's maid and the gentleman's man who bantered one another, as would be expected of such vulgar people, upon their employers' "sparking," but matrons and fathers, advanced virgins and passé beaux of society followed their subordinates' elegant example and smelt matches in the kindly association of the friendly young pair! Faugh! Truly this habit of social thinking is a vulgarism to be abandoned to scullions.
But Annie Gaston and I were very little troubled by the gossip of Ilchester. If in the book of Destiny we were indeed entered as "Eliodore Armour and Wife," we did not see it yet, or read any date opposite the entry in the margin. We had become very necessary to each other as friends and advisers, the contingency that might make us lovers had not arrived.
Besides moreover, had we loved, there were two objections which might have been quite serious to our marriage. I had come back to America, not rich by any means, but with just enough to secure me by its interest that rest from worldly contact which was agony to me. And I was still so proud, so morbid, that I could not bear the thought of giving any woman upon whom I imposed my name comforts merely. Moreover, Annie Gaston had duties to her decrepit and imbecile father which seemed to forbid her absorption in wifely cares and pleasures.
But I have taken too long a time to answer the gossipers of Ilchester.
That body of amiable people, gifted with eloquence and leisure, were still more certain that they had guessed right when, toward the coming in of spring, I changed my quarters, leaving the tavern and going to live at the little cottage at the end of the street.
There was abundant reason for doing so besides my own heart-sickness at the public solitude of an inn. My only friends in the world were under the Gastons' roof, but they needed me as much as I longed for them.
Mr. Gaston was every day growing more feeble and childish, and so becoming a burden more and more difficult to be borne alone by the young shoulders of the sensitive and prematurely grave girl, his daughter. She was able to keep but one servant, and that one in every sense a hireling. I therefore resolved that I would share her trial with her. I had done little in my life that could be of service to any body; it was time to begin, that even through pain and self-denial I might make myself worthy of being missed and wept for when I had gone.
Annie consented to let me help her, and I fitted up a little room in the cottage, where I might be within call at all hours of the day and night to soothe her father in his irritable moments; to fetch and carry for him; humor his vagaries, and be his staff to lean upon in the tottering journeys his restless feet were forever making from his bed to the fire, from his sleeping-room to the parlor, and back again. His desire for motion was as likely to be strongest at midnight as at noon, and this eccentricity had nearly worn his daughter to a shadow. Though she was still as patient and uncomplaining as an angel, and would have died without asking to burden other strength than her own, if I had not pressed my help on her.
It was not until I had become quite settled in my new lodging that I began in the least to realize what Annie Gaston was. As a visitor, I had known her as the ever-buoyant little woman in a modest blue-and-brown delaine, with an apron of such spotlessly white nature that it seemed to shed dust and soil as the duck's wing sheds water. I had known her the ever-smiling, the shiningly clean girl, her most tried moments only toning her inextinguishable cheeriness with a patient gravity which made it seem deeper and more lasting, never forgetting to be tidy because she was worried, always fresh and simple, and adorned more with the jewelry of her sweet manners than by any thing born of Tiffany. And on this very account I had greatly undervalued her. I think it is our natural tendency to despise very clean and cheerful people. And I suppose I had despised her in a modified, brotherly sort of way.
Not long after I made my abode under the same roof with Annie Gaston did her nature, the real woman in her, begin to vindicate itself. When I came to perceive what she had been bearing night and day for all the years past alone—when I felt myself, the stout, indignant buffeter of bad fortune, the rough-faring stepchild of this world, almost shrinking from the sights, and sounds, and associations that she had met bravely with love in her eyes and prayers in her mouth, it was then that I repented for having ever likened Annie Gaston's soul to a flat, pleasant meadow, and in the exaggeration of my atonement for the wrong set her among the highest of heroic spirits.
Nor was it so much of an exaggeration after all. The girl of twenty who neglects the early blossom of her womanhood, secludes herself from all society where she may love and be loved, puts every dream of a happy home and congenial friendships in the hand of a providence which seems almost certainly taking them to exhale them utterly, and does all this knowingly, with a most refined nature that has the depth to be aware of the measure of its sacrifice, and because she will not let rude hands do a single office for an imbecile, passionate father, is a noblest heroine.
Not a word of complaint—none of fatigue, save when I extorted it—ever helped me to the record of what Annie Gaston had been doing through all her young womanly life. But as gradually the old man became accustomed to my presence, and found me lovingly trying to follow her example of gentleness and self-denying service, he permitted me to share with his daughter many of those labors for his comfort and those forbearances with his strange disposition which had hitherto been devolving upon her alone. And in this experience with him he unconsciously showed me the greatness of that young girl's suffering.
Stephen Gaston was not entirely idiotic. The work paralysis had done for him was rather to make him partially insane, leaving his brain strown in confused masses rather than quite crushed out. At times he would ask to have the newspaper read to him, and sit by the hour with a vacant stare of attention while one of us went through column after column of any thing, no matter what, not comprehending it evidently, but pleased with an occupation which he remembered as an old habit. The Bible, too, he frequently asked for a chapter from. Almost always he said to us—
"Read, 'Have mercy on me, O God!"
For a whole week together, sometimes, he never spoke at all, but sat in his large easy-chair, with his feet resting on an ottoman, and stroked himself with his shriveled, trembling hands up and down constantly, as if feeling for pockets into which he had put something and lost it. Again, he would be all unrest, listening to no entreaties to spare himself, giving no peace to those poor, tottering legs of his, but wandering, supported by my arm, from room to room, forcing himself painfully up and down stairs, and peering, with a helpless, speechless anxiety, behind beds and under tables. Ask him what he wanted, and he invariably stopped—tried to think—uttered, half-coherently, "Nothing—oh, nothing at all!" and began his wanderings again. Stout as I was, at nightfall I was often tired enough to ask myself, with amazement, how Annie Gaston had ever lived through this till I came.
But this mere bodily weariness which my charge entailed upon me was nothing compared with another infliction that accompanied it. At times Stephen Gaston was visited by hallucinations of so ghostly and awful a character that to be with him in the night when they came on was a terror to have appalled any one.
Having had the care of him during one entire day, which Annie spent by my entreaty on her bed—for she was threatened with a lingering fever brought on by her fatigue for him—I undressed him at nightfall, and saw him sound asleep before I left his room. He had been all day more than usually vacant and feeble, and so very easily managed. I congratulated him and myself inwardly on our both having a peaceful night.
At twelve I retired myself, leaving my door ajar that I might hear him if he needed me. My lamp also stood on the table by the looking-glass, with one wick burning dimly. I was soon fast asleep.
It must have been nearly two in the morning when I awoke, with a start, and heard a knocking, at quick intervals, on my door. I leaped from my bed, and right by my side stood Stephen Gaston. He had never come into my room before; some great exigency must have nerved him to the work of tottering all that way without support. I ran to the lamp, lit both wicks, and in the full light saw him with the most fearful expression of madness I ever beheld on human face. His immense black eyes, hitherto so utterly leaden and soulless, now almost swelled out of their fiery-red lids; his long white hair streamed almost upright from his head, and his nostrils were dilated to their utmost.
For the first time in months he had dressed himself; and in such a horrible masquerade! Over his day-clothes he had tightly swathed a sheet about his now almost perfectly erect long figure; a napkin was bound under his chin, and he carried a cane in his hand. But for that face of his, swollen into scarlet fullness and brutality, he would have seemed like one of the dead who walk in wild legends. And he kept hoarsely growling to me, "Come! come! come! Are you ready? I say, come!"
I took him by the arm; I said, soothingly,
"Oh, you have been dreaming; let me help you into bed; lie down here and let me take care of you."
"No!" he answered, savagely; "I will go! Come, I say!"
"Go where? It is raining, and you are not well."
"I am going to the grave-yard. God has just sent for me!" And with a face of the most fearful despair, he added, "I must meet him, and give up my account."
I could not ask further what he meant. Yes—I am willing to confess I was afraid to ask. If his half-palsied tongue had been able to unvail to me more of a mind in such an awful state as that demoniac terror showed it to be, I would not for any reward have seen it. The only method I had was almost with force to make him sit down; and there, all night, I sat up with him, reading the gentlest and most compassionate parts of the Bible to soothe him, and most of all, "Have mercy upon me, O God!"
Toward daybreak he fell asleep. I stole into his room, and saw what his horror must have been when he thought God's awful message came to him; for, to light up the darkness, he had caught up a whole box of matches and fired them all upon the floor. Happily, they had gone out, stifled in their own gas, or he would most like have been burned to death—to say nothing of all the others who slept.
For days afterward, when he spoke at all, it was in language which showed that he believed himself dead and judged. And when this hallucination seemed to be forgotten, other horrid ones succeeded it. Thus, far into the summer did Annie Gaston and I dwell in an almost contagious atmosphere of imbecility or madness.
Truly, after all my long pinings for Lethe, for unbroken quiet, and my hope that I had come to it at last when I was tossed back on this American land, I was far enough from it in this house of the shattered Stephen Gaston.
But, thanks be to God! I came by degrees to know a better rest—the rest which Annie Gaston had dwelt in through all her over-tasked, heart-broken, and blighted young womanhood—the rest which I learned from her—to be merciful and pitiful like God, and therefore, like Him also, never to weary.
It was a new emotion, that rest. I had not included it in my prayer for peace while I wandered. I had meant to be a hermit. God made me a laborer, but gave me sweet wages in the thought that I was taking thorns out of the pillow of one of his most miserable sons. And without a single change in my outward circumstances—no richer, with no more of a home of my own, no less, but still more laborious than ever—not even thanked by the poor old man for whom, for mercy's sake, I did even servile offices daily—I awoke one day to find that a sad, sweet happiness and peace had lit upon me unpursued. I was a thoroughly changed man.
I began even to feel an affection for the wretched, repulsive old man to whom I was making life less terrible. I had even loathed him at first—helped him only because he was one of my father's early friends, and because my manhood could not endure the idea of a mere slender girl bearing his burden alone; and because, perhaps, I was desperate, and let chance lead me to any thing that would keep my thoughts from devouring me. But now I loved him even. It was then that I learned the double lesson which, put in practice, would make a heaven for us every where. Love the world, if you would do it good; do it good, and you will love it.
When was it—my free and out-speaking life-muse goes on to sing—when was it that into the current of this pure peace of thine, this unselfish self-outpouring for the well-being of another, yet another stream of motive than the love of Stephen Gaston glided, debouching through an almost imperceptible rill-inlet to which it had come winding unseen over a wide circuit of unexplored territory, hidden between low, overarching, shadowy banks that almost met above it all the way? When was it, Eliodore Armour?
It would be very difficult to say. For as the good master architect does not set the doors that open on his grand high-vaulted chambers and long fair-vistaed galleries swinging around great monumental pillars all blazing with inscriptions, but rather hangs them on the delicate pivots of the small and unobtrusive hinge, so He who builds up the symmetry of our human lives seldom turns the portals to their most beautiful and far-leading passages on the bearing of any conspicuous event, preferring more to hinge them on slight unnoticed circumstances, and make them surprises instead of expectations.
Thus it is given seldom to the soldier to say, "This or that certain exploit was the cause of my glory;" to the poet, "This or that song put me on my height among the immortals;" to the lover, "On such a day, and for such a defined reason, I began to love the beloved."
We often set up monuments to mark what we call memorable critical places of our lives; but rarely are they topographically correct. Our Ares de l'Etoile are not the true standing-places of our star—they are good only to remind us that we have a star, which shines, however, in far other place and time. Our broken shafts, set up to the memory of dead hopes, are oftenest cenotaphs—the hopes died and were buried many leagues off by the road-side, long ere we had traveled to the point where we have strength enough to raise a column to them.
And I have said all this as a preface to the answer that I can not tell where, when, and how I began to love Annie Gaston, and to know it. It may have been when, on handing me a peach, her soft little hand touched mine, and, though our hands had many a time touched before, for the first gave me an indescribable thrill. Or when we kissed one another goodnight, after having often kissed before (for we had been made very intimate by our common labors for the one poor being, her father), and first felt it altogether new and conscious and painfully pleasurable. Be this as it may, there did come a time when I loved her and knew it.
My whole life, with its disappointments, its mistakes, its betrayals, had taught me a lesson of caution and reserve which even my being in love could not make me wholly unlearn. I did not go to Annie Gaston directly, as I would have done in those days before I had exchanged the candid transparent garment of my younger soul for the world's steel-mail, and say to her, simply and passionately, "I love you!" and then bear "No," or thank God for "Yes."
If she valued me as the friend—was grateful to me as the benefactor—loved me as the brother—or either or all of these only—the simple fact of being so regarded by any human creature whom I loved so tenderly would have been the last hold I had on earthly happiness. For she on earth was dear to me alone—the one being I had left from my wrecked life to care for. And the measure of her care for me was necessarily then the measure of my happiness. I was jealous, therefore, of gauging it precisely, since, if I by chance found it upon inquiry less than mine, its real and existing value would be just so far diminished. I shrank from the possibility of paining us both—of infusing a distance and reserve into our relations—and so waited until I could see.
The autumn came, and we were beginning to have fires, I remember, and to sit almost always through the evening with lamps lit and the sashes down. The doctor said that Stephen Gaston would hardly last till the snow fell.
So Annie went about her household duties with a step even more noiseless than before, and a face of fixed sadness. We both expected, from the doctor's view of the symptoms, that another and final attack of paralysis was hanging over the broken old man, and therefore watched his chair and his bed with almost sleepless anxiety, to meet the chill silent-comer Christianly and unsurprised.
It surprised us greatly when we saw a far other change passing over Stephen Gaston in the earlier part of October. His occasional moroseness entirely disappeared. His sleep was more unbroken, and lasted a little longer every night; but the hours of his wakefulness were altogether quieter, more natural, and attentive to things external. His speech, too, became greatly less incoherent—his eye lost its alternating vacancy and wild fire—and I noticed that he seemed to understand what we read him from the Bible, and his lips sometimes moved as if he prayed silently. Annie and I began to congratulate ourselves wonderingly over the doctor's false prophecy—he was even getting as well as ever, we said, and would soon be about again. So the young girl went about singing once more as she took care of the house.
But with all this change in Stephen Gaston, I was totally unprepared to have him call me into his room, as he did one morning, and say, in a gentle, altogether unprecedented tone of affection,
"You have been very kind to me for a long time, my dear friend."
"Have I? Well—I have tried to be—I am glad if it has made you happy."
"Happy?—No, no—I'm not happy; but I love you. You're very good—very! Oh, are you a minister?"
"No, I am not—I was never good enough; but why, my friend?"
"Because I feel as if I wanted—to tell a minister something that's on my mind. I'm sorry you aren't one. But let me see—you've been very good to me—God sent you to be—why, that's being enough of a minister! I'll tell you."
Seeing how earnest he was, and anxious to unburden himself of some trouble, I let him go on in spite of the fear that so much use of his partly regained powers would exhaust him, and drew my chair closer to his pillow, taking his hand tenderly, as a son might, in my own. He continued:
"I'm a poor, ruined old man. I wasn't always as I am now. I was rich. I lived in New York, and had houses and lands and money. My own old mother was alive then.
"By-and-by she died. After that I didn't care for any thing. She must have kept on praying for me where she'd gone, but I didn't hear her. I wasn't held in by anything. I forgot her and every thing good.
"I did something awfully wicked. So wicked, I don't know whether God has any mercy for me. Oh! say, do you think he has?"
"For all—for every thing. His name is Love."
"Hear me, then, and I'll tell you what I did. I was a banker."
I started. What did he say! He did not notice me, but went on.
"I had left with me to take care of a great deal of money—thousands and thousands. It was trusted with me by merchants and servants and poor people, widows, orphans, young people just starting in this world for themselves. And I ran away, taking it all. There was one young man, my friend, just a year married."
"What was his name?" I almost shrieked at Stephen Gaston's ear, in an intolerable throe of fierce passions and memories.
The old man covered his face with his hands, and the tears of a half-manly, half-childish grief began to run down his cheeks as he answered, sobbing, "Lionel Armour."
I jumped up from my seat and ran out of his room. I seemed to be hurried back to the day when I sat on my father's knee, and hearing all his wrong, drew out my little knife and said, "I would stick this in his heart!" And blush not, Brother Man, to own me brother if I tell thee that for one small moment only I questioned with myself if I should not rush back and take the vengeance on that dying old man out of God's hands. I shut myself in my own room. I strode up and down, taking wild, long paces, talking to myself with my teeth shut tight.
But coming by the centre-table, my eye, almost by fascination (so it seemed to me in that state), fell upon the Bible lying there. It was open at the place where I had last read for Stephen Gaston.
"Have mercy upon me, O God!"
And in my soul there came a voice—"It is God that showeth mercy. Who art thou that revengest?"
I turned from the table and leaned against the window-frame, half-stilled. Lucy Gaston, picking the few last asters in the garden for her father's room, looked up at me sweetly with her smiling, pure brown eyes; and the rest of the work was done. The Good—the God-like in me had triumphed.
I went back to Stephen Gaston's room.
"Where have you been?" said he, reproachfully.
"I have been in my room—seeking and finding mercy for you and for me. Forgive me, my friend. I will not leave you again; go on, please."
"Where was I? Oh, yes—Lionel Armour. As I told you, he was my friend. My loving, true friend. He trusted in me—I took his all—all he had made in a hard-working life. O God, forgive me! He is dead, and never can. Never! never! The rest I wronged I do not know; I don't remember even their names. But his name—my friend's—it has been eating into my soul these years! It will be the last thing I see when I die! Oh! oh!"
And the old man shook with the power of his anguish. A thought came over me. Perhaps I might comfort him.
"Suppose, Mr. Gaston," said I, gently caressing his forehead, "that his only son were still living, and should come to you, telling you that up to the last night of his life his father never had a thought of hate to you, but prayed you might be forgiven. Suppose the son himself should say that he, too, from the bottom of his heart forgave you, what then?"
The old man looked up with streaming eyes, and said, brokenly, "I should die in peace. But no, no; it can never be. His son is dead; not a word has been heard of him for years."
"Mr. Gaston, look at me! From the bottom of my heart I forgive you; and I am Lionel Armour's only son!"
Stephen Gaston drew his hand across his eyes as if to wipe away a mist—his breath stopped—then he half rose from his pillow, and, taking both my hands in his own, he regarded me for a full minute with a searching gaze out of which all the old vacancy had gone. And at length he said, solemnly,
"Are you telling a dying man falsehood or truth?"
"Truth, as God liveth!" answered I, with the same solemnity.
"And where are your proofs, young man?"
I thrust my hand into my breast-pocket and drew out an old wallet which had lain there every day, close-hugged for those many years. For it was that which my father had carried—the small receptacle of all that very little which his unworldly soul had ever had to do with the profit and loss of human business—the memoranda, the notes, the bills—in all amounting to perhaps a dozen papers. But it contained the voucher of Stephen Gaston's trust; and when the eyes of Lionel Armour were closed on my utter desolation, I kept it for a monument with me of his sad life and wrongs, oftentimes, in all my wanderings by sea and land, opening it, reading that one receipt with burning lids, and feeding thereby that only human emotion which seemed left me—indignant, silent bitterness.
I culled out the receipt and held it before Stephen Gaston's eyes. He read it, trembling and breathless. And then I folded it and tore it fine, saying to myself,
"For God's mercy's sake—the commemorated forgiveness of the dead—for the sake of Annie Gaston, and my own better spirit."
"Vain! vain!" said the old man, his voice choked to a whisper. "It has gone before me up to judgment."
"But with it your repentance, God's pardon, and the forgiveness of the Armours! Be at peace, my friend."
For a moment he remained with closed eyes, and his lips only moving as if in prayer, then said:
"The blessing of a wicked old man would but curse you, noble child of my bitterly wronged friend! I do not bless you, then; his blessing be upon you; yes, and this hour it is upon you; and the Great One's goes with it. But listen: I right the Armours late, yet much as can be—I right you! I have never touched a farthing of that money! It is invested—well, securely; and when the profits came in I said, 'I fear them; they are the price of holy blood!' and I invested them also. The bonds for all your heritage and its increase are in my safe; this key restores them to you."
And as he drew a small worn key from beneath his pillow and placed it in my hand I learned the meaning of all that jealous, wary fumbling, that search from corner to corner which had perplexed me in his more crazed and darkened days.
After a while he continued,
"I seem better—you and Annie—oh, poor, poor child!—think I will live. No! I shall not. This time of better light and speech I know has been given to me only in mercy for this reparation's sake. What if I had died in the dark! what if you were not here! Oh, God! to think of it! It is finished, and I am called. Bring Annie to me."
She came to his bedside, and, with much weeping, heard her father say solemnly that his time was at hand. And then he looked me fixedly in the face and asked,
"Speak truly. I have thought—was I mistaken?—that you love one another?"
"Better than the whole world and life!" I broke forth now for the first, most passionately.
But her only answer was to bury her tearful eyes in my bosom as I clasped her to me.
"I am right, then," said he. "Be kind to each other. Annie, be every thing to him—be life—be happiness—be soul! You know not what we owe him."
Nor should her clean spirit ever know. I put my finger on my lip and shook my head warningly, lest he should impulsively say too much more. And as our lips met in the first love-embrace beside her fainting father's bed, the mark of the secret long burned into my soul, and Stephen Gaston's was wiped out by the daughter's kiss, and I became as though I knew it not.
A week from that day and I alone on earth was left to her. God knows how it has been in my soul to make that all all-sufficient, with much care, and deep tenderness, and idolizing love. For her own, chiefly—yes, also for her forgiven father's sake.
Thus I saw the strange, long-forgotten, and disrespected dream of my first Ilchester night at length fulfilled. And I blessed God for those days and nights of weariness passed for Christian charity and her love beside Stephen Gaston's tottering footsteps, knowing that that light affliction had wrought for me my blessedness in her, and been therefore doubly, yea, unspeakably, the Ransom of my Heritage.