learning everything there was to be learned about their visitor. All
the city papers were examined for advertisements. If a cashier had
absconded, if a broker had disappeared, if a railroad president was
missing, some of the old stories would wake up and get a fresh currency,
until some new circumstance gave rise to a new hypothesis. Unconscious
of all these inquiries and fictions, Maurice Kirkwood lived on in his
inoffensive and unexplained solitude, and seemed likely to remain an
unsolved enigma. The “Sachem” of the boating girls became the “Sphinx”
of the village ramblers, and it was agreed on all hands that Egypt did
not hold any hieroglyphics harder to make out than the meaning of this
young man's odd way of living.
V. THE ENIGMA STUDIED.
It was a curious, if it was not a suspicious, circumstance that a young
man, seemingly in good health, of comely aspect, looking as if made for
companionship, should keep himself apart from all the world around him
in a place where there was a general feeling of good neighborhood and a
pleasant social atmosphere. The Public Library was a central point which
brought people together. The Pansophian Society did a great deal to make
them acquainted with each other for many of the meetings were open to
outside visitors, and the subjects discussed in the meetings furnished
the material for conversation in their intervals. A card of invitation
had been sent by the Secretary to Maurice, in answer to which Paolo
carried back a polite note of regret. The paper had a narrow rim of
black, implying apparently some loss of relative or friend, but not
any very recent and crushing bereavement. This refusal to come to the
meetings of the society was only what was expected. It was proper to ask
him, but his declining the invitation showed that he did not wish for
attentions or courtesies. There was nothing further to be done to bring
him out of his shell, and seemingly nothing more to be learned about him
at present.
In this state of things it was natural that all which had been
previously gathered by the few who had seen or known anything of him
should be worked over again. When there is no new ore to be dug, the old
refuse heaps are looked over for what may still be found in them. The
landlord of the Anchor Tavern, now the head of the boarding-house,
talked about Maurice, as everybody in the village did at one time or
another. He had not much to say, but he added a fact or two.
The young gentleman was good pay,--so they all said. Sometimes he paid
in gold; sometimes in fresh bills, just out of the bank. He trusted his
man, Mr. Paul, with the money to pay his bills. He knew something about
horses; he showed that by the way he handled that colt,--the one that
threw the hostler and broke his collar-bone. “Mr. Paul come down to the
stable. 'Let me see that cult you all 'fraid of,' says he. 'My master,
he ride any hoss,' says Paul. 'You saddle him,' says he; and so they
did, and Paul, he led that colt--the kickinest and ugliest young beast
you ever see in your life--up to the place where his master, as he calls
him, and he lives. What does that Kirkwood do but clap on a couple of
long spurs and jump on to that colt's back, and off the beast goes, tail
up, heels flying, standing up on end, trying all sorts of capers, and at
last going it full run for a couple of miles, till he'd got about enough
of it. That colt went off as ferce as a wild-cat, and come back as quiet
as a cosset lamb. A man that pays his bills reg'lar, in good money, and
knows how to handle a hoss is three quarters of a gentleman, if he is
n't a whole one,--and most likely he is a whole one.”
So spake the patriarch of the Anchor Tavern. His wife had already given
her favorable opinion of her former guest. She now added something to
her description as a sequel to her husband's remarks.
“I call him,” she said, “about as likely a young gentleman as ever I
clapped my eyes on. He is rather slighter than I like to see a young
man of his age; if he was my son, I should like to see him a little
more fleshy. I don't believe he weighs more than a hundred and thirty
or forty pounds. Did y' ever look at those eyes of his, M'randy? Just as
blue as succory flowers. I do like those light-complected young fellows,
with their fresh cheeks and their curly hair; somehow, curly hair doos
set off anybody's face. He is n't any foreigner, for all that he talks
Italian with that Mr. Paul that's his help. He looks just like our
kind of folks, the college kind, that's brought up among books, and is
handling 'em, and reading of 'em, and making of 'em, as like as not, all
their lives. All that you say about his riding the mad colt is just what
I should think he was up to, for he's as spry as a squirrel; you ought
to see him go over that fence, as I did once. I don't believe there's
any harm in that young gentleman,--I don't care what people say. I
suppose he likes this place just as other people like it, and cares more
for walking in the woods and paddling about in the water than he doos
for company; and if he doos, whose business is it, I should like to
know?”
The third of the speakers was Miranda, who had her own way of judging
people.
“I never see him but two or three times,” Miranda said. “I should like
to have waited on him, and got a chance to look stiddy at him when he
was eatin' his vittles. That 's the time to watch folks, when their jaws
get a-goin' and their eyes are on what's afore 'em. Do you remember that
chap the sheriff come and took away when we kep' tahvern? Eleven year
ago it was, come nex' Thanksgivin' time. A mighty grand gentleman from
the City he set up for. I watched him, and I watched him. Says I, I
don't believe you're no gentleman, says I. He eat with his knife, and
that ain't the way city folks eats. Every time I handed him anything
I looked closeter and closeter. Them whiskers never grooved on them
cheeks, says I to myself. Them 's paper collars, says I. That dimun in
your shirt-front hain't got no life to it, says I. I don't believe it's
nothin' more 'n a bit o' winderglass. So says I to Pushee, 'You jes'
step out and get the sheriff to come in and take a look at that chap.'
I knowed he was after a fellah. He come right in, an' he goes up to the
chap. 'Why, Bill,' says he, 'I'm mighty glad to see yer. We've had the
hole in the wall you got out of mended, and I want your company to
come and look at the old place,' says he, and he pulls out a couple of
handcuffs and has 'em on his wrists in less than no time, an' off
they goes together! I know one thing about that young gentleman,
anyhow,--there ain't no better judge of what's good eatin' than he is.
I cooked him some maccaroni myself one day, and he sends word to me by
that Mr. Paul, 'Tell Miss Miranda,' says he, I that the Pope o' Rome
don't have no better cooked maccaroni than what she sent up to me
yesterday,' says he. I don' know much about the Pope o' Rome except that
he's a Roman Catholic, and I don' know who cooks for him, whether it's a
man or a woman; but when it comes to a dish o' maccaroni, I ain't afeard
of their shefs, as they call 'em,--them he-cooks that can't serve up a
cold potater without callin' it by some name nobody can say after 'em.
But this gentleman knows good cookin', and that's as good a sign of a
gentleman as I want to tell 'em by.”
VI. STILL AT FAULT.
The house in which Maurice Kirkwood had taken up his abode was not
a very inviting one. It was old, and had been left in a somewhat
dilapidated and disorderly condition by the tenants who had lived in the
part which Maurice now occupied. They had piled their packing-boxes
in the cellar, with broken chairs, broken china, and other household
wrecks. A cracked mirror lay on an old straw mattress, the contents
of which were airing themselves through wide rips and rents. A lame
clothes-horse was saddled with an old rug fringed with a ragged border,
out of which all the colors had been completely trodden. No woman would
have gone into a house in such a condition. But the young man did not
trouble himself much about such matters, and was satisfied when the
rooms which were to be occupied by himself and his servant were made
decent and tolerably comfortable. During the fine season all this was
not of much consequence, and if Maurice made up his mind to stay through
the winter he would have his choice among many more eligible places.
The summer vacation of the Corinna Institute had now arrived, and the
young ladies had scattered to their homes. Among the graduates of the
year were Miss Euthymia Tower and Miss Lurida Vincent, who had now
returned to their homes in Arrowhead Village. They were both glad to
rest after the long final examinations and the exercises of the closing
day, in which each of them had borne a conspicuous part. It was a
pleasant life they led in the village, which was lively enough at
this season. Walking, riding, driving, boating, visits to the Library,
meetings of the Pansophian Society, hops, and picnics made the time
pass very cheerfully, and soon showed their restoring influences. The
Terror's large eyes did not wear the dull, glazed look by which they had
too often betrayed the after effects of over-excitement of the strong
and active brain behind them. The Wonder gained a fresher bloom, and
looked full enough of life to radiate vitality into a statue of ice.
They had a boat of their own, in which they passed many delightful
hours on the lake, rowing, drifting, reading, telling of what had been,
dreaming of what might be.
The Library was one of the chief centres of the fixed population, and
visited often by strangers. The old Librarian was a peculiar character,
as these officials are apt to be. They have a curious kind of knowledge,
sometimes immense in its way. They know the backs of books, their
title-pages, their popularity or want of it, the class of readers who
call for particular works, the value of different editions, and a good
deal besides. Their minds catch up hints from all manner of works on all
kinds of subjects. They will give a visitor a fact and a reference which
they are surprised to find they remember and which the visitor might
have hunted for a year. Every good librarian, every private book-owner,
who has grown into his library, finds he has a bunch of nerves going to
every bookcase, a branch to every shelf, and a twig to every book. These
nerves get very sensitive in old librarians, sometimes, and they do not
like to have a volume meddled with any more than they would like to have
their naked eyes handled. They come to feel at last that the books of
a great collection are a part, not merely of their own property, though
they are only the agents for their distribution, but that they are, as
it were, outlying portions of their own organization. The old Librarian
was getting a miserly feeling about his books, as he called them.
Fortunately, he had a young lady for his assistant, who was never so
happy as when she could find the work any visitor wanted and put it in
his hands,--or her hands, for there were more readers among the wives
and--daughters, and especially among the aunts, than there were among
their male relatives. The old Librarian knew the books, but the books
seemed to know the young assistant; so it looked, at least, to the
impatient young people who wanted their services.
Maurice had a good many volumes of his own,--a great many, according to
Paolo's account; but Paolo's ideas were limited, and a few well-filled
shelves seemed a very large collection to him. His master frequently
sent him to the Public Library for books, which somewhat enlarged his
notions; still, the Signor was a very learned man, he was certain, and
some of his white books (bound in vellum and richly gilt) were more
splendid, according to Paolo, than anything in the Library.
There was no little curiosity to know what were the books that Maurice
was in the habit of taking out, and the Librarian's record was carefully
searched by some of the more inquisitive investigators. The list proved
to be a long and varied one. It would imply a considerable knowledge
of modern languages and of the classics; a liking for mathematics and
physics, especially all that related to electricity and magnetism; a
fancy for the occult sciences, if there is any propriety in coupling
these words; and a whim for odd and obsolete literature, like
the Parthenologia of Fortunius Licetus, the quaint treatise 'De
Sternutatione,' books about alchemy, and witchcraft, apparitions, and
modern works relating to Spiritualism. With these were the titles of
novels and now and then of books of poems; but it may be taken for
granted that his own shelves held the works he was most frequently in
the habit of reading or consulting. Not much was to be made out of this
beyond the fact of wide scholarship,--more or less deep it might be, but
at any rate implying no small mental activity; for he appeared to read
very rapidly, at any rate exchanged the books he had taken out for new
ones very frequently. To judge by his reading, he was a man of letters.
But so wide-reading a man of letters must have an object, a literary
purpose in all probability. Why should not he be writing a novel? Not
a novel of society, assuredly, for a hermit is not the person to
report the talk and manners of a world which he has nothing to do with.
Novelists and lawyers understand the art of “cramming” better than any
other persons in the world. Why should not this young man be working
up the picturesque in this romantic region to serve as a background for
some story with magic, perhaps, and mysticism, and hints borrowed from
science, and all sorts of out-of-the-way knowledge which his odd and
miscellaneous selection of books furnished him? That might be, or
possibly he was only reading for amusement. Who could say?
The funds of the Public Library of Arrowhead Village allowed the
managers to purchase many books out of the common range of reading. The
two learned people of the village were the rector and the doctor. These
two worthies kept up the old controversy between the professions, which
grows out of the fact that one studies nature from below upwards, and
the other from above downwards. The rector maintained that physicians
contracted a squint which turns their eyes inwardly, while the muscles
which roll their eyes upward become palsied. The doctor retorted
that theological students developed a third eyelid,--the nictitating
membrane, which is so well known in birds, and which serves to shut
out, not all light, but all the light they do not want. Their little
skirmishes did not prevent their being very good friends, who had
a common interest in many things and many persons. Both were on the
committee which had the care of the Library and attended to the purchase
of books. Each was scholar enough to know the wants of scholars, and
disposed to trust the judgment of the other as to what books should
be purchased. Consequently, the clergyman secured the addition to the
Library of a good many old theological works which the physician would
have called brimstone divinity, and held to be just the thing to kindle
fires with,--good books still for those who know how to use them,
oftentimes as awful examples of the extreme of disorganization the
whole moral system may undergo when a barbarous belief has strangled the
natural human instincts. The physician, in the mean time, acquired for
the collection some of those medical works where one may find recorded
various rare and almost incredible cases, which may not have their like
for a whole century, and then repeat themselves, so as to give a new
lease of credibility to stories which had come to be looked upon as
fables.
Both the clergyman and the physician took a very natural interest in the
young man who had come to reside in their neighborhood for the present,
perhaps for a long period. The rector would have been glad to see him
at church. He would have liked more especially to have had him hear his
sermon on the Duties of Young Men to Society. The doctor, meanwhile, was
meditating on the duties of society to young men, and wishing that he
could gain the young man's confidence, so as to help him out of any
false habit of mind or any delusion to which he might be subject, if he
had the power of being useful to him.
Dr. Butts was the leading medical practitioner, not only of Arrowhead
Village, but of all the surrounding region. He was an excellent specimen
of the country doctor, self-reliant, self-sacrificing, working a great
deal harder for his living than most of those who call themselves the
laboring classes,--as if none but those whose hands were hardened by the
use of farming or mechanical implements had any work to do. He had that
sagacity without which learning is a mere incumbrance, and he had also
a fair share of that learning without which sagacity is like a
traveller with a good horse, but who cannot read the directions on the
guideboards. He was not a man to be taken in by names. He well knew that
oftentimes very innocent-sounding words mean very grave disorders; that
all, degrees of disease and disorder are frequently confounded under the
same term; that “run down” may stand for a fatigue of mind or body from
which a week or a month of rest will completely restore the over-worked
patient, or an advanced stage of a mortal illness; that “seedy”
may signify the morning's state of feeling, after an evening's
over-indulgence, which calls for a glass of soda-water and a cup of
coffee, or a dangerous malady which will pack off the subject of it, at
the shortest notice, to the south of France. He knew too well that what
is spoken lightly of as a “nervous disturbance” may imply that the whole
machinery of life is in a deranged condition, and that every individual
organ would groan aloud if it had any other language than the terrible
inarticulate one of pain by which to communicate with the consciousness.
When, therefore, Dr. Butts heard the word antipatia he did not smile,
and say to himself that this was an idle whim, a foolish fancy, which
the young man had got into his head. Neither was he satisfied to
set down everything to the account of insanity, plausible as that
supposition might seem. He was prepared to believe in some exceptional,
perhaps anomalous, form of exaggerated sensibility, relating to what
class of objects he could not at present conjecture, but which was as
vital to the subject of it as the insulating arrangement to a piece
of electrical machinery. With this feeling he began to look into the
history of antipathies as recorded in all the books and journals on
which he could lay his hands.
------------------------------
The holder of the Portfolio asks leave to close it for a brief interval.
He wishes to say a few words to his readers, before offering them some
verses which have no connection with the narrative now in progress.
If one could have before him a set of photographs taken annually,
representing the same person as he or she appeared for thirty or forty
or fifty years, it would be interesting to watch the gradual changes of
aspect from the age of twenty, or even of thirty or forty, to that of
threescore and ten. The face might be an uninteresting one; still,
as sharing the inevitable changes wrought by time, it would be worth
looking at as it passed through the curve of life,--the vital parabola,
which betrays itself in the symbolic changes of the features. An
inscription is the same thing, whether we read it on slate-stone, or
granite, or marble. To watch the lights and shades, the reliefs and
hollows, of a countenance through a lifetime, or a large part of it, by
the aid of a continuous series of photographs would not only be curious;
it would teach us much more about the laws of physiognomy than we could
get from casual and unconnected observations.
The same kind of interest, without any assumption of merit to be found
in them, I would claim for a series of annual poems, beginning in middle
life and continued to what many of my correspondents are pleased to
remind me--as if I required to have the fact brought to my knowledge--is
no longer youth. Here is the latest of a series of annual poems
read during the last thirty-four years. There seems to have been one
interruption, but there may have been other poems not recorded or
remembered. This, the latest poem of the series, was listened to by the
scanty remnant of what was a large and brilliant circle of classmates
and friends when the first of the long series was read before them, then
in the flush of ardent manhood:--
THE OLD SONG.
The minstrel of the classic lay
Of love and wine who sings
Still found the fingers run astray
That touched the rebel strings.
Of Cadmus he would fair have sung,
Of Atreus and his line;
But all the jocund echoes rung
With songs of love and wine.
Ah, brothers! I would fair have caught
Some fresher fancy's gleam;
My truant accents find, unsought,
The old familiar theme.
Love, Love! but not the sportive child
With shaft and twanging bow,
Whose random arrows drove us wild
Some threescore years ago;
Not Eros, with his joyous laugh,
The urchin blind and bare,
But Love, with spectacles and staff,
And scanty, silvered hair.
Our heads with frosted locks are white,
Our roofs are thatched with snow,
But red, in chilling winter's spite,
Our hearts and hearthstones glow.
Our old acquaintance, Time, drops in,
And while the running sands
Their golden thread unheeded spin,
He warms his frozen hands.
Stay, winged hours, too swift, too sweet,
And waft this message o'er
To all we miss, from all we meet
On life's fast-crumbling shore:
Say that to old affection true
We hug the narrowing chain
That binds our hearts,--alas, how few
The links that yet remain!
The fatal touch awaits them all
That turns the rocks to dust;
From year to year they break and fall,
They break, but never rust.
Say if one note of happier strain
This worn-out harp afford,
--One throb that trembles, not in vain,
Their memory lent its chord.
Say that when Fancy closed her wings
And Passion quenched his fire,
Love, Love, still echoed from the strings
As from Anacreon's lyre!
January 8, 1885.
VII. A RECORD OF ANTIPATHIES
In thinking the whole matter over, Dr. Butts felt convinced that, with
care and patience and watching his opportunity, he should get at the
secret, which so far had yielded nothing but a single word. It might
be asked why he was so anxious to learn what, from all appearances, the
young stranger was unwilling to explain. He may have been to some extent
infected by the general curiosity of the persons around him, in which
good Mrs. Butts shared, and which she had helped to intensify by
revealing the word dropped by Paolo. But this was not really his
chief motive. He could not look upon this young man, living a life
of unwholesome solitude, without a natural desire to do all that his
science and his knowledge of human nature could help him to do towards
bringing him into healthy relations with the world about him. Still,
he would not intrude upon him in any way. He would only make certain
general investigations, which might prove serviceable in case
circumstances should give him the right to counsel the young man as
to his course of life. The first thing to be done was to study
systematically the whole subject of antipathies. Then, if any further
occasion offered itself, he would be ready to take advantage of it.
The resources of the Public Library of the place and his own private
collection were put in requisition to furnish him the singular and
widely scattered facts of which he was in search.
It is not every reader who will care to follow Dr. Butts in his study
of the natural history of antipathies. The stories told about them are,
however, very curious; and if some of them may be questioned, there is
no doubt that many of the strangest are true, and consequently take away
from the improbability of others which we are disposed to doubt.
But in the first place, what do we mean by an antipathy? It is an
aversion to some object, which may vary in degree from mere dislike to
mortal horror. What the cause of this aversion is we cannot say. It
acts sometimes through the senses, sometimes through the imagination,
sometimes through an unknown channel. The relations which exist between
the human being and all that surrounds him vary in consequence of some
adjustment peculiar to each individual. The brute fact is expressed in
the phrase “One man's meat is another man's poison.”