A faint flush was in the evening sky: it was the afterglow, and in its

light I pressed onward toward the parsonage. A hollow in the road,

through which a stream rippled, lay between me and the grove that

sheltered Ellen's home: I hastened down it, and began climbing the

easy ascent on the other side of the stream. I seemed to grow years

older with every step I took, for I knew that the change which comes

to all must have come to me in like measure, though I was a boy again

when I came up the road laughing and heard the first sweet village

voice.

There was no form at the gate awaiting me, but the house was quite

unaltered, and I knew every leaf in the garden. The flush in the sky

had turned to gold and the air throbbed with light as I hid my

portmanteau under the rosebush by the gate and stole up to the

study-door. I would not give so palpable a clew to my identity as

that: I wished to appear like one who had dropped in for a moment to

ask the hour or the loan of a late journal. I rapped at the shutters

that enclosed the outer door, and waited in a tremor of expectation:

there was no response. Again I rapped, and again waited in vain for a

reply.

The shadows deepened in the grove; a thin light sifted down through

the leaves and fell upon the doorstep in pale disks that seemed to

tremble with agitation and suspense. I grew uneasy, and feared it was

not wise of me to have come without announcement, and my heart beat

heavily. I walked nervously to the side of the house and glanced in at

the deep bow-window; a shadow crossed the room: it was Ellen's shadow,

and unchanged, thank God! I knew she would not change, for she was one

whom time wearied not and fear fretted not, but to whom all things

were alike welcome, inasmuch as they came from the Hand that can work

no ill.

I returned to the study-door and rapped again, and then grew suddenly

much excited: I almost wished I had not summoned her so soon, but

already I heard her step upon the carpet, her hand on the latch and

the shutters swung apart. I strove to calm myself and ask carelessly

if she were at home, when I thought I saw a difference in the form and

face before me: they were so like Ellen's, but not hers. Had it been

in my power to do so, I would have turned at that moment and gone out

into the world without questioning any one: I would gladly have

avoided any revelation of ill that might have befallen that

household, and gone on as before, thinking it was well with them. But

it was too late: at the same instant we recognized one another.

"Is it Emma?" I asked fearfully.

"You are not--"

Ah, yes, it was he who had promised all these years to come, and had

come at last!

Then she added, "You have come too late: Ellen left us one week ago."

I knew what that meant: it was the leaving that takes all along with

it, and there remains nothing but a memory instead. It was the leaving

that lays bare the heart of hearts, and strikes blind and dumb the

agonized soul--the leaving and the leave-taking that is all

bitterness, call it by what name you will--that makes weak, the strong

and confounds the wise, and strikes terror to the breast of stone--the

leaving which is the leaving off of everything that is near and dear

and familiar, and the taking on of all that is new and strange--Death!

Death! at the thought of which even the Son of God faltered and cried,

"If it be possible let this cup pass from Me," alone in that wild

night in the garden, with watching and prayers and tears.

I had dreamed out my dream: it was glorious while it lasted, but I

wakened to a reality that was as cruel as it was unexpected.

Emma was a mere child when I left Heartsease: she had grown into the

living image of her sister. Whenever Emma spoke I seemed to hear the

voice and feel the presence of the one who had been gone a whole week

when I came in search of her. I entered the stricken home: father,

mother and maiden aunt--that good angel of all homes--were to me as if

I had parted with them but yesterday. We sat in silence for a time: it

seemed to me that if any one spoke there the very walls of the house

would distill sorrowful drops. Our hearts were brimming, our lips were

quivering, with inexpressible grief. It was a solemn and a holy hour;

the night closed in about us with unutterable tenderness; the summer

stars shed down their radiant beams.

The vesper-song of some invisible bird called me into the garden, and

I walked there alone. Did I walk utterly alone? A spirit was with me.

I wandered out to the gate and drew my portmanteau from its

hiding-place: I placed my hand upon the latch; the gate swung easily,

but I paused a moment. Shall I go or shall I stay? asked my heart:

"Stay," said the spirit that was with me. I returned to the house and

joined in the evening meal: sorrow sat at the board with us, but not a

hopeless sorrow. The magnetism of her touch had not yet left that

home: it never need, it never will leave it, for it is treasured

there. Her piano was closed, and I would not open it: any harmony

would have been too harsh for the hallowed silence of the place. Her

books, her pictures, her dainty needlework, _her words_--all that had

been a part of her life--still lived, though she had left us.

Those were sweet days to me. Emma and I went side by side to the old

haunts--to most of them, but not all, for there were some I cared no

longer to revisit. Before we had compassed the narrow limits of

Heartsease I began to wonder if there was a stone left that would give

back to me the impression of my early days: they all told another

story now, and most of them a sad one. Even the school-room was as a

dead thing, though I sat on the old benches and mounted the rostrum

whereon I was wont to "speak my piece" with much trepidation of spirit

and an inexplicable weakness of the knees. I wrote my name on the wall

in an obscure corner, simply because I didn't want it to be stricken

off from the roll entirely, and then turned back into the street with

less regret than I had reckoned on.

Of all the old friends I had known in boyhood, I saw but two besides

Emma--two sisters whose histories were strange and wonderful. They

greeted me as of yore, and we talked of the past with pity mingled

with delight. Dick, my old chum, Emma's soldier-brother, was miles and

miles away: not a boy of all our tribe was left in Heartsease to tell

me the story of the past. I began to be glad that it was so, for the

great gulf that lay between me and the boy I had been seemed to render

up no ghosts but were shrouded in sorrow.

There was one spot I might have visited, but did not: it seemed to me

better to wander to and fro about the dear old parsonage with the

living spirit near me, and to go out again into the world with the

softened influences of that lessened but unbroken circle consoling me,

than to seek the new grave that had not yet had time to clothe itself

with violets, and the sight of which could have given me nothing but

pain. By and by, I thought, let me return, and when it has healed over

and is sweet with summer flowers I will sprinkle rue upon it and

breathe her name. I went back from Heartsease like the bearer of

strange news. We had all sat together and thought, rather than

uttered, the memories of the past: they weighed me down, but they were

precious freights. When I looked once more, and for the last time,

upon the darling village drowsing in the sunshine, I felt that I had

learned the burden of the hearth: Not length of days is given, but the

sweetness and strength thereof: their memory shall live even though

the dead be dust. Out of the loam of this corrupting body springs

heavenward the invisible blossom of the soul. You have watered it with

tears: let the performance thereof comfort you. Though ye die, yet

shall ye live: thus saith the Lord. But shall the old days delight us

and the past live? Yea, verily, saith the Spirit--once, but never

again!

CHARLES WARREN STODDARD.

THE SCIENTIFIC LIFE.

It has been my good fortune to be thrown much with men of science, and

to find among them companions made agreeable by the best of social

qualities and by many larger capacities. Perhaps it is their life

apart, their consciousness of belonging to a distinct class, that has

made them, as I have found them, so strikingly individual, and partly

for this very reason so interesting. Indeed, it is curious to observe

how varied and how utterly different maybe the non-essentials, moral

and mental, of the beings to whom God has given the rare gift of power

to look into the secrets He has scattered around us in plant and earth

and animal life. Consistently with various grades of competence for

investigation, the man may be social, or may flee his fellows; may be

witty, or incapable of seeing the broadest fun; a poet, or almost

devoid of creative imagination; full of refinement and rife with

multiple forms of culture, or neither scholarly nor well-informed

outside of his especial line of work. According as he is endowed with

mental graces and forms of culture, apart from his science, will be

his charm as a companion; but while the absence of these means of

pleasing is sometimes met with, and while their lack in no wise

lessens his power of investigation, I have found most men of science

to possess in a high degree qualities which rendered them delightful

as comrades at the camp-fire or as guests at the dinner-table. Indeed,

the best talkers I know are men of science--not the mere students of a

knowledge already garnered, but those who discover new facts or who

spend their lives in original research. The most mirthful, cheery,

happy and liberal-minded of men are to be found in the limited ring of

those who are known in this country as investigators. On the European

continent the same remark holds true, but in Europe this class is very

often less refined than with us. In England the same class is

undoubtedly notable for a curious absence of the wide range of general

information constantly found in America, so that English men of

science often amaze us in social life by their lack not so much of

culture, as of wide knowledge of matters outside of their own studies,

as well as by their inaptitude to share the lighter chat of the

dinner-table.

Even in Great Britain--and yet more in Germany and France--the habits

of life make it less of a sacrifice than here for men to abandon all

that money gives and to devote themselves to the quiet life of the

closet and the laboratory. Once set in a groove, the average man

abroad is less apt, to seek to rise out of it or depart from it; while

with us the constant flow of a too intensely active life is for ever

luring men with baits of greed to take the easy step aside from pure

science into the golden ways of gain. Honored be they in this land of

eager money-getting who withstand the temptation, and in quiet and

peace, undisturbed by the turmoil about them, pursue those noble

quests which give to humanity its highest training! What these men

lose we know: to them are neither great houses nor the hoards of

successful commerce. Their lives are often vexed by the trouble and

worry of wretchedly incompetent incomes, and what trials they endure

those they love must also share. Their incomes, in fact, are usually

such as a well-paid bank-clerk or dry-goods salesman would despise.

Officers of the navy or army are, as a rule, as well paid as men of

science who hold the chairs of teachers; but while the former class

are the most signal and steady grumblers, the latter are, of all the

men I know, the most tranquilly content. What they miss in life we can

well imagine; what they gain the general public little comprehends;

but those who know them best will readily understand why it is that

their lives are seemingly so happy.

And here, again, I would remind the reader that the class I speak of

are not the mere college professors, useful as they are, but those

men, in or out of that class, whose lives are devoted to the

acquisition of facts fresh from Nature--to the original study of bird

and beast and stone and flower--and those who, on a yet higher plane

of work, are busy with the patient investigation of physics and

physiology. Such men do not rely for success in their pursuits on

their knowledge of human nature, or the passions and foibles and lower

wants of their fellows, but, for ever turning toward a more quiet

life, are living among those strange problems which haunt the

naturalist, or among those awful forces which rule the stars and

pervade the dead and living world of matter. There must be something

quieting and ennobling in this steady contemplation of vast

machineries, which have all the force and terror of human passions,

and yet the serene steadiness and certainty of unchanging law. It is

"a purer ether, a diviner air," from whence its citizens can afford to

look down in peace, perhaps in scorn, upon the ignoble strifes beneath

them.

I suppose, too, that other men can hardly dream of the one vast

pleasure which comes to these searchers when ever so little a new

truth or a fresh analogy reaches them as the result of their work. The

pursuit itself is all absorbing, all exacting, and when at last the

purpose is attained, and out of darkness flashes the light of some

novel law, the knowledge of some new connecting link, some simple

explanation of a range of facts or phenomena, or even the discovery of

a fresh analogy or homology, or of an undescribed fossil being, the

purity of the pleasure which they win is something which to be

understood must have been felt. "I think," said Jeffries Wyman once to

the writer, "that the most happy and heartfilling thing in the world

is to come face to face with something which no one but God ever saw

before." How transcendent must have been this form of joy when it

rewarded the first who saw the spectrum analysis of starlight in its

fullness of meaning, or to him who first knew where and how the blood

runs its wonderful courses!

Then, too, the life of other men, of the merchant and the lawyer,

palls as age advances and its rewards are paid in dollars or in honor.

Their experiences are limited and work out, but the naturalist or

investigator only gathers day by day new interests about his life of

duties. His work is as pleasant as play, and his play is usually only

some new form of work. Nature is his--a mistress whose charms are

unfading, and who is his for life. Go to some meeting of men of

science and see how this is. The oldest has as keen a zest as the

youngest, and while life becomes to others a weariness, to these men

the pleasure in their steady work is absolutely unfailing. I heard the

other day a half-jesting remark at a dinner-table of men of science to

the effect that life might become a tiresome thing as we grew older.

"Not for me," said one of them, whose name is known wherever science

is held in honor: "there must be no end of Rhizopods I have never

studied." Thus it is that men who live ever gazing at the surely

widening horizon of truth, who know that they at least need never sigh

for new worlds to conquer, who day by day are coming into closer

company with the yet unwhispered thoughts of the great Maker, are

happy and contented in the tasks to which their lives are given, and

serenely patient of what their duties deny them of luxury and wealth

and freedom to wander or to rest.

It might well be thought that men living so far apart from the general

paths, and pursuing purposes so remote from those of the trader, would

become obnoxious to that bitterest of American reproaches, the charge

of being unpractical. The directness of aim of scientific training and

the lofty code of honor among students of science, with their fair

share of cis-Atlantic pliability, makes them, however, most useful and

trustworthy people whenever it becomes requisite to entrust to them

the mixture of commercial and scientific labor which is needed by

heads of boards of weights and measures, of lighthouses, of coast

surveys, and for the affairs and mere business conduct of societies

and colleges or museums. Indeed, as regards this kind of work, they

have too much of it--too much of that sort of labor which in England

is well and wisely done by wealthy aristocrats who are amateurs in

science or eager to find work of some kind. The popular opinion

certainly conceives of the man of true science as being almost unfit

for the practical every-day duties which bring him into working

contact with his fellow-men. This is, as it were, a reversed form of

the prejudice which believes that a physician or a lawyer will be a

worse doctor or advocate because he writes verses or amuses an hour of

leisure by penning a magazine article. As regards medicine, this

popular decree is swiftly fading, though it still has some mischievous

power. It was once believed, at least in this country, that a doctor

should be all his life a doctor, and nothing else: the notion still

lingers, so that young medical men who at the outset of their career

seek to become known as investigators in any of the sciences related

to medicine are, I fear, liable to be looked upon by many older

physicians, and by a part of the lay public, as less likely than

others to attain eminence in the purely practical part of medical

life. It is time that this phantom of vulgar prejudice faded out.

"Whatever you do," said a late teacher of physiology in my presence to

a young doctor, "do not venture to become an experimental

physiologist--that is, if you wish afterward to succeed as a doctor.

It is fatal to that. It is sure to ruin you with the public." Yet

Brodie, Cooper, Erichson and many others so employed their earlier

years of leisure, and I might point in this country to some noble

instances of like success in practice following upon careers which at

first were purely scientific. But, in truth, every physician is more

or less an investigator, and those who have been early trained to the

sternly accurate demands of work in the laboratory of the experimental

physiologist are only the better fitted for study at the bedside.

There is, however, a long list of physicians who have begun life in

the pursuit of science, and have found its charms too potent to allow

them to depart thence into the more lucrative ways of medical

practice. One of this class was Jeffries Wyman, whose character and

career well illustrate all that I have said of the scientific life,

its trials and rewards. There are some graves on which we cannot lay

too many flowers; and if, therefore, after those who knew him best, I

venture to add my words of honor and affection, and to state the

impressions derived from my intercourse with the very remarkable

student of science whose loss we have all lamented, I trust that the

strong feeling which prompts me may be held a sufficient excuse.

I had three or four sets of associations with Wyman, no one of which

fails to come back to my remembrance filled with the charm of a man

whose whole nature was simple, wholesome, pure and generous. Others

have said all that need be said of what he did for his much-loved

science: it is less easy to convey to those who knew him not an

impression of the influence he exerted upon younger workers, and a

sense of the social pleasure which came of his remarkable combination

of vast knowledge and general culture, combined with a certain

loveliness of character and an almost childlike simplicity. I once

heard our greatest preacher nobly illustrate, with Samson's riddle as

his text, the delightfulness of that form of human character in which

sweetness and strength are blended. As I listened, somehow I began to

recall Wyman, for it was just here that his social charm resided. He

was intellectually stronger even than any of his completed work

showed, but he was also the most lovable of men. His mind was very

active and remarkably suggestive--so much so that in social chat, even

the most careless, he was constantly saying things which made you

think or left you thoughtful. For many years he wrote to me

frequently, and his letters are filled with the most lucid and happy

suggestions, explanations or comments. After the failure on the part

of one of his friends to attain a deserved object of just ambition, he

wrote to me to state his own extreme regret; and this not once, but

thrice, as if he was haunted by the sorrow of another's

disappointment. At times he was full of the most boyish spirit of

jesting, as when in 1862 he wrote to me grieving over the secession of

Virginia, because we had both of us thus lost our easiest supply of

rattlesnakes. Then he rejoiced over the fact that we still had the

bull-frog; and in an another note regrets that the rattlesnakes had

not been allowed to vote on the question of seceding.

As I write I pause to turn over these records of a dearly-valued

friendship. They begin years ago with words of encouragement as to

certain investigations in which both of us felt interest. Here and

there they touch on matters of social or personal value, but for the

most part they deal only with science. I used to wonder in those days,

and still am surprised anew as again I turn over these letters, at the

amount of what I might call suggestiveness in Wyman. He replies, for

example, in one letter to the gift of a scientific essay, and then in

a postscript runs off over eight pages of comment, explanation and

novel suggestions which put the subject in a new light; while every

here and there, amidst the wealth of scientific illustration and

useful hints given to aid another's work, there is some pause to

express a courteous doubt of his own opinions. Everywhere, indeed, his

letters, which made the most of our intercourse, were full of the

broadest sympathy in pursuits which often were--but often were not--in

the same direction as his own lifelong studies. At times, too, the

sympathy broke out into the extreme of generosity. Thus, having

learned from me that certain very important and hitherto undescribed

anatomical structures would probably be found in serpents and frogs,

he tells me soon after that he has found them; also, that he has

discovered them in birds, and that he has been led finally to a series

of unlooked-for discoveries in the anatomy of the nerves of the frog;

and he wishes experiments made on living frogs to learn the

physiological use of the structures thus found. Then not long after he

proposes that as the first discovery came from this writer, he should

take and use the notes and drawings which recorded his own researches,

and should use them in a second paper. It is needless to say that this

was declined, and the results appeared under Wyman's name. It was

characteristic of the man, and was not the only time when I had to

thank him for the kindest offers of aid.

To see Dr. Wyman in his museum was one of the most pleasant

exhibitions of the man at his best. I well remember one Sunday

afternoon in May three years ago, when, walking in Cambridge with

H----, one of the most prominent of our great railway presidents--and,

better than this, a man notable for genial social qualities, high

culture and a broad range of the readiest sympathies--I proposed to

him to call on Wyman and ask him to show us the Archaeological Museum.

We found Wyman at home, and if you had asked a bright little girl to

show you her baby-house she could have been no better pleased than he.

At first, as we went from case to case, he was quiet and said little,

but as we showed the interest and admiration we so warmly felt, he

also grew eager and vivid in description, until as he went on his talk

became a marvel of illustrative learning--so wide, so varied, so

complete, that we were carried along the current of his thoughts in

wonder at this strange combination of intense interest, of almost

childlike satisfaction, of a concentration on his subject of vast

antiquarian knowledge and of absolutely perfect anatomical skill. Mr.

H---- called his attention to the curious distortions and odd

enlargements of the protruded tongue in some of the Alaskan wooden

masks, and on this little text he was away in a moment from case to

case in the museum, and from century to century, pointing out the use

of the tongue as an organ of facial expression in various ages. Here

were Roman or Greek examples, here Sioux or Alaskan types of the same

usages, and here was a new thought he had never had before, and we

were thanked for awakening it; and so in his talk over this little

point he showed us how barbarian natures had like thoughts everywhere,

and, as much amused as we, he quoted and laughed and talked, still

always pleased and easy under the vast weight of learning which,

coming from his lips, was so utterly free from the least appearance of

being ponderous or tiresome. I think I never knew any other man whose

learning sat upon him as lightly or was given to others as gracefully.

I had once a like pleasure in raking over an Indian shell-heap with

Wyman. The quiet, amused amazement of the native who plied the spade

for us was an odd contrast to Wyman's mood of deep interest and

serious occupation. He had a boy's pleasure in the quest, and again

displayed for me the most ready learning as to everything involved in

the search. Bits of bones were named as I would name the letters of

the alphabet: bone needles, fragments of pottery and odds and ends of

nameless use went with a laugh or some ingenious comment into his

little basket. In truth, a walk with Wyman at Mount Desert was

something to remember.

The acquaintances of the merchant or lawyer grow fewer as age comes

on, but the naturalist is always enlarging his circle of living or

dead things in which he takes interest, and none more profited thus by

the years as they came than Wyman. The bird, the tree, the flower, the

rock, tiny worlds beneath damp stones, little dramas of minute life

within mouldy tree-trunks, the quaint menageries in the sea-caves,

shifted with every tide, whatever the waves brought or the winds

carried or the earth bore were one and all acquaintances of this

delightful and delighted companion. Not without a manly interest in

the world of men and politics, he lived for the most part serenely

above its ferment and passions. Without the large means which, had

they been his, had been in the truest sense and for the best purposes

_means,_ he lived a life of quiet, studious content, made somewhat

hard by ill-health, but, so far as I know, undisturbed by envy of

easier lots than his. Whatever were his crosses in this world--and

they must have been many--no man who knew Wyman could now wish them to

have been changed, if, as no doubt was the case, they helped to build

up a character so filled with honest labor, so pure, so lofty and so

generous--

Nor could Humanity resign

A life which bade her heart beat high,

And blazoned Duty's stainless shield,

And set a star in Honor's sky.

S. WEIR MITCHELL.

PLAYING WITH FIRE.

Apple-blossoms and the pale wild roses that grow in the shadow of

woody lanes were things of which she always reminded you, she was so

slight and so fair, with just a suggestion of bloom about her--the

bloom of youth. Hardly beautiful, but then seventeen summers have a

beauty of their own--a beauty of firm round curves and velvety color,

whose absence a dozen years later works utter transformation. When

Lilian should approach thirty, and the blush that shifted now with

every word she spoke, almost with every thought, should have

paled--when time and tears should perhaps have dimmed the soft

eyes--then she might be, to those who love fleshly magnificence alone,

of sufficiently commonplace appearance, but just now there was

something about her so unique and so attractive that every one when

she passed by turned to discover what it was. For the clear blue of

her eye and the lofty purity of her brow seemed to tell of a spirit

whose beauty far exceeded that of its temple, and the brightness of

the glance and the sweetness of the smile warmed the heart in her

behalf as regular outline and perfect contour are seldom known to do.

Happiness, too, is a crowning charm to any woman, and Lilian was

deeply and contentedly happy: a smile perpetually played in the

little, half-guessed dimples at the corners of her mouth, and her wide

clear eyes were full of peace. No; though years should rob Lilian of

bloom, it was plain that they could but add fresh charms to her soul;

and Lilian's lover must needs love her soul.

She was to be married in a couple of years--her mother would not hear

of it at present--to one who had been her lover from her cradle, and

who loved her with a tender and devoted passion, who thought her

embodied loveliness, and who would have made any sacrifice, even to

death, for her welfare. She had seemed to him from the hour when he

first saw her--a blue-eyed, rosy child with an aureole of palest

yellow hair--a being not made of clay--something remote and different

as the angels are; and when he first discovered that he loved her he

had felt momentarily as if he committed a sacrilege, and though he

lost that sensation soon enough, she always, seemed to him a holy and

perfect thing. The only cloud that crossed her sky now was sometimes

when this passion of Sterling's oppressed her or constrained her, and

made her feel that her love was less than his.

Sterling was in the first flush of manhood, some half dozen years her

senior--a hazel-eyed, bright-haired Saxon, and a noble, upright

fellow: he was as prosperous in his fortunes as he had a right to

expect, for his father had established him in a good business, and

with suitable thrift and care there was no reason why he should not

succeed. His father was a man of such strict adherence to theory that

he allowed the boy, as he still called him, only the same chance that

he himself had had: he lent him his capital and exacted a rigid

payment of the interest. "John shall share my fortune equally with

Helen and his mother," Mr. Sterling used to say, "when he has shown me

that he deserves it and can double it." And John, sure that any theory

of his father's was as right as a law of the universe, was only

anxious to keep the warm affection that he knew lay behind the stern

principle.

He lived with Lilian's mother, whom he had persuaded, when she found

it necessary to make exertion, to come to the city and rent a house

there for himself and two or three of his friends. He meant to take

the house off her hands as soon as he was able to afford so large an

expenditure, and meantime he did all he could to help her render it

attractive and homelike. If it was not yet all they wished, or all he

intended it should be, he knew that they were young, and felt that

they could wait; and he said as much to Lilian when he saw her stand

on tiptoe before a picture or look longingly at a bit of bronze;

conscious the while that there was an artistic and luxurious side to

the child's nature that he did not gratify--with which, indeed, he had

little sympathy--and evidence of which it often vexed him to observe,

as if it were a barrier between them, when her rapt face revealed

feelings unknown to him as she looked into the sunset; as she stood at

the door on summer nights while bell-notes and flower-scents went by

on the wind; as she listened to orchestral music which in his ears was

a noisy snarl. But, for all that, he said to himself that this ideal

intelligence, so to call it, of Lilian's, was something higher than

his own rude senses; he had no wish to place her on a lower level; he

must do away the barrier by surmounting it himself; and he used his

leisure time to study pictures and music, to discover the entrance to

this world of art whose atmosphere he fancied to be Lilian's native

air; and already he began to be able to translate into ideas the

strange and awful thrill he felt before some great white marble where

genius and inspiration had wrought together, and to find the thread by

which he might one day follow the vast windings of those symphonies

which Lilian always grew so pale to hear. But he was a person of

singular reserves, and Lilian learned nothing of such effort or

accomplishment as yet. "You think I am so perfect!" she would say.

"You have built up a great hollow idol around me, and it is like

living in a vacuum. Don't you know it is very tiresome to be chained

up to such a standard?" And John only adored her all the more for her

candor, did not believe it, and hastened home from business the

sooner.

In fact, if this home, in which they all shared, was not exactly as

they would have liked it to be, it was nevertheless a delightful place

to John Sterling. He already had a sense of proprietorship in it. He

lined its walls with books as he grew able, with prints, with now and

then a painting, with plaster till he could get marble; Lilian's ivies

clambered everywhere, and her azaleas and great lilies seemed to have

a secret of perpetual flowering; a bright fire cast rosy lights and

shadows over it all; and John would declare, as he sank into his

easy-chair in the half twilight and surveyed the warm place, which

seemed only a ruddy background for Lilian's fairness, that he never

wanted anything better than this as long as he lived. It hurt him

sometimes, though, to remember that Lilian never made any response to

such words. "Well, well," he would say to himself in a way he had,

"why should she? and why should I expect it of her? If people are born

with wings, they do not want to creep. She beautifies everything she

touches, and she is only in her right place when all the flower of the

world's beauty is about her. But some day that shall be; and meantime

there is nothing to hinder my liking this." He had almost an ideal

home with Lilian's mother, as he wrote to his own mother, and every

time he went out of it in the morning he felt himself a better man

than he was when he went into it at night. His mother and father

journeyed a thousand miles to see it, and felt as John did

himself--thanked Heaven for the promise of a child like Lilian--one so

forgetful of herself, so thoughtful for every one else, so candid, so

generous, so gentle, so good. "She is nothing but a child," said Mrs.

Sterling for the thousandth time, "and yet how lofty she is!--so lofty

and so sweet! What will she be at thirty if she is this at seventeen?

It makes me tremble to think of John's being blest so, as if it were

too much, as if some fate must overtake him."

"He must become a very superior man under the influence of such a wife

as Lilian will be," said Mr. Sterling. "Helen shall go on and spend

the winter with John: they teach canaries to sing," said he, stroking

Helen's black hair, "by hanging up their cages in the same room with a

nightingale's."

And so Helen was despatched on the journey, and made another member in

the little family, for John's friends merely had rooms, and enjoyed

no more sufferance than other guests in the penetralia of the house.

She was a gaunt and big-eyed child, with a certain promise of

magnificence that, as Reyburn said, might be fulfilled in a year or

two in a sumptuous sort of beauty. But now she was a morbid and

retiring creature, fourteen or fifteen years old, looking out askance

and half suspiciously on the world from under the shadow of her

immense eyelashes, and singing from room to room with a strange voice

that a year or two would ripen into tones fit for a siren. There was

just the difference in age between her and Lilian that, while it

allowed them companionship, gave Lilian, together with the fact of her

engagement to John, a glorious dignity in Helen's eyes that she would

not have her abate a jot. Her gowns, her shawls, her simple laces and

few jewels seemed the appanage of a superior state of existence; they

brought close to her the possibilities of that charmed time when she

too would be a woman grown. She could not tire of gazing at the blush

flitting over Lilian's face as she spoke, at the way her steady eyelid

slanted toward her cheek as she read: the sound of her voice had an

intimate music that acted like a charm; and when this wonderful being

entertained her in her well hours and cosseted her in her ill ones,

listened to her, waited on her and caressed her, Helen rewarded her by

worshiping her. It was Lilian who constantly procured Helen pleasures,

who shielded her little faults, who sympathized with her joys and her

griefs and her sentimentalities, making merry with her to-day, crying

with her to-morrow, and who shone upon her with unvarying sunshine; it

was Lilian who did all this in another way for John; it was Lilian who

made every one's happiness that came near her; and Helen's affection

for her became something romantic and ideal. As for her brother John,

Helen had always held him in a place apart: she loved him far better

than she loved her strict, stern father; he was a portion of herself;

her universe revolved around him; she had never formed a fancy of what

life and the world would be without him; and much as she worshiped

Lilian, she had more than once doubted if she were altogether worthy

of John--not because she was Lilian, but because he was John. She used

to watch Lilian sometimes when John's friends came in in the

evening--used to watch her and admire her flushing face, her perfect

toilette, her gracious manner; but used to wonder if all betrothed

women treated their lovers' friends so exactly as they did their

lovers, with that same unchanging courtesy and gentle sweetness. Once

she saw the manner vary: it was while she herself was singing to them

all, facing down the room, and John held his pawn suspended in the

crisis of a game of chess, while Mr. Reyburn walked familiarly up and

down, now turning the music for her, now bending with a word in

Lilian's ear, now joining in the burden of the song:

As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,

So deep in luve am I;

And I will luve thee still, my dear,

Till a' the seas gang dry--

Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,

And the rocks melt wi' the sun.

"What a being Burns was!" interrupted John, without looking up. "How

precisely he knew my feelings toward any one who would show me how to

escape this checkmate!" And Lilian sprang to her feet, upsetting her

workbasket, and ran to him and commenced talking hurriedly, while Mr.

Reyburn, whose eyes had been resting on her face for some time, kept

on singing after Helen ceased--

Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,

And the rocks melt wi' the sun.

And Helen, child as she was, looking at him and listening to him,

recognized a veiled meaning in the tone of the singing, and thought

she hated the singer.

That night, when all the others had gone, and Lilian's mother was

folding her work, and John was locking a window, and Helen closing the

piano, she saw Mr. Reyburn stoop over Lilian's hand as he said

good-night--stoop low, and press his lips upon its dimpled back. In

after years Helen might recall his manner of that moment and

understand it, half reverence, half passion, as it was, but now she

only saw Lilian turn white and tremble, and clasp her hand over her

eyes in a bewildered way when he had gone to his rooms on the other

side of the hall, and walk up stairs as though she feared to rouse an

echo.

"Oh, Lilian," said Helen, following her into her mother's room, "how

dared he kiss your hand? How dared he look at you so while he sang? I

hate him!"

"Hush, child," said Lilian gently, almost solemnly. And Helen,

remembering who Lilian was, and the deep friendship between her

brother and the other, felt as if she had committed an unpardonable

sin, and crept away to bed, and did not see the man again during the

short remainder of her stay.

But Lilian saw him often. Perhaps she never went out without seeing

him, perhaps she never remained at home that he did not come in: going

by the parlor-door half a dozen times a day, nothing was easier. In

fact, few men have friends who think it worth their while to pay such

attentions to another's chosen wife as this friend of John's did.

To-day he gave flowers and helped her heap them in the vases; on the

morrow he brought in for inspection a borrowed portfolio of the

wonderful water--colors that some mad artist had dashed off among the

painted canons, or brought perhaps the artist himself; when he was

absent he wrote her letters, sent to John's care indeed, and conveying

messages to John--letters full of what John called Reyburn's

transcendental twaddle, but which were meat and drink to Lilian,

living half alone in her world of fancy; when he was in town again he

took her through galleries of pictures and statues where John had not

an entree; he placed his opera-box at her disposal; and when John, who

insisted on her acceptance of Reyburn's courtesies, heard them talk

together about the mysteries of the music or the ballet there, he

could have found it possible to question the justice of Fate that had

mated such spirit with such clod in giving Lilian to himself--for he

felt that she was already given, and they were mated by their long

affection beyond all divorce but death's--could have found it possible

to question the justice of Fate if he had not remembered, with a sort

of pain, that, charming and brilliant as Reyburn was, having a sweet

and reckless gayety and generosity, winning friends who loved him

almost as men love women, he was nevertheless as inconstant as the

breeze that rifles a rose.

"Yes," said he one day, in speaking of Reyburn to Lilian as they

looked at him through the open door of the drawing-room--"yes, we men

may love Reyburn safely enough, as we ask for no devotion in return,

but woe be to the woman who builds her house on that sand!"

"Will it slide away?" asked Lilian, not glancing from her needle.

"Well--Look at him now. Possession palls on him, they say. Half an

hour ago he plucked that bud. If it had hung as high as heaven, he

would have climbed for it, having once set his heart on it, and have

been tireless till he got it. On the whole, the thing is lucky that he

did not tear it to pieces in his dissecting love of laying bare its

heart. He has been inhaling its delicious soul this half hour: let us

see what he does with it." And as they looked they saw Reyburn lift

the half-forgotten flower, whose pale bloom had begun to tarnish ever

so little, glance at it lightly and give it a careless fillip to the

marble floor of the hall where he was walking up and down, and where,

as he came back, he set his heel upon it without knowing that he did

so.

It was just after Helen went home that Lilian's health began to

fail--to fail gently and slowly, but surely. She shut herself up at

first, and lay all day listless and melancholy. She did not come down

in the morning before John went out, but he usually found her on the

sofa when he came in. And there she stayed, either on the sofa or half

lost among the cushions of an arm-chair, during the evenings when

John's friends came. But by and by the house-friends one by one ceased

to drop in as they passed down the hall; other friends ceased to ring

the bell: the old lively evenings were impossible with one so frail

and delicate to be cared for.

Reyburn, to be sure, came every day, and no message could shut him

out. If Lilian was not in the parlors, he ran up stairs into the

little sitting-room: if he could not see Lilian, he would walk in and

see her mother. Sometimes John took her out to drive--to give her a

color, as he said--but he was unable to do it often, and then Reyburn

took his place till she declared she would ride no more. It was not so

easy to discover what ailed Lilian as it was to see she failed. One

doctor said she had merely functional derangement of the heart;

another talked about complicated depression of the nerves; and a third

said she was whimsical, and nothing at all was the matter with her,

and she had better marry and taste the hard realities of life, and she

would soon be cured of her follies. But Lilian firmly and quietly

refused to be married yet: possibly she knew that her emotions were

not what they should be for marriage with the man to whom she was

plighted; possibly hoped that time might make it right; possibly

wanted nothing more definite than delay. Once John impressed Reyburn

into his service in the matter: they were so thoroughly intimate, so

like brothers of one family, that he appealed to him without a second

thought. What Reyburn meant by urging her to fix the day for her

wedding with John, Lilian might have marveled had he not kept his eyes

on the floor while he spoke the few curt sentences, and held her hand

with the grip of death. It was no marriage with John that Reyburn

wanted for her, she knew too well: he also looked forward to delay.

But she told John that when she was herself again it would be time

enough to talk of marriage: she should not bind him to a dead woman.

And somehow, though the relation between her and John remained the

same, the usual evidences of it, one by one, had disappeared. If he

took her in his arms, she slipped away; if he bent to kiss her lips,

she held her cheek. Still, though caresses ceased, the tender word and

the kindly glance remained. John fancied the rest to be but a part of

the nervous whims of her illness, from which she was to recover in

time; and he waited with all the old love in his soul. And as for

Lilian, the old affection was with her too--the affection of childhood

and girlhood, the deep and grateful feeling associated with all her

life--but it struggled and wrestled with a novel power that while it

promised pleasure gave only pain. It made her suffer to see John

suffer: she hurt him as little as she could, but for the life of her

she was able to do no differently. She thought it would be better for

him if she should die; and when she found his great sad eyes fastened

on her, with their longing for her return to him, she wished to

disappear out of the world and his memory together. She grew whiter

and thinner, more tired and sore at heart, all the time, till the two

years that had been fixed as the period of their engagement had

passed--grew so transparent and spiritual that sometimes, as John hung

over her in despair, he felt as if, instead of being bound to a dead

woman, he were already bound to an angel.

One evening, after an absence, Reyburn came in as John sat reading by

Lilian's side: he brushed away the book and insisted on their playing

an odd new game of cards, and Lilian unaccountably brightened and

sparkled and laughed, as in the old time, for more than an hour; and

as he left them at last he came back to declare his belief that a

change was all Lilian needed--other climates, other scenes. "Come,

Sterling," said he, "my little yacht, the Beachbird, sails on a cruise

next week. I will have a cabin fitted up for Miss Lilian if you will

take her and her mother and come along. The house can keep itself;

your clerks can keep your books; we shall all escape the east winds.

It will be a certain cure for her, and do you good yourself."

And talking of it lightly at first, presently it grew feasible--all

the more so that Helen and her father were spending their second

winter down there in one of those "summer isles of Eden," and word

could be sent to them in advance to be in readiness to join the

Beachbird. And the end of all the talk was that at the close of the

next week John's business had been left in the hands of others, and

John and Lilian and her mother were on the Beachbird's deck as she

slipped down the harbor.

Mr. Reyburn's prophecy proved true: whether the sea-breeze fanned

Lilian into fresh life, whether there were healing balms in the

perpetual summer through which they sailed, or whether she abandoned

herself to the pleasures of the flying hours, she began to regain

strength and color, her languor disappeared, she spent the day in the

soft blissful air with her books or work, her mother knitting and

nodding near by; while John, if not sick himself, yet feeling very

miserable, lay on a mattress on the deck, sometimes dozing, sometimes

following with his eye the graceful lines and snowy dazzle of the

perfect little yacht as mast and sheet and shroud made their relief

upon the sky; sometimes listening to Lilian and Reyburn; sometimes

watching them as they walked up and down in the twilight, her dress

fluttering round her and her fair hair blowing in the wind. John

wondered at her as he watched her: she seemed to be possessed with an

unnatural life; a flickering, dancing sort of fire burned in her eye,

on her cheek and lip, in her restless manner: she was like one who

after long slumber felt herself alive and receiving happiness at every

pore, but a strange, treacherous sort of happiness that might slip

away and leave her at any moment, and which she was ever on the alert

to keep.

One night Lilian's mother had gone below, John had followed, and they

were long since folded in their quiet dreams; and Lilian, unable to

sleep, had at last arisen and thrown on some garments, and wrapping a

great cloak about her, had stolen on deck. The person still pacing the

deck, who saw her ascend and flit along with her fair hair streaming

over her white cloak and her face shining white in the starlight,

might have taken her for a spirit. But he was not the kind of man that

believes in spirits. He went and leaned with her as she leaned over

the vessel's edge, and watched the glittering rent they made in the

water. They were side by side: now and then the wind blew the silken

ends of her hair across his cheek, and his hand lay over hers as it

rested on the rail; now and then they looked at one another; now and

then they spoke.

"Are you happy, Lilian?" he said.

"Oh, perfectly!" she answered him.

As she said it there was an outcry, a sudden lurch of the vessel, a

flapping of the sails and ropes, and a vast shadow swept by them, the

hull of a huge steamer, so near that they could almost have touched it

with an outstretched hand. But as it ploughed its way on and left them

unharmed and rocking on its great waves, Reyburn released her from the

arm he had flung about her in the moment's dismay--the arm that had

never folded her before, that never did again.

"Oh no! no!" sighed Lilian with a shiver as she quickly drew

away--"not perfectly, oh not perfectly! That is impossible here, where

that black death can at any moment extinguish all our light."

"Be still! be still!" said Reyburn. "Why do you speak of it?" he cried

roughly. "Isn't it enough to know that some day it must come?--

"The iron hand that breaks our band,

It breaks my bliss--it breaks my heart!"

He left her side in a sudden agitation a moment, and walked the deck

again; and before he turned about Lilian had slipped below.

The next afternoon the Beachbird anchored within sight of shore and

outside a long low reef where they saw a palm-plume tossing, and a

boat came off, bringing Helen and her father.

John, who had begun at last to find his sea-legs, stood as eager and

impatient to welcome the new-comers, while every dip of the shining

oars lessened the distance between them, as if the cruise were just

beginning; but Lilian, in the evening shadow behind him, knew that her

share in the cruise was over.

"Is it the fierce and farouche duenna who wanted to annihilate me so

when I bade you adieu one night?" asked Reyburn, taking Lilian upon

his arm for a promenade upon the deck while they waited. "Let me see:

she was very young, was she not, and tall, and ugly? Is it her destiny

to watch over you? If she proves herself disagreeable, I will rig a

buoy and drop her overboard. After all, she is only a child. Ah no,"

he said, half under his breath, "the end is not yet."

"She is no longer a child," said Lilian, "Her father writes that he

hardly dares call her the same name, she is so changed. While I have

been withering up in the North, two equatorial years down here have

wrought upon her as they do upon the flowers. He says no Spanish woman

rivals her. Well, it will please--"

Just then Reyburn handed her the glass he had been using, and pointed

it for her.

"Can it be possible?" said Lilian. "Has Helen been transfigured to

that?" and something, she knew not what, sent a quiver through her and

made the image in the glass tremble--the image of a tall and shapely

girl whose round and perfect figure swayed to the boat's motion, lithe

as a reed to the wind, while she stood erect looking at something that

had been pointed out, and the boatmen paused with their oars in the

air; the image of a face on whose dark cheek the rose was burning, in

whose dark eye a veiled lustre was shining, around whose creamy brow

the raven hair escaped in countless tendril-like ringlets, and whose

smile, as she seemed to speak to some one while she stood in the low

sunset light, had a radiance of its own. As Lilian looked upon this

dazzling picture, backed by the golden and rosy sky, the golden and

rosy waters, the palm-plumes tossing in the purpling distance, the

silver flashing of the oars, the quiver came again, and she gave the

glass to Reyburn, who held it steadily till the boat was within

hailing distance, and who himself at last handed the shining creature

on board and led her to Lilian and her mother. And then the Beachbird

slowly spread her wings, and with her new burden softly floated away

into the dusk, and the great colors faded, and the stars one after

another seemed to drop low and hang from the heavens like lamps, and

rich odors floated off from the receding land, and they moved along

folded in the dark splendor of the tropical night. But in some vague

way every soul on board the little yacht felt the presence of another

influence, and that, though they sailed in the same waters as

yesterday, it was in another atmosphere; for an element had come among

them that should produce a transformation as powerful as though it

wrought a chemic change of their atoms.

Lilian and Reyburn still paced the deck, after their custom, when the

first greetings were over, leaving Helen and her father with John for

the present. But as the conversation dropped more personal subjects,

and John and his father were discussing political matters, Helen began

to look about, and chiefly she surveyed Lilian. And as she saw the

transparent skin, the vivid flush, the restless air--saw the way

Reyburn had, as he walked with her, as he bent to her, as he folded

her shawl about her--the way he had of absorbing her, a hasty

remembrance of the night when he stooped over Lilian's hand came to

her, and she remembered also how she herself had hated him. "The man

has bewitched her," said Helen an hour afterward--an hour of watching

and puzzling. "She is fond of John still: she cannot bear to break his

heart--she would rather break her own--and she is dying of her

attraction to the other." As she sat there, still observing them,

wondering what could be done, she turned and laid her arm on her

brother's shoulder, and rested her head beside it with her eyes full

of tears. And at the movement John bent and kissed her forehead, and

she saw that he himself was at last awake; and Reyburn, looking at

them, saw it too. Perhaps the tears dimmed her sight a little, and

gave Lilian a sort of glorified look to her, standing still a moment

with the light of the late rising moon on her face; but then as her

gaze fell again on Reyburn, on his lofty form and kingly manner, his

proud face, his bold bright eye, it seemed to her as if it were

Lucifer tempting an angel; and all at once she had resolved what she

would do to save Lilian, to save her brother. She could do it well,

she said, well and safely--she who already hated the man. Courage came

with the resolution, courage and strength: she began to laugh and

scatter jests across the grave conversation of John and her father;

presently she was humming a gay Spanish air.

"That is right, Helen," said her brother. "Sing something to us. My

father says your voice would fill the Tacon theatre."

And at that she sang--not the air of the little bolero again, but a

low, melancholy song that began with a sigh, but swelled ever clearer

and higher, till, like the bursting of a flower, it opened and

deepened into one breath of passionate sweetness and triumph. The rich

voice rose to all the meaning of the music, and, though they could not

understand the words, they thrilled before the singer, Late into the

midnight she sang--the bunch of blossoms that was in her hand as she

came on board still shedding its pungent odors round her as the

blossoms died--strange wild songs that she had learned in the two

years of her tropic life; ancient and plaintive Spanish airs; Moorish

songs whose savage tunes were sweet as the honey of the rocks; wild

and mournful Indian airs that the Spaniards might have heard in those

Caribbean islands when first they burst upon their peaceful seas; and

by and by a sleepy nocturne that seemed to lull the wind, to charm the

ship, and hold the great moon hovering overhead; and as they rocked

from wave to wave of the glimmering water, and that pure voice rose

and poured out its melody, the soft vast southern night itself seemed

to pause and listen.

Helen did not appear on the deck next day till the sunset came again,

for Lilian was ill, and she remained with her; nor did Reyburn see

her. But as the heat of the day passed, and the sails, that had been

hanging idle ever since the night-breeze fell, began to fill again,

Helen ascended.

"You come with the stars," said Reyburn, giving her his hand at the

last step; but she merely put out her own hand with the gesture of

receiving aid, and passed on, her dark gauzy drapery floating behind

her, and the lace of her Spanish mantilla falling round her from her

Spanish comb. She went to her brother's side, and sat there and

talked, or rose with him and walked: there was everything to say and

hear after their two years' separation. As for Reyburn, perhaps her

manner was courteous enough to him, but certainly she hardly seemed to

see him. Nor could he claim acquaintanceship with her: the gaunt and

big-eyed child whom he had known two years ago had a different

individuality from this dark girl with the rosy stain on the oval

cheek and the immense eyelashes. He heard her gay laugh as John

complimented her--a laugh as sweet as her singing; he saw the smile

that kindled all her beauty into vivid life; he saw the still face

listening to what was said; but he scarcely learned anything further

than was thus declared. When at length she sang one parting strain, he

wondered if the singing and the beauty were all there was: it occurred

to him to find out. He remembered that moment of the evening before

when John had betrayed distrust. "I will mislead him," said Reyburn,

"and Lilian will understand it all." He stood before Helen as she rose

with her father to go down.

"Ask me no more whither doth haste

The nightingale when May is past;

For in your sweet dividing throat

She winters, and keeps warm her note!"

he said, and stepped aside.

"We've taken a mermaid aboard, sir," said the sailing-master. "Nothing

else, they say, sings after that fashion, and the men are on the

lookout for foul weather."

"Never mind what the men say," said Reyburn, "while your barometer

says nothing."

When Mr. Reyburn went on deck at sunrise he found Helen standing there

with Lilian--with Lilian, who, after her day's illness, looked

strangely wan and worn, looked like the feeble shadow of the other

with her rich carnations, her glowing eyes, her picturesque outlines.

Reyburn went aft and took Lilian's hand. "You have been so ill!" he

said; and then he looked up and saw again this splendid creature,

loosely clad in white, her black hair, unbraided and unbound, flowing

in wave and ripple far down her back, her sleeve falling from the

uplifted arm and perfect hand, that held a fan of the rose-colored

spoonbill's feathers above her head, so beautiful and brilliant that

she seemed only a projection of that beautiful and brilliant hour,

with all its radiant dyes, before the sun was up; and he forgot that

Lilian had been ill, forgot for a moment that Lilian existed. "I will

find out what she is made of," thought Reyburn. "Are you made of

clay?" he said boldly.

"He shall find that there is fire in my clay," said Helen to herself

as she appeared not to heed his look or his words.

And there it began. And swift and sudden it went on to the end. She

had come on board the yacht that first night to startle it with her

beauty and her voice; last night, silent and stately, she had slipped

through the evening like a dream; now she stood before him a dazzling

creature of the morning: yesterday she was Penseroso; to-day she was

Allegro; what would she be to-morrow? How sparkling, as one day

followed another, her gayety was! and yet with no shallow sparkle:

there was always the shadow of still depths just beyond--seasons of

silence, moments of half sadness, times when he had to wonder whither

her thoughts had led her. She sang a little song of the muleteers on

the mountains, that he admired; then she must teach it to him, she

said; they sang the song together, their voices lingering on the same

note, rising in the same breath, falling in the same cadence. He had a

sonorous tenor of his own: more than once she caught herself pausing

in her part to hear it. How soft, and yet how strong, was the language

of the song! he said; he must learn Spanish, she replied; and they

hung together over the same book, and he repeated the phrase that fell

from her lips--an apt pupil, it may be, for more than once the phrase,

as he uttered it, deepened the color on her cheek. More than once she

was conscious of gazing at him to find the charm that Lilian had

found; more than once he caught her glance and held it there

suspended; more than once you might have thought, by the quick,

impatient manner in which she tore her eyes away, that she had found

the charm herself. Perhaps he made some ostentation of his attraction

before the others; perhaps the simulation of warmth was close enough

to melt a colder heart than hers; perhaps it was not wholly

simulation. It may be that her hand lay in his a moment longer than

need was, her glance fell before his a moment sooner: it may be that

as she fled all her manner beckoned him to follow. She was confiding

to him her thoughts, her aspirations, her emotions, as if she wished

that he, and he alone, should know them: he was listening as though

there were no other knowledge in the world. If presently he thought of

her as a creature of romance, if presently she felt the need of that

keen interest, what wonder? They were playing with fire, and those

that play with fire must needs be burned. And meantime, whether he

looked at her languid in the burning noon, gay with the reviving

freshness of the dusk, leaning over the bulwarks in the night and

gazing up into the great spaces of the stars, he was always fascinated

to look again. There was the profile exquisite as sculpture, there was

the color as velvet soft as rose-petals, there was the droop of the

long silken lashes half belying with its melancholy the rapture of the

smile. Whether she spoke or whether she sang, her voice was music's

self, and he was longing for the next tone; and presently--presently

Lilian had faded like a phantom before this aurora who was fresh and

rosy and dewy, with song and color and light--a sad pale phantom wan

in a mist of tears.

"It is killing me!" she cried.

But he did not perceive the meaning of her unguarded cry: he did not

know how it was with her, for he had not yet dreamed how it was with

himself. But he was soon to discover.

Three weeks they had been wafted about from key to key, from bay to

bay; they landed and explored the quaint old towns; they made trips

into the tropical forests; great boatloads of juicy mangoes and guavas

and bananas came off to them; they scattered coins on the clear bottom

for the brown babies tumbling about the shores to dive after. Now at

noon they lay anchored in still lagoons under the shadow of an

overhanging orange-grove; now at night they were flying across the

broad seas. But Lilian felt she could endure no more of it: her life

was exhausted; she longed for the yacht's head to be turned northward,

that she might die in peace on shore. John also was impatient to be

gone. If he could have Lilian once more at home, he thought, he would

marry her in spite of her protest, and take her where forgetfulness

must needs soothe her, and strange faces make her cling to him in the

old way. The way in which she clung to him now was too bitter to be

borne. Her mother also began to think of home, and Mr. Sterling had

wearied long ago; and at length, further pretences failing, they had

been freshly provisioned and had started on their homeward way.

Reyburn had, indeed, been loath to make any change in their luxurious

summering, but he was one of those who slide along with the days.

Take the goods the gods provide thee:

The lovely Thais sits beside thee--

was a couplet that he was fond of humming, and he always waited for

some unnatural wrench to make the effort he should have made himself.

But he had consented at last to the return, because while he was still

floating in Southern waters, under Southern skies, with this delicious

voice in his ears, this delicious beauty by his side, he could not

think that a week's sailing must bring him under other conditions.

Perhaps, though, it would be more than a week's sailing, some one

said, for the fair wind that had taken them hither and yon so long,

and had waited on their fancies, was apparently on the point of

deserting them at last, and the yacht was merely drifting before a

fitful breeze that lightly moved a scud of low clouds which the sunset

had kindled into a blaze of glory hanging just above them, and whose

ragged shreds only now and then displayed a star.

"We are going to have nasty weather," the sailing-master said to his

mate. "The barometer is going down with a rush."

"Yes, sir," had come the answer: "we shall catch it in the mid-watch."

"Then stow the light sails, Mr. Mason," the captain said, "and get

everything secure for a heavy blow. Keep a sharp lookout, and call me

as soon as the weather changes."

"All right, sir."

"I am going down for forty winks," said the captain. Then as he passed

Mr. Reyburn: "I don't much like the appearance of things, sir."

"Appearance?" said Reyburn. "Why the sea is as smooth as glass!"

"Too smooth by half, sir, with the barometer falling. I've sailed with

that glass a long time, and she's never told me a lie yet. We've

already shortened sail."

"So I see. But why in the world did you do it, when you want every

stitch of it out to catch what wind there is? However, I am in no

hurry," said Reyburn laughing. "Do as you please, skipper: you're

sailing the ship."

"I am sailing her, sir," said the captain, a little nettled, "and

sailing her on the edge of a hurricane. You had better take the lady

below, sir: when it comes it will come with a crack." But Reyburn

laughed at him again, and passed over to Helen's side.

They sat together on the deck, Helen and Reyburn, long after all the

others had gone to rest; for Mr. Sterling left the arrangement of

etiquette and decorum to Lilian's mother; and whether she were a

purblind soul, looking delightedly at a new love-match, or whether,

with any surmise of the state of things, she felt pleased that

Reyburn, led by whatever inducement, should step aside from Lilian's

path, she gave no other sign than that when her early withdrawal from

the scene left the deck clear for action. As each in turn they fell

away into their dreams, those below could still hear Helen singing;

and if one there lay sleepless in the pauses of the singing, no one

guessed it. All the ship was in shadow save where a lantern shone, but

Helen lingered, still irresolute. Now and then she touched the Spanish

guitar in the measure of some tune that flitted across her thoughts,

now and then she sang the tune, now and then was silent. She was half

aware of what the approaching moments held--was half afraid. Was she

to avenge herself upon the man who had destroyed her brother's peace?

Faithful to Lilian should she go, or faithless stay? He took the

guitar himself and fingered the strings, making fewer chords than

discords; her own fingers wandered to correct him; their hands met;

the guitar slipped down unheeded; the grasp grew closer, grew

warmer--ah, Helen, was it Lilian of whom you thought, whom you would

save?--and then an arm was around her; shining eyes, only half guessed

in the glimmer that the phosphorescent swells sent through the

darkness, hung over her rosy upturned beauty; she was drawn forward

unresisting, her head was on his breast, she, heard the heavy

throbbing of his heart, and his lips lay on hers and seemed to draw

her soul away. And so they sat there in the deepening shadow,

whispering in faint low whispers, thrilling with a great rapture,

their lips meeting in long kisses. Why should he think of Lilian?

Never once had he touched _her_ mouth like this, had his arms closed

round her so, had he felt the sighing of her breath. As a pale white

rushlight burns in the sun, that love seemed now, compared with this

great sweet flame. He bowed his face over Helen's as she sat trembling

in his embrace, and neither of them remembered past or future in the

passion of the present; neither of them felt the yacht swing idly up

and down with scarcely a movement forward; neither of them heard the

listless flapping of the sails against the masts, or noticed that no

dew lay on the rail, or once looked up to see how black and close the

air had gathered round them, how deadly hot and sulphurous--till

suddenly, and as if by one accord, men were running and voices were

crying all about them. They sprang to their feet to hear the

sailing-master's shout as one beholds lightning fall out of a blue

sky: "See your halyards all clear for running."

"Ay, ay, sir!" came the ringing answer.

"Stand by your halyards and down-hauls."

"Ay, ay, sir!"

"Haul down the flying jib: take the bonnet off the jib, and put a reef

in her," came the strong swift sentences. "Brail up the foresail, and

double reef the mainsail."

There was a sound far, far off, like a mighty rush of waters, coming

nearer and swelling to a roar--an awful roar of winds and waves. And

Helen was wildly clasping Reyburn, who was plunging with her down the

companion-way.

"Here she comes!" cried the captain. "Hold on all!" And then there was

a shock that threw them prostrate, a writhing and twisting of every

plank beneath them, and the tornado had struck the yacht and knocked

her on her beam-ends.

"Cut away the weather rigging!" they heard the captain thunder through

all the rout before they had once tried to regain themselves. The

quick, sharp blows resounded across the beating of the billow and the

shrieking of the wind and cloud. "Stand clear, all!" and with a crash

as if the heavens were coming together the masts had gone by the

board, and what there was left of the Beachbird had righted and now

rolled a wreck in the trough of the sea.

A half hour's work, but it had done more than wreck a ship: it had

wrecked a passion. For as Helen still clung round Reyburn, sobbing and

screaming, he had seen the opposite door open, and Lilian landing

there, white-robed, white-shawled, with her bright hair about her face

as white as a spirit's. "John," she said, "we are in a hurricane."

"Yes, Lilian," he had answered from where he was stationed close

beside her door. "But the worst must be over. The wind already abates,

and as soon as the sea goes down--"

As he spoke there came the terrible cry, loud above all other clamor,

"A leak! a leak!" and then followed the renewed trampling of feet

overhead, and the hoarse wheeze of the pumps.

"We are going down," Lilian said, and turned that white face away.

"Oh, John!, before we go forgive me," she cried; and John held his

outstretched arms toward her and folded her within them.

Reyburn saw it, and even in that supreme moment, when life and death

swung in the balance, an awful revulsion seized him. He beheld now

with a sickening shudder the woman cowering at his feet whose beauty

an hour ago had melted his soul: she was flesh to him only--her beauty

was of the earth, and flesh and the earth were passing, and it was

other things on which such moments as these were opening--things such

as shone in the transfigured face of Lilian--of Lilian whom, if this

marsh-light had not dazzled him from his way, he might now be holding

to his heart triumphant; for here disguises would have fallen and he

could have claimed his own. For, whether it were the terror of the

time, or the trancelike and spiritual look of Lilian, or whether it

were the jealous pang of seeing her in another's arms, the love on

which he had been waiting for two years and more, to which he had

sacrificed time and endeavor, which had brought him here to this

danger and this death, returned now and overwhelmed him, and the

passion of a day and night fell apart and left him in its ruins. This

woman at his feet filled him with a strange disgust: that other

woman--If this were the last hour of time, he would have risked his

chances in eternity to have held her as John did. He threw himself,

face down, on the divan, and he cursed God and called upon the

drowning wave to come.

The captain leaped down the companion-way, and caught his pistols from

a drawer. "Mr. Reyburn, we need you and the other gentlemen," he

cried. "We are throwing out our ballast. All hands must take spells at

the pumps, for the leak gains, and I shall have all I can do to keep

the men at work and the yacht afloat."

"Let her sink!" yelled Reyburn into the cushions where he lay. "Damn

her! let her sink!" And he did not stir. But John had gently released

Lilian and placed her in a chair near the sofa where her mother lay

gasping, and had sprung on deck with his father and the captain.

A horrid hour crept by--a bitter blank below, hard and fierce work

above--and then the pumps were choked. Lilian and her mother had crept

on deck, holding by whatever they could find, and surveying the

amazing scene around them. For the great black storm-cloud was flying

up and away, flying into the north-east, and through the torn vapors

that followed in its rack a waning moon arose. A tremendous sea was

running, monstrous wave breaking on monstrous wave in a mad white

frolic far as the eye could see; as one billow bounded along, curling

and feathering and swelling on its path, a score leaped round it to

powder themselves in a common cloud of spray; and every cloud of spray

as it shot upward caught the long ray of the half-risen moon, that but

darkly lighted and revealed an immensity of heaven, till all the

weltering tumult of gloom and foam was sown with a myriad lunar

rainbows.

The beauty of it almost overcame the terror with Lilian as she grasped

her mother's hand.

"It is a fit gate to enter heaven by," said John, coming to her side.

"We have done all we can," he added.

At the moment the bows dipped with a prodigious sea. Somebody forward

sang out, "She's settling, sir! she's settling, sir!" The cry ran

along the deck like fire: there was one panicstricken shriek that

followed, and the men had jumped for the boats, into which water and

provision had been already thrown. Reyburn came staggering up the

companion-way with Helen. The dingy and one of the quarter-boats were

already swamped in the wild haste: the men were crowding into the

other, which had been safely lowered.

"You brutes!" the captain shouted, "are you going to leave the women?"

"Let them come, then," answered a voice, "and make haste about it;"

and Lilian found herself drawn forward and looking over the side into

the shadow below.

"Are you going, John?" she said hurriedly.

"No, darling: it is impossible, you see, but--"

"Nor I, either," she answered quickly.

"Lilian!"

"No," she said, "no! We were to be together in life, and we shall be

in death. Oh, John, do you think I can leave you now?"

"Make haste about it," was repeated harshly from the boat.

"I am going to stay," repeated Lilian firmly.

"Here," cried Reyburn, as he drew up the ropes to bind them round

Helen's waist. "Take _her_." But the boat was already clear of the

ship and away; and he flung the ropes down again with a motion of

abhorrence, and stood leaning against the stump of the mast, where he

could hear the murmurs of John and Lilian, straining his ears to

listen, as if he must needs torment himself--to listen to those few

low, fervent whispers, with one eager to pour out the love so long

restrained, the other to receive it--both in the face of death making

the life so lately found too sweet a thing to leave.

Soon the little company remaining on the wreck had clustered around

that portion of it; the captain and Mr. Mason were near by, and

Lilian's mother sat beside her and kept her hand; Mr. Sterling, not

far off, held Helen, who lay faint with fright--faint too with many a

pang, snatched as she had been from a dream of warmth and joy to a

nightmare of horror; one moment ruling in a heart that in the next

moment had cast her forth to be trampled on; bewildered by the

repugnance she had too plainly seen in the face of her passionate

lover of two hours ago; half heartbroken with the remembrance of the

tone in which he had called to the crew of the quarter-boat to take

her, and cold with the awful expectancy of the moment. The moon swam

slowly up, and the sky cleared about her; the sea rose and fell less

violently, its dark expanse everywhere running fire; but the broken

yacht still rolled like a log, and they clung to each other as she

rolled. She settled slowly, and another hour had passed and left her

still afloat.

"We are safe," cried the captain, coming back to their side after a

brief absence with the mate. "Mr. Reyburn, do you see?" But Mr.

Reyburn did not even hear. A soft lustre began to blanch the violet

depths of the lofty sky; a rosy flare welled up from the horizon and

half drowned the shriveled moon; a star that was steady in the east

was shaking a countless host of stars in the shaking waters round

them. And then the rosy flare was a yellow flame that filled the

heavens; the long swells that ran up to break against them were like

sheets of molten jewels--rubies and beryls and sapphires and

chrysolites, changing and flashing as they broke into a thousand

splendors; strange mild-eyed birds were hovering about them and

alighting on the wreck; the moon was gone; the vaporous gold that

overflowed the east was burned away in the increasing glory, and the

sunshine fell about them.

"We are not going down," cried Lilian, her face aglow and lovely in

the light. "That smoke in the horizon is a steamer's, and she will

take us off. Oh, John, we have our lives before us yet!"

The captain and Mr. Mason had already signaled the steamer, and before

very long the wreck was quite abandoned, and those whom it had carried

were on their northward way again.

It was a singular wedding that I saw one day about two months after

the wreck of the Beachbird. I was going by the church of St. Saviour,

and being of an inquiring mind in the matter of weddings, I went in.

There were two brides there: the husband of the first, the fair one,

was just turning away with her. So calm, so pure, so peaceful, so

content, were the faces of that new husband and wife, that I could

long have looked upon them, as on some picture of strong spirits in

the presence of God, had not the beauty of the second bride arrested

me. But that was a beauty one hardly sees twice in a lifetime--so

perfect in outline, under snowy veils and blossoms, the dark eyes so

softly, dewily dark, the white brow whiter for its tendril-like rings

of raven hair; and where had I ever seen groom so stately, so lofty,

so proud? But what did the pantomime mean? a stranger might well have

asked. Was that the man's natural demeanor? or had he brought his mind

to the task of taking her by an effort that had destroyed every

sentiment of his soul but scorn? And for her? Had the rose forsaken

her cheek and the smile her lip because she looked on life as on a

desert? Was that utter sadness and dejection a thing that should one

day fade away and leave a sparkle of hope behind it? Or was it the

scar of one who had played with fire, who had not the strength to

release a pledge, and was marrying a man who she knew loathed her and

her beauty together?

HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD.

RECOLLECTIONS OF THE TUSCAN COURT UNDER THE GRAND DUKE LEOPOLD.

When the wretched, worthless and worn-out debauchee Gian Gaston dei

Medici, grand duke of Tuscany, died on the 9th of July, 1737, the

dynasty of that famous family became extinct. For some years before

his death the prospect of a throne without any heir by right divine to

claim it had set the cupidity of sundry of the European crowned heads

in motion. Various schemes and arrangements had been proposed in the

interest of different potentates. But the "vulpine cunning," as an

Italian historian calls it, of Cardinal Fleury, the minister of Louis

XV., at length succeeded in inducing the European powers to accede to

an arrangement which secured the greater part of the advantage to

France. It was finally settled that the duke of Lorraine should cede

to France his ancestral states, which the latter had long coveted, and

that he should be married to Maria Teresa, the heiress of the Austrian

dominions, carrying in his hand Tuscany, the throne of which was

secured to him at the death of Gian Gaston. It was further promised to

the Tuscans, discontented at the prospect of having an absentee

sovereign, that on the death of the emperor Francis, Tuscany should

have a ruler of its own in the person of his second son. This Francis,

who gave up the duchy of Lorraine to become the husband of Maria

Teresa, reigned over Tuscany till his sudden death by apoplexy on the

18th of August, 1765. His second son, Leopold, reigned in Tuscany

till, on the death of his elder brother on the 24th of December, 1789,

he was in his turn also called to ascend the imperial throne.

Thereupon the second son of Leopold became grand-duke in 1789, and

reigned as Ferdinand III. till 1824, when, on the 18th of June, his

son succeeded him as Leopold II. Now, though the sovereignty of

Tuscany was thus entirely and definitively separated from that of

Austria, all these princes were of the blood-royal of Austria, and

might in the course of Nature have succeeded to the imperial throne.

For this reason they were held, though only dukes of Tuscany, to be

entitled to the style and title "imperial and royal," according to the

custom of the House of Austria; and thus every grimy little

tobacco-shop and lottery-office in Tuscany, in the days when I first

knew it, in 1841, styled itself "imperial and royal."