STARTLING DEVELOPMENTS.
Harrington lifted his calm eyebrows with some wonder at the furious
entrance of his friend, and sat regarding him with a firm mouth and
steadfast eyes. Wentworth, out of breath with the speed of his course,
and the tumult of his emotions, had flung his hat across the room, and
himself upon the sofa, and sat panting, with his handsome face flushed,
and his bright auburn curls damp with perspiration.
“Well, Richard, what’s the matter?” said Harrington, calmly. “Has the sky
fallen?”
“Harrington, see here,” panted Wentworth, “Johnny’s just been up to the
studio.”
“Johnny? Who’s Johnny?” interrupted Harrington.
“Oh, pshaw! Bagasse’s boy, you know. John Todd,” fumed Wentworth,
stopping to wipe his brow with a white handkerchief.
“Well. Is that any reason for your running yourself into a pleurisy?”
bantered Harrington.
“By George!” exclaimed the young artist, “it’s a reason for my running
Fernando Witherlee into something else, and that’s a broken neck, I’m
thinking. Cursed rascal!”
“What’s Witherlee been up to now?” inquired Harrington, with sudden
interest.
“Impudence,” replied Wentworth. “Impudence unparalleled. Listen,
Harrington. John Todd says Witherlee came into the fencing-school this
morning, and had the atrocious impudence—the abominable—the infernal”—
Wentworth stopped, gasping with rage.
“O Muse of adjectives, descend!” jocosely cried Harrington, lifting his
hand in mock-heroic invocation, with his cheeks wrinkled in a rich smile.
Wentworth, thus prayed for, began to laugh, even in the midst of his fury.
“Well, Harrington,” said he, “I know it’s foolish to get excited about
it, but upon my word, Witherlee behaves scandalously. Do you know that he
has been telling Bagasse a long rigmarole about Muriel and Emily, and you
and me. Bagasse! Now just think of it! Think of his talking of two ladies
like those, and in such a connection, and to Bagasse! Yes, of all persons
in the world, to Bagasse!”
Harrington’s color changed and his face puckered with amazement, while he
nervously grasped the arms of his chair.
“Is Witherlee possessed!” he ejaculated. “Why, I never heard of such
conduct. So boyish, so foolish, such an outrage against the fitness of
things”—
“And so infamously impudent,” put in Wentworth. “It’s the impudence that
strikes me.”
“Certainly. It’s impudent, too, and I don’t wonder you were moved,”
murmured Harrington, slowly, with an absorbed air.
“Moved!” snapped Wentworth. “By Jupiter, I am moved to give him a sound
horse-whipping, and he’ll get it, or my name’s not what it is. Why, look
at it, Harrington. In the first place, Emily’s a particular friend of
his. Now, wouldn’t you think that the commonest respect for her would
have prevented him from bandying her name about in conversation with
anybody, much less old Bagasse?”
“Eureka! I have it,” exclaimed Harrington, bursting from his abstraction.
“That accounts for Bagasse’s remark about the two ladies that gave the
violets.”
“What do you mean?” inquired Wentworth.
Harrington recounted what the fencing-master had said that morning.
“You see, Richard,” he added, “that set me wondering; for how did Bagasse
know that ladies had given us the violets? How did he know but that I
had gathered them from my own yard? Then, when I saw your nosegay in his
button-hole, I thought you must have told him, and I was astonished to
think that you should choose the old veteran for a confidant.”
“By Jupiter, Harrington, you didn’t think I would do such a thing,”
exclaimed Wentworth, reproachfully.
“My dear Wentworth, it was absurd in me, and I beg your pardon,” returned
Harrington. “Certainly, it was not like you; but then, somebody must have
told him, and how could I imagine it was Witherlee?”
Wentworth sat silent, thinking with mounting rage of Witherlee’s remarks
to the fencing-master. If he had been cool and thoughtful, he might
have at least suspected, from the sample he had of the good Fernando’s
nature, that he was at the bottom of Emily’s alienation from himself.
But Wentworth’s vivid temper only threw gleams and flashes on things,
and what he saw, he saw in salient points, without observing their
connections and relations.
“By George, I’ll break his neck!” he foamed, stamping his foot on the
floor.
“Now, Richard, keep cool,” said Harrington. “You can depend that Fernando
has been making mischief all round, and let us just track it out. In the
first place, let’s hear Johnny’s report of what he said.”
“Lord! I can’t tell you! it’s gone from me,” fumed Wentworth, running his
hands through his curls, as if in search of it. “Let’s see. In the first
place, he had some snob criticisms on your coat; which, he thinks, is not
genteel enough to entitle you to Muriel’s friendship.”
“Oh, indeed,” said Harrington, with grand good-nature. “Well, that’s a
trifle, anyway.”
“He said,” continued Wentworth, “that you looked like a beggarman, who
had been in the watch-house all night.”
“Complimentary,” jeered Harrington.
“Wondered how you had the assurance to visit Miss Eastman at all, when
your social position was so much beneath hers,” pursued Wentworth; “and
thought it was very kind in her to permit you.”
Harrington burst into a peal of hearty laughter.
“Positively,” he said, “this is comic. The only tragic thing about it is,
that all this time, Fernando has been pretending that he was the best of
friends to me.”
“I tell you, Harrington,” replied Wentworth, “that fellow’s a perfect
snake in the grass. The next thing was to pitch into my personal
appearance.”
“Yours!” exclaimed Harrington, laughingly. “Why, Richard, you’re the pink
of fashion. You’re D’Orsay and Raphael Sanzio, in one.”
Wentworth smiled faintly; too angry at Witherlee to be much amused.
“Nevertheless,” he continued, “Witherlee poked his gibes at me,
too—something about the Anti-Slavery Bazaar. Do they sell clothes there?”
“Not exactly,” replied Harrington, laughing.
“Then, I’m hanged if I know what he meant by that,” said Wentworth.
“Well, probably he said you looked bizarre; and Johnny, not knowing the
word, mistook it for its fellow in sound,” remarked Harrington.
“That’s it I’ll bet,” burst out Wentworth, reddening. “Bizarre! The
cursed snob! He wants me to cut my hair off, I suppose, and wear a
stove-pipe hat instead of my Rubens. I’ll see him hanged first.”
“Well, go on Richard,” said Harrington. “All this is unimportant.”
“Then,” continued the young artist, fidgeting in his seat like a man who
had to deal with an awkward subject, and looking very fixedly at the
opposite wall, with his face redder than before, “then he proceeded to
give Bagasse a sketch of us two with Cupid’s arrows stuck in our bleeding
hearts—a regular Saint Valentine picture. O bother, I won’t report the
stuff! It makes me crawl.”
“Oh, go on, Richard, go on,” urged Harrington.
“No, I won’t. Let it go. Come, Harrington, let’s drop it. Upon my word, I
can’t repeat it, and I won’t,” said Wentworth.
Harrington saw that it was no use to urge him, and was silent. The fact
was, Wentworth did not like to have Harrington think of him as the lover
of Emily, and Witherlee’s portraiture of him as such was too faithful for
exhibition. No man likes to confess that he has been jilted by a woman,
as Wentworth thought he had been by Emily, and to say that he had been
reputed her lover by Witherlee was certainly an approximation at least to
such a confession.
“Very well,” remarked Harrington after a pause, “if you don’t care to
talk about it, let it go. Now, Richard, I want you to leave this matter
to me. There’s more in it, I’m convinced, than appears, and if you make
a quarrel with Fernando we shall never know the whole of it. Just keep
cool, say nothing to him of what you have heard, and let me track the fox
through all his doublings. Will you promise?”
Wentworth hesitated, but his own suspicions were roused, and he felt the
good sense of Harrington’s proposal.
“I agree, Harrington,” he said at length. “Yes, I promise, and I’ll keep
dark.”
“Good,” replied Harrington. “I declare, Richard, I can’t help feeling, in
view of the serious grandeur of life, that all this is pitifully petty.
These pigmy broils and imbroglios seem all the more trivial in contrast
with such scenes and passions as I have been in to-day. I wish we could
live only in the larger life, unvexed by this buzz and fribble.”
“What has happened to-day, Harrington?” asked Wentworth.
Harrington told him briefly of the scene in Southac street, omitting to
mention what passed in Roux’s house, lest it should lead to questions
verging upon the secret which Emily now shared with Muriel, himself and
Captain Fisher.
“I wish I could feel interested as you do in these political affairs,”
said Wentworth, lightly, when Harrington had concluded. “Somehow, I can’t
though. Of course, I’m for liberty in my own quiet way, and I pity the
poor darkeys and all that, but then it doesn’t come home to me at all.
I’m an artist in the grain, I suppose, and art-life and matters connected
with it, leave me no interest for other matters.”
“Ah, Richard,” replied Harrington, “you must outlive these notions. Art
cannot thrive sequestered from life. It may live in the cell, but it will
narrow and spire, and it can only branch and broaden into Shakspearean
greatness when planted among the ways and walks of men. No man can be a
great painter, sculptor, composer, poet, whose heart is not deeply and
warmly engaged in the life of his own time. It is the lack of interest
and participation in human affairs which makes our modern artists mere
imitators and colorists, and so much of modern art weak and pallid—a mere
watery reflection of old models and forms of beauty.”
“Come, now, that’s heresy?” said Wentworth, laughing. “Talk of poets—look
at Shakspeare. What interest did he take in human affairs? He kept the
Globe Theatre, studied his part by day, played it at night, and wrote
his dramas between whiles. That’s the way his years were occupied. What
participation had he in Elizabethan politics? What in the life of his own
time? Why, Ulrici says, in substance, that Shakspeare didn’t care enough
about the politics of his age to have his mind even colored by them.
The critics agree that a more thorough aristocrat or conservative never
breathed. Jupiter! according to the critics, he was a perfect despiser of
the common people, and a man utterly without patriotism and philanthropy.
Your Verulam there, now,” pursued Wentworth, looking at the statue, “was
patriot and philanthrope. He toiled for his country and wrought for ‘the
relief of the human estate,’ as he phrases it. But the most powerful
microscope couldn’t detect anything of that sort in William.”
Harrington laughed amusedly.
“Now, look here, Richard,” he replied. “In the first place, I flatly
deny that there is contempt for any sort of people, common or uncommon,
in the Shakspearean pages. But let that pass, for what I am going
to say will cover it fully. I want to call your attention to the
distinctive peculiarity—the uniqueness—of the Shakspearean creations.
In the Shakspearean mind you have an unexampled union of the subtlest
observation and the profoundest reason. This author observed far more
closely than even Thackeray, and philosophized far more greatly than even
Plato. But this is not all. He constructed a series of works which show
the principles of human action as they lie in the nature of man, and
all the complex operation of the human passions. And more, he created a
number of figures, which are not characters, but types. That is the grand
distinctive Shakspearean peculiarity. Nobody has done that but he. The
Don Quixote of Cervantes is a great figure, but it is not Shakspearean.
The Greek Prometheus, the German Mephistopheles are immense allegorical
creations, but they are not Shakspearean. He alone has made figures which
are types—representative men and women standing for classes. In a word,
he alone has given us in a series of models or images, the Science of
Human Nature. This it is that makes him solitary, as the power with which
it is done makes him supreme, in literature.”
“I understand,” said Wentworth, “and I agree; but I don’t see what you’re
driving at, mine ancient.”
“Wait a minute, and you shall see,” returned Harrington. “Bacon wanted
this very thing done. Nothing that you can do for the elevation of the
world, he says substantially, is of any value, unless this is done. The
radical defect in all science is, he says, that it has not been done, and
he rates Aristotle sharply for not doing it. He wants a work which will
give us the Science of Man, as he is, in order that we may make him what
he ought to be—a work, he says, which is to contain the descriptions of
the several characters and tempers of men’s natures and dispositions to
the end that the precepts concerning the culture and cure of the mind
may be concluded upon—a work which is also to contain examples in moral
and civil life. This is what Bacon wanted done, and the author of the
Shakspeare Drama did it. Bacon’s requirement is fulfilled exactly in the
Shakspeare Drama. Even our critics have got hold of the idea that the
Science of Human Nature which Bacon wanted is in the Shakspeare Drama,
and the purpose which Bacon intended such a work to accomplish, is in
daily process of accomplishment through the agency of those plays. And
what is more, Bacon wanted that work to be in the form of poetry—the
Georgics of the Mind, he calls it, with a reminiscence of Virgil. The
poets, he says elsewhere, are the best doctors of this knowledge;
and again, for the expression of such a purpose, reason is not so
perspicuous, nor examples so apt, as the dramatic or poetic presentation.
Very good. Bacon wanted it in poetry, and in poetry you have it.”
Wentworth looked at Harrington steadily, with so curious an amazement on
his countenance, that Harrington smiled.
“Now, Richard, observe,” he pursued. “The Shakspeare Drama contains
the Science of Man. A Science of Man cannot be formed accidentally, or
by the mere spontaneity of genius; it involves design. The author of
the Shakspeare Drama knew, therefore, what he was about; and the fact
that his figures have the peculiarity of being types, sufficiently
proves it. Now, science is preparatory to art, and a Science of Man is
a preparation for an Art of Human Life. This makes of your ‘aristocrat’
and ‘conservative’ Shakspeare a Socialist of the most daring order—the
largest innovator the world has ever known.”
“By Jupiter!” exclaimed Wentworth, “it’s precious odd that nobody has
noticed all this before.”
“So it is, Richard,” returned Harrington, smiling good-naturedly at
him. “About as odd as that Ulrici should have said that Shakspeare took
no heed of the politics of his time, when Lear, Coriolanus, and Julius
Cæsar are occupied, under the dramatic cover, and in the very face of
the military despotism of the age, with the broadest sort of political
discussion. About as odd as that you should think Shakspeare had no
patriotism, when the historical dramas so overflow with passionate love
for England that London theatres, at this day, rise and roar to it when
Phelps or Macready gives it voice from the stage.”
“Well,” said Wentworth, reddening and laughing, “I spoke too fast, no
doubt. Besides, there’s Brutus—a splendid type of the pure country-lover.
But the philanthropy—where’s that?”
“So the man who drew up the Science of Human Nature, subtle, vast, exact,
complete, the inevitable preliminary to the relief of the human estate
that Bacon schemed for, had no philanthropy,” bantered Harrington.
“That’s you exactly!” burst out Wentworth, coloring again, and laughing.
“Thunder, Harrington! that’s the way you hook in a fellow. Of course,
since I’ve accepted your first proposition, the rest follows. Well, at
all events, you may show philanthropy as the genius of the plan, but I’m
hanged if you can name a character that has it in the plays.”
“Can’t I, then?” retorted Harrington, good-humoredly. “What do you
think of Lear? Whose heart folds in poor Tom, the social outcast from
the lowest sinks of the Elizabethan wretchedness? Who hurls forth that
terrible invocation for the ‘superfluous and lust-dieted man that
slaves Heaven’s ordinance—that will not see because he does not feel?’
Who prays for the ‘poor naked wretches that bide the peltings of the
pitiless storm,’ and dwells so eloquently on ‘their houseless heads
and unfed sides, their looped and windowed raggedness.’ Who is it, the
impersonation of cold and callous conservatism, that is made, as Burke
says, to ‘attend to the neglected and remember the forgotten,’ and comes
face to face with houseless poverty and want to exclaim, ‘Oh, I have
ta’en too little care of this?’ Who demands that the rich and fortunate
shall expose themselves to ‘feel what wretches feel,’ in order that their
superfluities may be shared with them, and justice be more the law of
social life? And if this is not philanthropy, what is it?”
“Say no more, Harrington, I cave,” replied Wentworth, gaily.
“It is true,” pursued Harrington, “that the Shakspeare Drama has
no figure of a philanthropist like Howard, no more than it has of a
religious saint like Xavier or Monica. But I do not think that such
portraitures would consist with the author’s design, which, however vast,
is still special, having for its end the culture and cure of the human
mind, and, as I have said, the reconstruction of society. Ah, but the
true philanthropist, the true saint of that Drama is its author! No need
to add such a figure to his pages when he himself stands there added to
them by our thought, an image of the noblest love that ever strove and
suffered for mankind.”
They both sat in silence for a few moments, lost in musing.
“It is strange,” said Wentworth, at length. “All we know about Shakspeare
personally, is in conflict with what you have said—though I admit that
his works sustain your view. He seems to have lived a very common-place
and vulgar sort of a life. Certainly, his biography does not show that he
had large sympathies and designs for man, and it is indisputable that he
did not participate in the loftier life of his age.”
“I look at it in this way,” replied Harrington. “Set aside the evidence
we might collect from his writings, and consider only what must
inevitably have followed from the nature of his intellect. The complex
catholicity—the massive breadth—in a word, the universality of his
mind, inevitably involves a corresponding vastness of interest and
participation in the public affairs of his time, and all the varieties
of its thought and life. Isolation from public life may coexist, and
be perfectly compatible, with intensity of genius—with universality,
never. Moreover, to be worldly wise, as the plays show their author
to have been, a man must follow the rule Bacon insists upon as
indispensable—namely, to ally contemplation with action. Deny such a man
experience, and you cannot get from him the lessons of experience, as
you get them from this author. Isolate such a man from affairs, and his
genius spreads aloft into the vast air of the abstract, and you never
get in his writings the voices of the street, the camp, the court, the
cabinet—in a word, the voices of concrete practical life, as you do in
the Shakspeare Drama. Take for example, the man nearest Shakspeare, the
many-sided Goethe: the corollary to his many-sidedness is the fact that
he was a man of the world, a scientifician, courtier, statesman. So with
the author of the Drama. He must have been immersed in public life. He
must have held office. He must have administered the affairs of State.
It was the inevitable result of his genius, and it was the condition on
which the manifestations of that genius depended. Denied public life, and
either his development would have been arrested, or he would have become
a vast dreamer or abstractionist.”
“Upon my word, Harrington,” said Wentworth, “that’s an astonishing thing
for you to say!”
“It’s the truth, nevertheless,” replied Harrington, smiling.
“But the facts of Shakspeare’s life are against you,” rejoined Wentworth.
“Well, you must reconcile them as you can,” said Harrington. “Meanwhile,
there is the indestructible truth. All history, all facts, all reason
testify to it. It is so.”
“But look here, Harrington,” said the amazed Wentworth. “On the one hand,
you infer that a man of Shakspeare’s genius must have been a statesman.
On the other hand, is the plain fact that Shakspeare was nothing of the
sort. Now, therefore, we must at once conclude that your inference is
wrong.”
“Not necessarily,” replied Harrington.
“Not necessarily?” Wentworth laughed, and fixed his eyes with a puzzled
look upon the floor. “Well, I don’t see how you can escape from so
obvious a conclusion. Now, let me state it again. In the first place, who
wrote the plays?”
Receiving no answer, Wentworth looked up, and saw Harrington gazing with
rapt affection on the noble bust of Verulam. For a moment the young
artist held his breath in utter stupefaction; then a deep flush burned
upon his face, and he laughed immoderately. Harrington colored, but took
his friend’s merriment, as he took everything, good-naturedly, and sat
smiling at him.
“Bravo!” cried Wentworth, at length. “Another sacrifice to the idol! Now,
Harrington, I can’t swallow the idea, that the idol wrote Shakspeare’s
plays, but, for goodness’ sake do publish it! It will make such a jolly
row. By Jupiter! what fun it will be to see all the steady old ink-pots
fizzing into vitriol bottles, and foaming over on to your idea! Do
publish it.”
“One of these days, Richard,” said Harrington, gently. “But I don’t think
Verulam alone wrote the plays. He had help from others—and some of them
came from a lower order of mind than his. But in all the great plays
his intellect and design are visible. However, let it pass, and in the
meantime, say nothing about it to any one, for till it can come with
solid proof, it will meet with no favor from the Jedburgh justice of a
world that hangs your thought first, and tries it afterward. But for your
own sake, I wish you could believe that this great poet could not have
been the poet he was, if he had not been concerned in everything that
concerns mankind. Especially must he have cherished the idea of political
liberty, for without that, poet or artist can be but little.”
“Upon my word, Harrington,” said Wentworth, “I shouldn’t be much
astonished if you were to assert that the author of Shakspeare’s plays,
as you call him, would be, if he was alive, a Garrisonian Abolitionist.”
“Well,” replied Harrington, laughing in his beard, “you know Montaigne
says a man’s books are his children, and I’m sure this author’s children
don’t vote with the Webster Whigs or go union-saving or kidnapping with
either Whigs or Democrats. And as for Shakspeare being a Garrisonian,
it’s quite clear to my perverted sense, that the man who makes his
patriot, Brutus, cry aloud, as the first demand of political justice,
‘Liberty, Freedom, and Enfranchisement,’ would not, at any rate, if he
were with us, be found in Mr. Ben Hallett’s party.”
Wentworth, touched at the idea of Shakspeare and Ben Hallett being by any
chance thrown together, laughed immoderately, while Harrington, highly
amused at his mirth, sat and smiled at him.
“Harrington,” said Wentworth, recovering from his merriment, “you almost
tempt me to extend my studio among the sons of men.”
“That’s where the great artists extended theirs,” replied Harrington.
“Raphael, Giotto, Cellini, Angelo, all those superb artists, were
politicians, country-lovers, friends and comrades of their kind. Their
human sympathies gave their genius its pulse of life. You young artists
ought to blush when you think of Michael Angelo.”
“Well, Michael was a trump,” returned Wentworth, gaily.
“A trump?” repeated Harrington. “I wish he was a trump that could sound
some of you fellows into life. Yes, there was a man behind the artist
in Michael, and his works are cryptic with his humanity. By the way,
Richard, how comes on the ‘Death of Attucks?’”
The “Death of Attucks” was a picture which Wentworth, instigated by
Harrington, had begun to paint in illustration of the picturesque scene
on that wild March night of the early Revolution, when a black man flung
himself on the bayonets for a country which enslaves his race, and has
scribes to defile his memory.
“Well,” replied Wentworth, with a look of momentary sadness, “I haven’t
painted much lately—so the picture stands. O me,” he sighed, “I see
intellectually the truth of all you say about the relation of liberty to
art, but somehow I don’t get kindled.”
“Look here, Richard,” said Harrington, “you ought to hear Wendell
Phillips.”
“So I ought,” answered Wentworth, “and I mean to sometime.”
“You must,” replied Harrington. “He will show you the ideal beauty of
anti-slavery. Many a young man has found his eloquence the golden door
to a life for liberty. Now Muriel has planned to go to the Convention
to-night, and you are to go with us, and I hope you will hear him.
“Who are going?” asked Wentworth.
“We four,” replied Harrington.
“You three,” responded Wentworth; “I won’t go.”
“Oh, but you must,” replied Harrington. “I promised to bring you there to
tea, and my word is at stake.”
Wentworth was silent, and sat with his eyes fixed on the floor, and his
face reluctant and uneasy. Harrington watched him, and felt that there
was some reason connected with either Muriel or Emily for his desire to
avoid going to Temple street that evening. Suddenly the story Witherlee
had told him about Wentworth and Muriel flashed into his memory, and with
it came the sharp suspicion that Witherlee had lied. Could it be, after
all, that Wentworth and Emily were lovers? Harrington’s heart trembled,
and he determined to question Wentworth on the spot.
“Richard,” said he, “why are you averse to going up to Temple street this
evening? Is it on account of anything in this talk of Fernando’s which
John Todd told you?”
“Oh, no,” replied Wentworth, coloring. “I don’t care—I’ll go since you
desire it.”
“Richard,” said Harrington, after an awkward pause, “pardon my rudeness,
but I want to ask you a frank question, and I have a reason for asking
it. Are you in—well, have you, as Witherlee said, one of Cupid’s arrows
in your bleeding heart?”
Harrington tossed out the question gaily, but with a flushed face, and
his heart beating. As for Wentworth he was scarlet to the roots of his
hair, and with his eyes fixed on the floor, toyed with his moustache in
great confusion.
“Oh, that wasn’t Witherlee’s phrase,” he stammered evasively. “That was
my way of reporting what he said.”
“Well,” returned Harrington, “but is it true or not?”
Wentworth was silent for a moment.
“Suppose it is true. What then?” was his answer.
“It is true, then?” faltered Harrington.
Wentworth was still for a moment, then nodded affirmatively.
“Good!” exclaimed Harrington. “Richard, I give you joy. But now tell
me—pardon my inquisitiveness—tell me which is the one?”
Wentworth felt himself in a corner, and with his face hot as fire, and
his heart throbbing furiously, cast desperately about for some evasive
answer.
“Is it Emily?” said Harrington hastily, in a voice which he could not
keep from trembling.
Wentworth instantly took the tone as evidence of Harrington’s love for
Miss Ames, and with a bitter feeling filling his heart as the sense of
the injury she had done him, swept over him, he became self-possessed and
cold.
“Emily!” he repeated, affecting surprise and looking at Harrington’s
flushed face with desperate placidity, while a faint smile curved his
proud lip. “Indeed, Harrington, none of Emily’s lovers have a rival in
me.”
The answer was at once a taunt and an evasion, but to Harrington it
seemed decisive, and spoken in plain good-faith. It fell upon him like a
death-blow, but his heart, mailed in magnanimity, rose from under it, and
he forced himself to smile, lest Wentworth should be pained by perceiving
that it gave him pain. As yet, Wentworth had not the least idea that his
friend loved Muriel. And, as yet, he did not perceive that he had just
given Harrington to understand that he himself was her lover.
So, thought Harrington, Witherlee told the truth after all, and I was not
mistaken.
“Richard,” he cried, springing from his seat, and crossing over to
Wentworth, who instantly rose, startled by his sudden movement, as
well as by the strange emotion which struggled with a smile in his lit
face. “Richard, I give you joy. I do with all my heart and soul. You
should have told me before, that I might sooner have been happy in your
happiness. But I am glad to know it now—from your own lips, for I knew
it, or all but knew it, before. My love and blessing on you both forever!”
All this poured forth impetuously, his hands grasping Wentworth’s,
his features convulsed and smiling, his kind eyes shining through
tears. An awful feeling swept down, like an avalanche, on Wentworth.
Petrified with the suddenness of the revelation, he not only saw that
he had inadvertently confessed himself Muriel’s lover, but he saw that
Harrington loved her! He strove to speak, but his lips refused their
office, and no form of words came to his whirling mind. Harrington saw
his pallor and agitation, and mistaking them for the signs of a young
lover’s emotion at being thus brusquely congratulated, wrung his hands
once more, and turned away. Wentworth, too much overwhelmed to even
think, sank down upon his seat, and leaning his arm on the back of the
sofa, covered his hot eyes with his hand.
At that moment a low, piteous whine was heard in the yard. Harrington
started and colored and went out instantly.
Wentworth, meanwhile, hearing the noise, and aware of his friend’s exit,
took no heed of either, but sat trying to compose his mind to think of
the new complication in which he found himself.
Presently the deep sense of Harrington’s splendid magnanimity in so
joyfully giving up the woman he loved, rose upon him in contrast with
his own passionate envy and jealousy when he thought him the lover of
Emily, and with the tears springing to his eyes, he felt as if he were
the meanest man that ever breathed. To go and fling his arms around
Harrington, ask his forgiveness, and explain the whole matter, was his
first impulse. Then came the consideration that in doing this, he must
own that he loved Emily, for had he not said that he was in love with
one? and he must own that she had played the coquette with him, and left
him with a wounded heart. He could not do it. Pride forbade it. But what
should he do? He could not leave Harrington in error, and such an error!
Yet how explain that loving one of the two, he did not love Muriel, nor
yet Emily. Altogether, Wentworth was in a dilemma!
Vainly revolving the matter for a few moments, he finally came to the
desperate resolution so say nothing at present, but wait until he could
be alone, and then think what course he could pursue to extricate himself
from this embroilment.
The clear remembrance came to his mind how sedulously Emily had been
wooing Harrington of late. Acquitting him now of all knowledge or blame
in this respect, his censure gathered into a fiercer focus on her. It
was plain that, having played the heartless coquette with him, she was
trying the same game on his friend. A regular Lady Clara Vere de Vere,
he thought, remembering the haughty beauty dowered with manly scorn in
Tennyson’s poem. Fiery rage at Emily contended in his soul with fiery
love for her. Gnashing his teeth with fury, scorning himself that he
could love her and she so false and base, scorning himself that he
could hate her when he so loved her, he walked up and down the room for
a minute or two; then suddenly, with a violent effort, grew cool, and
picking up his hat from the floor, went out into the yard.
He did not see Harrington at first, but stepping around the corner of
the house, he caught sight of him, and all his passionate agitation
faded away in surprise as he became aware of his friend’s occupation.
Harrington was stooping down in an angle of the garden near a large
square box set on end, rubbing away with a gloved hand at the back of an
old, weak, white dog, the same Wentworth had seen tormented in the street
that morning. Actually, thought Wentworth, he went back to take that
forsaken brute home with him!
“What in thunder are you doing, Harrington?” he exclaimed, approaching
the scene of his friend’s operations.
Harrington started, and turned his glowing face with a half ashamed smile
upon Wentworth, then continued to rub the dog’s back.
“I couldn’t leave the poor old fellow in such a plight, Richard,” he
remarked, in an apologetic tone, “so, you see, I took him in.”
“Why, he’s got the mange,” said Wentworth, eying the animal with a face
of mingled disgust and curiosity.
“That’s not his fault,” returned Harrington, coolly, dipping his gloved
hand into a box of what appeared to be powdered sulphur, sprinkling a
handful on the dog’s back, and rubbing it in.
The dog, meanwhile, lying on the ground, was devouring with feeble
content a plateful of broken victuals which the young man had procured
from the house. He was a miserable, weak, red-eyed, flaccid-jawed,
dirty-white old mastiff, and, as the young artist had observed, he had
the mange. As ugly, forlorn-looking and worthless a cur in his life as
that dead dog which, the old Mohammedan apologue says, the Jewish mob
derided in the streets of Jerusalem, when a tall stranger of grave and
sweet aspect drew near, and paused to cast a look of compassion on the
object of their derision. “Is it not a miracle of ugliness!” jeered
the crowd. “But see,” said the stranger, “pearls are not equal to the
whiteness of his teeth!” And then, says the Mohammedan story, the people
knew that the stranger was the great prophet Jesus, for none but he would
look upon a dead dog with the beauty-seeing eye of love.
“Poor old fellow,” soliloquized Harrington, “I quite forgot I had him,
till he whined for his dinner.”
“How confoundedly dirty he is,” observed Wentworth.
“Dirty? Oh, no—that’s his color,” said Harrington, naively. “He’s not
dirty now, for I washed him.”
“The deuce you did!” replied Wentworth, laughing. “Upon my word,
Harrington, you’re a regular Brahmin. Though it’s mighty good in you to
take so much trouble for a brute like that. Faith, I’d have left him to
his fate.”
“Oh, well,” replied Harrington, tranquilly, scanning the dog’s back,
to see if any diseased spot had escaped him, “the poor old thing has
something to do in this world, or he wouldn’t have been sent, and he has
a right here, seeing that he does no harm. There, I guess that’ll do, and
he’ll be comfortable till I get back.”
He took off his glove, patted the old dog on the head, and spoke to him.
The animal, who had finished his dinner, feebly wagged his tail, and
licked the kind hand, then looked up with bleared red eyes into the face
of his protector, still wagging his tail.
“Good,” said Harrington; “see how grateful he is! Come, Wentworth, it’s
time for us to go,” he continued, rising to his feet. “It’s after four
o’clock, and I promised to be there early.”
Stooping again, he lifted the dog into the packing-case on some old rags
of carpeting, put a pan of water near him, laid the tin box of sulphur
and the glove on top, and turned away to the house.
“What a good fellow Harrington is,” muttered Wentworth, following him.
“To think of his rescuing that old brute from the boys, and taking as
much care of him as if he was Scott’s Maida! I wonder that I, who admire
such things so much, never think of doing such things.”
He got into the room just as Harrington was disappearing up the flight of
steps into the room above, whither he went to wash his hands and brush
his clothes. In a few minutes he descended again, closed the windows, put
on his slouched hat, and they set off together arm in arm.