Live while ye may, yet happy pair; enjoy
Short pleasures, for long woes are to succeed.--MILTON.
The autumn and the winter passed away; Mordaunt’s relation continued
implacable. Algernon grieved for this, independent of worldly
circumstances; for, though he had seldom seen that relation, yet he
loved him for former kindness--rather promised, to be sure, than
yet shown--with the natural warmth of an affection which has but few
objects. However, the old gentleman (a very short, very fat person; very
short and very fat people, when they are surly, are the devil and all;
for the humours of their mind, like those of their body, have something
corrupt and unpurgeable in them) wrote him one bluff, contemptuous
letter, in a witty strain,--for he was a bit of a humourist,--disowned
his connection, and very shortly afterwards died, and left all his
fortune to the very Mr. Vavasour who was at law with Mordaunt, and for
whom he had always openly expressed the strongest personal dislike:
spite to one relation is a marvellous tie to another. Meanwhile the
lawsuit went on less slowly than lawsuits usually do, and the final
decision was very speedily to be given.
We said the autumn and the winter were gone; and it was in one of those
latter days in March, when, like a hoyden girl subsiding into dawning
womanhood, the rude weather mellows into a softer and tenderer month,
that, by the side of a stream, overshadowed by many a brake and tree,
sat two persons.
“I know not, dearest Algernon,” said one, who was a female, “if this is
not almost the sweetest month in the year, because it is the month of
Hope.”
“Ay, Isabel; and they did it wrong who called it harsh, and dedicated it
to Mars. I exult even in the fresh winds which hardier frames than mine
shrink from, and I love feeling their wild breath fan my cheek as I ride
against it. I remember,” continued Algernon, musingly, “that on this
very day three years ago, I was travelling through Germany, alone and on
horseback, and I paused, not far from Ens, on the banks of the Danube;
the waters of the river were disturbed and fierce, and the winds came
loud and angry against my face, dashing the spray of the waves upon me,
and filling my spirit with a buoyant and glad delight; and at that time
I had been indulging old dreams of poetry, and had laid my philosophy
aside; and, in the inspiration of the moment, I lifted up my hand
towards the quarter whence the winds came, and questioned them audibly
of their birthplace and their bourne; and, as the enthusiasm increased,
I compared them to our human life, which a moment is, and then is not;
and, proceeding from folly to folly, I asked them, as if they were the
interpreters of heaven, for a type and sign of my future lot.”
“And what said they?” inquired Isabel, smiling, yet smiling timidly.
“They answered not,” replied Mordaunt; “but a voice within me seemed
to say, ‘Look above!’ and I raised my eyes,--but I did not see thee,
love,--so the Book of Fate lied.”
“Nay, Algernon, what did you see?” asked Isabel, more earnestly than the
question deserved.
“I saw a thin cloud, alone amidst many dense and dark ones scattered
around; and as I gazed it seemed to take the likeness of a funeral
procession--coffin, bearers, priests, all--as clear in the cloud as I
have seen them on the earth: and I shuddered as I saw; but the winds
blew the vapour onwards, and it mingled with the broader masses of
cloud; and then, Isabel, the sun shone forth for a moment, and I
mistook, love, when I said you were not there, for that sun was you; but
suddenly the winds ceased, and the rain came on fast and heavy: so my
romance cooled, and my fever slacked; I thought on the inn at Ens,
and the blessings of a wood fire, which is lighted in a moment, and I
spurred on my horse accordingly.”
“It is very strange,” said Isabel.
“What, love?” whispered Algernon, kissing her cheek.
“Nothing, dearest, nothing.”
At that instant, the deer, which lay waving their lordly antlers to and
fro beneath the avenue which sloped upward from the stream to the house,
rose hurriedly and in confusion, and stood gazing, with watchful eyes,
upon a man advancing towards the pair.
It was one of the servants with a letter. Isabel saw a faint change
(which none else could have seen) in Mordaunt’s countenance, as he
recognized the writing and broke the seal. When he had read the letter,
his eyes fell upon the ground, and then, with a slight start, he lifted
them up, and gazed long and eagerly around. Wistfully did he drink,
as it were, into his heart the beautiful and expanded scene which lay
stretched on either side; the noble avenue which his forefathers had
planted as a shelter to their sons, and which now in its majestic growth
and its waving boughs seemed to say, “Lo! ye are repaid!” and the never
silent and silver stream, by which his boyhood had sat for hours, lulled
by its music, and inhaling the fragrance of the reed and wild flower
that decoyed the bee to its glossy banks; and the deer, to whose
melancholy belling be had listened so often in the gray twilight with
a rapt and dreaming ear; and the green fern waving on the gentle hill,
from whose shade his young feet had startled the hare and the infant
fawn; and far and faintly gleaming through the thick trees, which
clasped it as with a girdle, the old Hall, so associated with vague
hopes and musing dreams, and the dim legends of gone time, and the lofty
prejudices of ancestral pride,--all seemed to sink within him, as he
gazed, like the last looks of departing friends; and when Isabel, who
had not dared to break a silence which partook so strongly of gloom,
at length laid her hand upon his arm, and lifted her dark, deep, tender
eyes to his, he said, as he drew her towards him, and a faint and sickly
smile played upon his lips,--
“It is past, Isabel: henceforth we have no wealth but in each other. The
cause has been decided--and--and--we are beggars!”