GENERAL HARRINGTON'S CONFESSION.
General Harrington had spent a good many years of his life abroad, and
no American ever went through that slow and too fashionable method of
expatriation with more signal effect. While walking through the rooms
peculiarly devoted to his use, you might have fancied yourself intruding
on the privacy of some old nobleman of Louis the Fourteenth's court.
His bed chamber was arranged after the most approved French style, his
dressing-room replete with every conceivable invention of the toilet,
from the patent boot-jack with its silver mountings, to the superb
dressing-case, glittering with gold and crystal, everything was perfect
in its sumptuousness. In his own house, this old man was given up to
self-worship, without a shadow of concealment. In society the graceful
hypocrisy of his deportment was beautiful to contemplate, like any other
exhibition of the highest art. If benevolence was the fashion, then
General Harrington was the perfection of philanthropy. Nay, as it was
his ambition to lead, the exemplary gentleman sometimes made a little
exertion to render benevolence the rage! His name often lead in
committees for charity festivals, and he was particularly interested in
seeing that the funds were distributed with the most distinguished
elegance, and by ladies sure to dignify humanity by distributing the
munificence of the fashionable world in flowing silks and immaculate
white gloves.
After this fashion, the General was a distinguished philanthropist.
Indeed, humanity presents few conditions of elegant selfishness in which
he was not prominent. A tyrant in his own household, he had, from his
youth up, been the veriest slave to the world in which he moved. Its
homage was essential to his happiness. He could not entirely cheat his
astute mind into a belief of his own perfections, without the constant
acclamations of society. As he grew old, this assurance became more and
more essential to his self-complacency.
The General studied a good deal. His mind was naturally of more than
ordinary power, and it was necessary that he should keep up with the
discoveries and literature of the day, in order to shine as a savant,
and belles-lettres scholar. Thus some three or four hours of every day
were spent in his library, and few professional men studied harder to
secure position in life, than he did to accumulate knowledge which had
no object higher than self-gratulation.
Still, with all his selfishness and want of true principle, the General
was, at least, by education, a gentleman, and he would at any time have
found it much easier to force himself into an act of absolute
wickedness, than to be thought guilty of ill-breeding in any of its
forms. In short, with General Harrington, habit stood in the place of
principle. He possessed few of those high passions that lead men into
rash or wicked deeds, and never was guilty of wrong without knowing it.
Unconsciously to herself, Agnes Barker had wounded the old man in his
weakest point, when she resented his question if she had read Mabel's
journal, with so much pride. This haughty denial was a reproach to the
impulse that had seized him to read the book from beginning to end. His
conscience had nothing to urge in the matter, but the meanness of the
thing he intended, struck him forcibly, and after a moment's hesitation,
he closed the journal and laid it in a drawer of his desk. Thus, by
affectation and over-acting, the girl defeated her object, much to her
own mortification. The passage on which General Harrington had opened at
random, was in itself harmless, a warm and somewhat glowing description
of a passage up the Guadalquivir in the spring months, had nothing in it
to provoke farther research, and the General seldom read much from mere
curiosity. Certainly, the book might contain many secret thoughts and
hidden feelings of which Mabel's husband had never dreamed, but it was
many years since the old gentleman had taken sufficient interest in the
feelings of his wife to care about their origin or changes, and so,
Mabel's precious book, in which so many secret thoughts were registered,
and memories stored, lay neglected in her husband's desk.
Fortunately, she was unconscious of her loss. Sometimes for months
together, she shrank from opening the escritoir in which the volume was
kept. At this period, she was under the reaction of a great excitement,
and turned with a nervous shudder from anything calculated to remind her
of all the pain which lay in the past.
Another reason, perhaps, why General Harrington was less curious about
his wife's journal than seemed natural to his tempters, lay in his own
preoccupation at the time. One of his youthful vices had grown strong,
and rooted itself amid the selfishness of his heart; all other sins had
so cooled down and hardened in his nature, that with most men they might
have passed for virtues, the evil was so buried in elegant
conventionalisms; but one active vice he still possessed, always
gleaming up from the white ashes of his burnt out sins, with a spark of
vivid fire.
General Harrington was a gambler. Understand me----it is not probable
that he had ever entered a gambling hall openly or frankly since his
youth, or ever sat down with swindlers or professed blacklegs around the
faro table. The General was altogether too fastidious in his vices for
that. No, he rather plumed himself secretly upon the aristocratic
fashion in which he indulged this most lasting remembrance of a reckless
youth.
The club life of England had always possessed great fascinations for
this fine old republican gentleman, and he was among the first to
introduce the system in New York. Here, his naturally fine energies had
been vigorously put forth, and he became not only a prominent member of
an aristocratic club, but a principal director and supporter also.
At this lordly rendezvous, the General spent a great portion of his
time, and somehow, I do not pretend to point out the direct process, for
it was generally understood that no high play was sanctioned in the
establishment, and the mysterious glances and half-murmurs which
transferred five dollar notes into five thousand, as the harmless games
proceeded, are not capable of an embodiment--but, it chanced very often,
that General Harrington found a transfer of funds necessary after one of
these club nights, and once or twice, a rather unpleasant interview with
Mr. James Harrington had been the result.
But these unsatisfactory consequences seldom arose. The General was too
cool and self-controlled to be always the loser, and up to the time of
our story, this one active vice had rather preponderated in favor of his
own interests.
But a rash adventure, and a sudden turn of fortune, reversed all this in
a single night; and General Harrington--who possessed only the old
mansion-house, and a few thousand a year in his own right--all at once
found himself involved to more than the value of his family home, and
two years income in addition. Close upon this, came that fearful
accident upon the river----and, worse still, the application of his son
to marry a penniless little girl, whose very existence depended on his
charity.
With all these perplexities on his mind, the General had very little
time for idle curiosity, and thus his wife's secret remained for the
time inviolate.
Like most extravagant men, the General, under the weight of an enormous
gambling debt, became excessively parsimonious in his household, and
talked loudly of retrenchment and home reforms. In this new mood, Agnes
Barker found little difficulty in having several of the old servants
discharged, before Mabel left her sick room. Indeed this girl, with her
velvety tread and fawning attentions, was the only one of his household
with whom General Harrington was not for the time in ill-humor.
With all his self-possession, this old man was a moral coward. He knew
that James Harrington was the only person to whom he could look for
help--and yet the very thought of applying to him, made the gall rise
bitterly in his bosom. To save time, he gave notes for the debt, and
made no change in his life, save that he was away from home now almost
constantly--a circumstance which the members of his household scarcely
remarked in their new-found happiness.