The first three months of Ralph’s sojourn in America were spent in vain
attempts to obtain a situation. Day after day he walked down Broadway,
calling at various places of business and night after night he returned
to his cheerless room with a faint heart and declining spirits. It was,
after all, a more serious thing than he had imagined, to cut the cable
which binds one to the land of one’s birth. There a hundred subtile
influences, the existence of which no one suspects until the moment they
are withdrawn, unite to keep one in the straight path of rectitude, or
at least of external respectability; and Ralph’s life had been all in
society; the opinion of his fellow-men had been the one force to which
he implicitly deferred, and the conscience by which he had been wont
to test his actions had been nothing but the aggregate judgment of his
friends. To such a man the isolation and the utter irresponsibility of a
life among strangers was tenfold more dangerous; and Ralph found, to his
horror, that his character contained innumerable latent possibilities
which the easygoing life in his home probably never would have revealed
to him. It often cut him to the quick, when, on entering an office in
his daily search for employment, he was met by hostile or suspicious
glances, or when, as it occasionally happened, the door was slammed in
his face, as if he were a vagabond or an impostor. Then the wolf was
often roused within him, and he felt a momentary wild desire to become
what the people here evidently believed him to be. Many a night he
sauntered irresolutely about the gambling places in obscure streets,
and the glare of light, the rude shouts and clamors in the same moment
repelled and attracted him. If he went to the devil, who would care? His
father had himself pointed out the way to him; and nobody could blame
him if he followed the advice. But then again a memory emerged from that
chamber of his soul which still he held sacred; and Bertha’s deep-blue
eyes gazed upon him with their earnest look of tender warning and
regret.
When the summer was half gone, Ralph had gained many a hard victory over
himself, and learned many a useful lesson; and at length he swallowed
his pride, divested himself of his fine clothes, and accepted a
position as assistant gardener at a villa on the Hudson. And as he stood
perspiring with a spade in his hand, and a cheap broad-brimmed straw hat
on his head, he often took a grim pleasure in picturing to himself
how his aristocratic friends at home would receive him, if he should
introduce himself to them in this new costume.
“After all, it was only my position they cared for,” he reflected,
bitterly; “without my father’s name what would I be to them?”
Then, again, there was a certain satisfaction in knowing that, for
his present situation, humble as it was, he was indebted to nobody but
himself; and the thought that Bertha’s eyes, if they could have seen him
now would have dwelt upon him with pleasure and approbation, went far to
console him for his aching back, his sunburned face, and his swollen and
blistered hands.
One day, as Ralph was raking the gravel-walks in the garden, his
employer’s daughter, a young lady of seventeen, came out and spoke to
him. His culture and refinement of manner struck her with wonder, and
she asked him to tell her his history; but then he suddenly grew very
grave, and she forbore pressing him. From that time she attached a kind
of romantic interest to him, and finally induced her father to obtain
him a situation that would be more to his taste. And, before winter
came, Ralph saw the dawn of a new future glimmering before him. He had
wrestled bravely with fate, and had once more gained a victory. He began
the career in which success and distinction awaited him, as proof-reader
on a newspaper in the city. He had fortunately been familiar with the
English language before he left home, and by the strength of his will he
conquered all difficulties. At the end of two years he became attached
to the editorial staff; new ambitious hopes, hitherto foreign to his
mind, awoke within him; and with joyous tumult of heart he saw life
opening its wide vistas before him, and he labored on manfully to repair
the losses of the past, and to prepare himself for greater usefulness in
times to come. He felt in himself a stronger and fuller manhood, as if
the great arteries of the vast universal world-life pulsed in his own
being. The drowsy, indolent existence at home appeared like a dull
remote dream from which he had awaked, and he blessed the destiny which,
by its very sternness, had mercifully saved him; he blessed her, too,
who, from the very want of love for him, had, perhaps, made him worthier
of love.
The years flew rapidly. Society had flung its doors open to him, and
what was more, he had found some warm friends, in whose houses he
could come and go at pleasure. He enjoyed keenly the privilege of daily
association with high-minded and refined women; their eager activity
of intellect stimulated him, their exquisite ethereal grace and their
delicately chiseled beauty satisfied his aesthetic cravings, and the
responsive vivacity of their nature prepared him ever new surprises.
He felt a strange fascination in the presence of these women, and the
conviction grew upon him that their type of womanhood was superior to
any he had hitherto known. And by way of refuting his own argument, he
would draw from his pocket-book the photograph of Bertha, which had
a secret compartment there all to itself, and, gazing tenderly at it,
would eagerly defend her against the disparaging reflections which the
involuntary comparison had provoked. And still, how could he help seeing
that her features, though well molded, lacked animation; that her eye,
with its deep, trustful glance, was not brilliant, and that the calm
earnestness of her face, when compared with the bright, intellectual
beauty of his present friends, appeared pale and simple, like a violet
in a bouquet of vividly colored roses? It gave him a quick pang, when,
at times, he was forced to admit this; nevertheless, it was the truth.
After six years of residence in America, Ralph had gained a very high
reputation as a journalist of rare culture and ability, and, in 1867
he was sent to the World’s Exhibition in Paris, as correspondent of the
paper on which he had during all these years been employed. What wonder,
then, that he started for Europe a few weeks before his presence was
needed in the imperial city, and that he steered his course directly
toward the fjord valley where Bertha had her home? It was she who had
bidden him Godspeed when he fled from the land of his birth, and she,
too, should receive his first greeting on his return.