The fair widow moved into her father’s house, and carried joy with her,
and smiles, and a new life. The dusty halls and silent chambers were
soon made glad, and gave no echo back to the busy feet which beat their
floors in measured tread to the sound of lutes. Men wondered at the
miser’s transformation, and the jolly sun, driving up the clear, blue,
vaulted roof of the earth, looked in upon curtains, and mirrors, and
rich carpets, and all the bought luxury of great wealth, and danced upon
the draped walls, and laughed, and wondered too. But the change was of
the surface. The miser loved his daughter with his whole soul; he loved
gold with more than his whole soul—gold, his first love—and the
daughter held a divided and an inferior empire in his affections. The
miser loved his daughter as he best might, with his heart of shining
metal, and he would have loved her had she been less than what she was;
less beautiful, less worthy, less full of the love which flowed from her
like a sea, and covered him, and he drank of it, a joy he had never
known. He loved her, as the heir to his vast estates, as himself
renewed, to bear his labor onward, to accumulate through still another
span of life; and he showed her to the world, and took pride in this new
glory, as a new title to his possessions, which was to carry them with
himself, even beyond the grave.
I was often with them; I became almost an inmate of the house,
subsequent to the events which I have just related—the father’s legal
adviser, the daughter’s best friend. Mr. Cornelius did not weary of the
empty bustle and noise of fashion with which his daughter’s youth and
brilliant position at once surrounded her; he seemed pleased with it,
and often spoke of it as the proud homage which intellect, and nice
honor, and high titles, and all the virtues, and all the prejudices of
men, pay to wealth—and so, indeed, it was. With the daughter, these
enjoyments soon palled. She had learned of sorrow from her birth, and
had happily received from her mother a head too strong for turning;
when, therefore, novelty wore away, and satiety began to usurp its
place, she gradually withdrew from the press of company, and gave to her
father those hours which others had before possessed. Although change
had come over every thing else, Mr. Cornelius forbid its entrance into
the one room reserved for himself; the room in which he had received his
daughter, with the little table and the two chairs standing in the
centre, and its naked walls and bare door, which were to him as old
acquaintances, and where, alone, he now felt fully at home. There they
would often sit together in the deep hours of the night, and while she
played with his white locks, and watched the beatings of his heart, to
find it tuned to a music widely different from her own, and listened to
his never-ending promises, and never-ending hopes of a wealth which was
to make his only one, his jewel, a match which princes might envy, she
became painfully conscious of her father’s worldliness and debasing
servitude to the hard earth. She saw that he lay prone, chained, bound
down with clamps of iron, of silver, and of gold, and never raised his
eyes to the upper light, or questioned of the day when he should be
called to give an account of his stewardship. Then she would weep, and
kiss her father, and talk of her mother who had passed away, and of
another life, and hope that they might all meet in that better world;
and the miser would stroke down her glossy hair with his trembling
hands, and press her forehead to his lips, and call her a foolish girl,
who troubled herself about matters with which she had nothing to do; and
bade her go and dream of the glory to which he had raised her, and count
her suitors, and be brave.
“More, more,” was the miser’s unceasing cry; “all, all—I want all,” was
the prayer which he put up, not to the Giver of all Good, but to his own
will, which habit had enslaved, until use made servitude a happiness.
And he worked on, ever gaining, ever adding, abstemious, pinching,
self-denying, liberal only to his daughter, whom he could never see too
richly clad, too sumptuously served—a costly toy to be stared at and
admired. “She is my diamond,” he would say, “which I have chosen to
plant in a rich setting.”