effort, or pulse of affection, which does not have immediate and
practical bearing upon that success in life by which you measure your
hopes. The dreams of love, of romantic adventure, of placid joy, have
all gone out with the fantastic images to which your passionate youth
had joined them. The world is now regarded as a tournament, where the
gladiatorship of life is to be exhibited at your best endeavor. Its
honors and joys lie in a brilliant pennon and a plaudit.
Dalton is learned in those arts which make of action, not a duty, but a
conquest; and sense of duty has expired in you with those romantic hopes
to which you bound it, not as much through sympathy as ignorance. It is
a cold and a bitterly selfish work that lies before you,--to be covered
over with such borrowed show of smiles as men call affability. The heart
wears a stout, brazen screen; its inclinations grow to the habit of your
ambitious projects.
In such mood come swift dreams of wealth,--not of mere accumulation, but
of the splendor and parade which in our Western world are, alas! its
chiefest attractions. You grow observant of markets, and estimate
percentages. You fondle some speculation in your thought, until it grows
into a gigantic scheme of profit; and if the venture prove successful,
you follow the tide tremulously, until some sudden reverse throws you
back upon the resources of your professional employ.
But again as you see this and that one wearing the blazonry which wealth
wins, and which the man of the world is sure to covet,--your weak soul
glows again with the impassioned desire, and you hunger, with brute
appetite and bestial eye, for riches. You see the mania around you, and
it is relieved of odium by the community of error. You consult some gray
old veteran in the war of gold, scarred with wounds, and crowned with
honors, and watch eagerly for the words and the ways which have won him
wealth.
Your fingers tingle with mad expectancies; your eyes roam, lost in
estimates. Your note-book shows long lines of figures. Your reading of
the news centres in the stock-list. Your brow grows cramped with the
fever of anxiety. Through whole church-hours your dreams range over the
shadowy transactions of the week or the month to come.
Even with old religious habit clinging fast to your soul, you dream now
only of nice conformity, comfortable faith, high respectability; there
lies very little in you of that noble consciousness of Duty
performed,--of living up to the Life that is in you,--of grasping boldly
and stoutly at those chains of Love which the Infinite Power has lowered
to our reach. You do not dream of being, but of seeming. You spill the
real essence, and clutch at the vial which has only a label of Truth.
Great and holy thoughts of the Future,--shadowy, yet bold conceptions of
the Infinite,--float past you dimly, and your hold is never strong
enough to grapple them to you. They fly, like eagles, too near the sun;
and there lies game below for your vulture beak to feed upon.
[Great thoughts belong only and truly to him whose mind can hold them.
No matter who first puts them in words, if they come to a soul and fill
it, they belong to it,--whether they floated on the voice of others, or
on the wings of silence and the night.]
To be up with the fashion of the time, to be ignorant of plain things
and people, and to be knowing in brilliancies, is a kind of Pelhamism
that is very apt to overtake one in the first blush of manhood. To hold
a fair place in the after-dinner table-talk, to meet distinction as a
familiarity, to wear _salon_ honors with aplomb, to know affection so
far as to wield it into grace of language, are all splendid achievements
with a man of the world. Instruction is caught without asking it; and no
ignorance so shames as ignorance of those forms by which natural impulse
is subdued to the tone of civilian habit. You conceal what tells of the
man, and cover it with what smacks of the _roué_.
Perhaps under such training, and with a slight memory of early
mortification to point your spirit, you affect those gallantries of
heart and action which the world calls flirtation. You may study
brilliancies of speech to wrap their net around those susceptible hearts
whose habit is too _naïve_ by nature to wear the leaden covering of
custom. You win approaches by artful counterfeit of earnestness, and
dash away any _naïveté_ of confidence with some brave sophism of the
world. A doubt or a distrust piques your pride, and makes attentions
wear a humility that wins anew. An indifference piques you more, and
throws into your art a counter-indifference,--lit up by bold flashes of
feeling,--sparkling with careless brilliancies, and crowned with a
triumph of neglect.
It is curious how ingeniously a man's vanity will frame apologies for
such action.--It is pleasant to give pleasure; you like to see a joyous
sparkle of the eye, whether lit up by your presence or by some buoyant
fancy. It is a beguiling task to weave words into some soft, melodious
flow, that shall keep the ear and kindle the eye; and to strew it over
with half-hidden praises, so deftly couched in double terms that their
aroma shall only come to the heart hours afterward, and seem to be the
merest accidents of truth. It is a happy art to make such subdued show
of emotion as seems to struggle with pride, and to flush the eye with a
moisture, of which you seem ashamed, and yet are proud. It is a pretty
practice to throw an earnestness into look and gesture, that shall seem
full of pleading, and yet--ask nothing!
And yet it is hard to admire greatly the reputation of that man who
builds his triumphs upon womanly weakness; that distinction is not
over-enduring whose chiefest merit springs out of the delusions of a too
trustful heart. The man, who wins it, wins only a poor sort of womanly
distinction. Without power to cope with men, he triumphs over the
weakness of the other sex only by hypocrisy. He wears none of the armor
of Romans, and he parleys with Punic faith.
----Yet even now there is a lurking goodness in you that traces its
beginning to the old garret-home,--there is an air in the harvest heats
that whispers of the bloom of spring.
And over your brilliant career as man of the world, however lit up by a
morbid vanity, or galvanized by a lascivious passion, there will come at
times the consciousness of a better heart, struggling beneath your
cankered action,--like the low Vesuvian fire, reeking vainly under rough
beds of tufa and scoriated lava. And as you smile in _loge_ or _salon_,
with daring smiles, or press with villain fondness the hand of those
lady-votaries of the same god you serve, there will gleam upon you over
the waste of rolling years a memory that quickens again the nobler and
bolder instincts of the heart.
Childish recollections, with their purity and earnestness,--a sister's
love,--a mother's solicitude, will flood your soul once more with a
gushing sensibility that yearns for enjoyment. And the consciousness of
some lingering nobility of affection, that can only grow great in mating
itself with nobility of heart, will sweep off your puny triumphs, your
Platonic friendships, your dashing coquetries, like the foul smoke of a
city before a fresh breeze of the country autumn.
III.
_Manly Hope._
You are at home again; not your own home,--that is gone,--but at the
home of Nelly and of Frank. The city heats of summer drive you to the
country. You ramble, with a little kindling of old desires and memories,
over the hill-sides that once bounded your boyish vision. Here you
netted the wild rabbits, as they came out at dusk to feed; there, upon
that tall chestnut, you cruelly maimed your first captive squirrel. The
old maples are even now scarred with the rude cuts you gave them in
sappy March.
You sit down upon some height overlooking the valley where you were
born; you trace the faint, silvery line of river; you detect by the
leaning elm your old bathing-place upon the Saturdays of Summer. Your
eye dwells upon some patches of pasture-wood which were famous for their
nuts. Your rambling and saddened vision roams over the houses; it traces
the familiar chimney-stacks; it searches out the low-lying cottages; it
dwells upon the gray roof sleeping yonder under the sycamores.
Tears swell in your eye as you gaze; you cannot tell whence or why they
come. Yet they are tears eloquent of feeling. They speak of
brother-children,--of boyish glee,--of the flush of young health,--of a
mother's devotion,--of the home affections,--of the vanities of
life,--of the wasting years,--of the Death that must shroud what friends
remain, as it has shrouded what friends have gone,--and of that Great
Hope, beaming on your seared manhood dimly from the upper world!
Your wealth suffices for all the luxuries of life; there is no fear of
coming want; health beats strong in your veins; you have learned to hold
a place in the world with a man's strength, and a man's confidence. And
yet in the view of those sweet scenes which belonged to early days, when
neither strength, confidence, nor wealth were yours,--days never to come
again,--a shade of melancholy broods upon your spirit, and covers with
its veil all that fierce pride which your worldly wisdom has wrought.
You visit again with Frank the country homestead of his grandfather: he
is dead; but the old lady still lives; and blind Fanny, now drawing
toward womanhood, wears yet through her darkened life the same air of
placid content, and of sweet trustfulness in Heaven. The boys, whom you
astounded with your stories of books, are gone, building up now with
steady industry the queen cities of our new western land. The old
clergyman is gone from the desk, and from under his sounding board; he
sleeps beneath a brown stone slab in the churchyard. The stout deacon is
dead; his wig and his wickedness rest together. The tall chorister sings
yet; but they have now a bass-viol--handled by a new schoolmaster--in
place of his tuning-fork; and the years have sown feeble quavers in his
voice.
Once more you meet at the home of Nelly the blue-eyed Madge. The
sixpence is all forgotten; you cannot tell where your half of it is
gone. Yet she is beautiful, just budding into the full ripeness of
womanhood. Her eyes have a quiet, still joy, and hope beaming in them,
like angel's looks. Her motions have a native grace and freedom that no
culture can bestow. Her words have a gentle earnestness and honesty that
could never nurture guile.
You had thought after your gay experiences of the world to meet her with
a kind condescension, as an old friend of Nelly's. But there is that in
her eye which forbids all thought of condescension. There is that in her
air which tells of a high womanly dignity, which can only be met on
equal ground. Your pride is piqued. She has known--she must know your
history; but it does not tame her. There is no marked and submissive
appreciation of your gifts as a man of the world.
She meets your happiest compliments with a very easy indifference; she
receives your elegant civilities with a very assured brow. She neither
courts your society, nor avoids it. She does not seek to provoke any
special attention. And only when your old self glows in some casual
kindness to Nelly, does her look beam with a flush of sympathy.
This look touches you. It makes you ponder on the noble heart that lives
in Madge. It makes you wish it were yours. But that is gone. The fervor
and the honesty of a glowing youth is swallowed up in the flash and
splendor of the world. A half-regret chases over you at nightfall, when
solitude pierces you with the swift dart of gone-by memories. But at
morning the regret dies in the glitter of ambitious purposes.
The summer months linger; and still you linger with them. Madge is often
with Nelly; and Madge is never less than Madge. You venture to point
your attentions with a little more fervor; but she meets the fervor with
no glow. She knows too well the habit of your life.
Strange feelings come over you,--feelings like half-forgotten
memories,--musical, dreamy, doubtful. You have seen a hundred faces more
brilliant than that of Madge; you have pressed a hundred jewelled hands
that have returned a half-pressure to yours. You do not exactly admire;
to love you have forgotten; you only--linger!
It is a soft autumn evening, and the harvest-moon is red and round over
the eastern skirt of woods. You are attending Madge to that little
cottage-home where lives that gentle and doting mother, who, in the
midst of comparative poverty, cherishes that refined delicacy which
never comes to a child but by inheritance.
Madge has been passing the day with Nelly. Something--it may be the soft
autumn air, wafting toward you the freshness of young days--moves you to
speak as you have not ventured to speak, as your vanity has not allowed
you to speak before.
"You remember, Madge, (you have guarded this sole token of boyish
intimacy,) our split sixpence?"
"Perfectly;" it is a short word to speak, and there is no tremor in her
tone,--not the slightest.
"You have it yet?"
"I dare say I have it somewhere;"--no tremor now; she is very composed.
"That was a happy time;"--very great emphasis on the word happy.
"Very happy;"--no emphasis anywhere.
"I sometimes wish I might live it over again."
"Yes?"--inquiringly.
"There are, after all, no pleasures in the world like those."
"No?"--inquiringly again.
You thought you had learned to have language at command; you never
thought, after so many years' schooling of the world, that your pliant
tongue would play you truant. Yet now you are silent.
The moon steals silvery into the light flakes of cloud, and the air is
soft as May. The cottage is in sight. Again you risk utterance:--
"You must live very happily here."
"I have very kind friends;"--the very is emphasized.
"I am sure Nelly loves you very much."
"Oh, I believe it!"--with great earnestness.
You are at the cottage-door.--
"Good night, Maggie;"--very feelingly.
"Good night, Clarence;"--very kindly; and she draws her hand coyly, and
half tremulously, from your somewhat fevered grasp.
You stroll away dreamily, watching the moon,--running over your
fragmentary life,--half moody, half pleased, half hopeful.
You come back stealthily, and with a heart throbbing with a certain wild
sense of shame, to watch the light gleaming in the cottage. You linger
in the shadows of the trees until you catch a glimpse of her figure
gliding past the window. You bear the image home with you. You are
silent on your return. You retire early, but you do not sleep early.
----If you were only as you were: if it were not too late! If Madge
could only love you, as you know she will and must love one manly heart,
there would be a world of joy opening before you. But it is too late!
You draw out Nelly to speak of Madge: Nelly is very prudent. "Madge is a
dear girl," she says. Does Nelly even distrust you? It is a sad thing to
be too much a man of the world!
You go back again to noisy, ambitious life: you try to drown old
memories in its blaze and its vanities. Your lot seems cast beyond all
change, and you task yourself with its noisy fulfilment. But amid the
silence and the toil of your office-hours, a strange desire broods over
your spirit,--a desire for more of manliness,--that manliness which
feels itself a protector of loving and trustful innocence.
You look around upon the faces in which you have smiled unmeaning
smiles: there is nothing there to feed your dawning desires. You meet
with those ready to court you by flattering your vanity, by retailing
the praises of what you may do well, by odious familiarity, by brazen
proffer of friendship, but you see in it only the emptiness and the
vanity which you have studied to enjoy.
Sickness comes over you, and binds you for weary days and nights,--in
which life hovers doubtfully, and the lips babble secrets that you
cherish. It is astonishing how disease clips a man from the
artificialities of the world! Lying lonely upon his bed, moaning,
writhing, suffering, his soul joins on to the universe of souls by only
natural bonds. The factitious ties of wealth, of place, of reputation,
vanish from his bleared eyes; and the earnest heart, deep under all,
craves only heartiness!
The old craving of the office silence comes back,--not with the proud
wish only of being a protector, but--of being protected. And whatever
may be the trust in that beneficent Power who "chasteneth whom he
loveth," there is yet an earnest, human yearning toward some one, whose
love--most, and whose duty--least, would call her to your side; whose
soft hands would cool the fever of yours, whose step would wake a throb
of joy, whose voice would tie you to life, and whose presence would make
the worst of Death--an Adieu!
As you gain strength once more, you go back to Nelly's home. Her
kindness does not falter; every care and attention belong to you there.
Again your eye rests upon that figure of Madge, and upon her face,
wearing an even gentler expression as she sees you sitting pale and
feeble by the old hearth-stone. She brings flowers--for Nelly: you beg
Nelly to place them upon the little table at your side. It is as yet the
only taste of the country that you can enjoy. You love those flowers.
After a time you grow strong, and walk in the fields. You linger until
nightfall. You pass by the cottage where Madge lives. It is your
pleasantest walk. The trees are greenest in that direction; the shadows
are softest; the flowers are thickest.
It is strange--this feeling in you. It is not the feeling you had for
Laura Dalton. It does not even remind of that. That was an impulse, but
this is growth. That was strong, but this is strength. You catch sight
of her little notes to Nelly; you read them over and over; you treasure
them; you learn them by heart. There is something in the very writing
that touches you.
You bid her adieu with tones of kindness that tremble,--and that meet a
half-trembling tone in reply. She is very good.
----If it were not too late!
IV.
_Manly Love._
And shall pride yield at length!
----Pride!--and what has love to do with pride? Let us see how it is.
Madge is poor; she is humble. You are rich; you are a man of the world;
you are met respectfully by the veterans of fashion; you have gained
perhaps a kind of brilliancy of position.
Would it then be a condescension to love Madge? Dare you ask yourself
such a question? Do you not know--in spite of your worldliness--that the
man or the woman, who _condescends_ to love, never loves in earnest?
But again Madge is possessed of a purity, a delicacy, and a dignity that
lift her far above you,--that make you feel your weakness and your
unworthiness; and it is the deep and the mortifying sense of this
unworthiness that makes you bolster yourself upon your pride. You _know_
that you do yourself honor in loving such grace and goodness; you know
that you would be honored tenfold more than you deserve in being loved
by so much grace and goodness.
It scarce seems to you possible; it is a joy too great to be hoped for;
and in the doubt of its attainment your old, worldly vanity comes in,
and tells you to--beware; and to live on in the splendor of your
dissipation and in the lusts of your selfish habit. Yet still underneath
all there is a deep, low, heart-voice,--quickened from above,--which
assures you that you are capable of better things; that you are not
wholly lost; that a mine of unstarted tenderness still lies smouldering
in your soul.
And with this sense quickening your better nature, you venture the
wealth of your whole heart-life upon the hope that now blazes on your
path.
----You are seated at your desk, working with such zeal of labor as
your ambitious projects never could command. It is a letter to Margaret
Boyne that so tasks your love, and makes the veins upon your forehead
swell with the earnestness of the employ.
* * * * *
----"DEAR MADGE,--May I not call you thus, if only in memory of
our childish affections; and might I dare to hope that a riper
affection, which your character has awakened, may permit me to call you
thus always?
"If I have not ventured to speak, dear Madge, will you not believe that
the consciousness of my own ill-desert has tied my tongue; will you not
at least give me credit for a little remaining modesty of heart? You
know my life, and you know my character,--what a sad jumble of errors
and of misfortunes have belonged to each. You know the careless and the
vain purposes which have made me recreant to the better nature which
belonged to that sunny childhood, when we lived and grew up together.
And will you not believe me when I say, that your grace of character and
kindness of heart have drawn me back from the follies in which I lived,
and quickened new desires which I thought to be wholly dead? Can I
indeed hope that you will overlook all that has gained your secret
reproaches, and confide in a heart which is made conscious of better
things by the love you have inspired?
"Ah, Madge, it is not with a vain show of words, or with any counterfeit
of feeling, that I write now; you know it is not; you know that my heart
is leaning toward you with the freshness of its noblest instincts; you
know that--I love you!
"Can I, dare I hope, that it is not spoken in vain? I had thought in my
pride never to make such avowal,--never again to sue for affection; but
your gentleness, your modesty, your virtues of life and heart, have
conquered me! I am sure you will treat me with the generosity of a
victor.
"You know my weaknesses; I would not conceal from you a single
one,--even to win you. I can offer nothing to you which will bear
comparison in value with what is yours to bestow. I can only offer this
feeble hand of mine--to guard you; and this poor heart--to love you!
"Am I rash? Am I extravagant, in word, or in hope? Forgive it then, dear
Madge, for the sake of our old childish affection; and believe me, when
I say, that what is here written--is written honestly and tearfully.
Adieu."
* * * * *
It is with no fervor of boyish passion that you fold this letter: it is
with the trembling hand of eager and earnest manhood. They tell you that
man is not capable of love: so the September sun is not capable of
warmth! It may not indeed be so fierce as that of July; but it is
steadier. It does not force great flaunting leaves into breadth and
succulence, but it matures whole harvests of plenty!
There is a deep and earnest soul pervading the reply of Madge that makes
it sacred; it is full of delicacy, and full of hope. Yet it is not
final. Her heart lies intrenched within the ramparts of Duty and of
Devotion. It is a citadel of strength in the middle of the city of her
affections. To win the way to it, there must be not only earnestness of
love, but earnestness of life.
Weeks roll by, and other letters pass and are answered,--a glow of
warmth beaming on either side.
You are again at the home of Nelly; she is very joyous; she is the
confidante of Madge. Nelly feels, that with all your errors you have
enough inner goodness of heart to make Madge happy; and she
feels--doubly--that Madge has such excess of goodness as will cover your
heart with joy. Yet she tells you very little. She will give you no full
assurance of the love of Madge; she leaves that for yourself to win.
She will even tease you in her pleasant way, until hope almost changes
to despair, and your brow grows pale with the dread--that even now your
unworthiness may condemn you.
It is summer weather; and you have been walking over the hills of home
with Madge and Nelly. Nelly has found some excuse to leave
you,--glancing at you most teasingly as she hurries away.
You are left sitting with Madge upon a bank tufted with blue violets.
You have been talking of the days of childhood, and some word has called
up the old chain of boyish feeling, and joined it to your new hope.
What you would say crowds too fast for utterance, and you abandon it.
But you take from your pocket that little, broken bit of
sixpence,--which you have found after long search,--and without a word,
but with a look that tells your inmost thought, you lay it in the
half-opened hand of Madge.
She looks at you with a slight suffusion of color,--seems to hesitate a
moment,--raises her other hand, and draws from her bosom by a bit of
blue ribbon a little locket. She touches a spring, and there falls
beside your relique--another, that had once belonged to it.
Hope glows now like the sun.
----"And you have worn this, Maggie?"
----"Always!"
"Dear Madge!"
"Dear Clarence!"