THE COUSINS.
I.
Though resolved to face all out to the last, at whatever desperate
hazard, Pierre had not started for the city without some reasonable
plans, both with reference to his more immediate circumstances, and his
ulterior condition.
There resided in the city a cousin of his, Glendinning Stanly, better
known in the general family as Glen Stanly, and by Pierre, as Cousin
Glen. Like Pierre, he was an only son; his parents had died in his early
childhood; and within the present year he had returned from a protracted
sojourn in Europe, to enter, at the age of twenty-one, into the
untrammeled possession of a noble property, which in the hands of
faithful guardians, had largely accumulated.
In their boyhood and earlier adolescence, Pierre and Glen had cherished
a much more than cousinly attachment. At the age of ten, they had
furnished an example of the truth, that the friendship of fine-hearted,
generous boys, nurtured amid the romance-engendering comforts and
elegancies of life, sometimes transcends the bounds of mere boyishness,
and revels for a while in the empyrean of a love which only comes short,
by one degree, of the sweetest sentiment entertained between the sexes.
Nor is this boy-love without the occasional fillips and spicinesses,
which at times, by an apparent abatement, enhance the permanent delights
of those more advanced lovers who love beneath the cestus of Venus.
Jealousies are felt. The sight of another lad too much consorting with
the boy's beloved object, shall fill him with emotions akin to those of
Othello's; a fancied slight, or lessening of the every-day indications
of warm feelings, shall prompt him to bitter upbraidings and reproaches;
or shall plunge him into evil moods, for which grim solitude only is
congenial.
Nor are the letters of Aphroditean devotees more charged with headlong
vows and protestations, more cross-written and crammed with discursive
sentimentalities, more undeviating in their semi-weekliness, or
dayliness, as the case may be, than are the love-friendship missives of
boys. Among those bundles of papers which Pierre, in an ill hour, so
frantically destroyed in the chamber of the inn, were two large packages
of letters, densely written, and in many cases inscribed crosswise
throughout with red ink upon black; so that the love in those letters
was two layers deep, and one pen and one pigment were insufficient to
paint it. The first package contained the letters of Glen to Pierre, the
other those of Pierre to Glen, which, just prior to Glen's departure for
Europe, Pierre had obtained from him, in order to re-read them in his
absence, and so fortify himself the more in his affection, by reviving
reference to the young, ardent hours of its earliest manifestations.
But as the advancing fruit itself extrudes the beautiful blossom, so in
many cases, does the eventual love for the other sex forever dismiss the
preliminary love-friendship of boys. The mere outer friendship may in
some degree--greater or less--survive; but the singular love in it has
perishingly dropped away.
If in the eye of unyielding reality and truth, the earthly heart of man
do indeed ever fix upon some one woman, to whom alone, thenceforth
eternally to be a devotee, without a single shadow of the misgiving of
its faith; and who, to him, does perfectly embody his finest, loftiest
dream of feminine loveliness, if this indeed be so--and may Heaven grant
that it be--nevertheless, in metropolitan cases, the love of the most
single-eyed lover, almost invariably, is nothing more than the ultimate
settling of innumerable wandering glances upon some one specific object;
as admonished, that the wonderful scope and variety of female
loveliness, if too long suffered to sway us without decision, shall
finally confound all power of selection. The confirmed bachelor is, in
America, at least, quite as often the victim of a too profound
appreciation of the infinite charmingness of woman, as made solitary for
life by the legitimate empire of a cold and tasteless temperament.
Though the peculiar heart-longings pertaining to his age, had at last
found their glowing response in the bosom of Lucy; yet for some period
prior to that, Pierre had not been insensible to the miscellaneous
promptings of the passion. So that even before he became a declarative
lover, Love had yet made him her general votary; and so already there
had gradually come a cooling over that ardent sentiment which in earlier
years he had cherished for Glen.
All round and round does the world lie as in a sharp-shooter's ambush,
to pick off the beautiful illusions of youth, by the pitiless cracking
rifles of the realities of the age. If the general love for women, had
in Pierre sensibly modified his particular sentiment toward Glen;
neither had the thousand nameless fascinations of the then brilliant
paradises of France and Italy, failed to exert their seductive influence
on many of the previous feelings of Glen. For as the very best
advantages of life are not without some envious drawback, so it is among
the evils of enlarged foreign travel, that in young and unsolid minds,
it dislodges some of the finest feelings of the home-born nature;
replacing them with a fastidious superciliousness, which like the
alledged bigoted Federalism of old times would not--according to a
political legend--grind its daily coffee in any mill save of European
manufacture, and was satirically said to have thought of importing
European air for domestic consumption. The mutually curtailed,
lessening, long-postponed, and at last altogether ceasing letters of
Pierre and Glen were the melancholy attestations of a fact, which
perhaps neither of them took very severely to heart, as certainly,
concerning it, neither took the other to task.
In the earlier periods of that strange transition from the generous
impulsiveness of youth to the provident circumspectness of age, there
generally intervenes a brief pause of unpleasant reconsidering; when
finding itself all wide of its former spontaneous self, the soul
hesitates to commit itself wholly to selfishness; more than repents its
wanderings;--yet all this is but transient; and again hurried on by the
swift current of life, the prompt-hearted boy scarce longer is to be
recognized in matured man,--very slow to feel, deliberate even in love,
and statistical even in piety. During the sway of this peculiar period,
the boy shall still make some strenuous efforts to retrieve his
departing spontaneities; but so alloyed are all such endeavors with the
incipiencies of selfishness, that they were best not made at all; since
too often they seem but empty and self-deceptive sallies, or still
worse, the merest hypocritical assumptions.
Upon the return of Glen from abroad, the commonest courtesy, not to say
the blood-relation between them, prompted Pierre to welcome him home,
with a letter, which though not over-long, and little enthusiastic,
still breathed a spirit of cousinly consideration and kindness,
pervadingly touched by the then naturally frank and all-attractive
spirit of Pierre. To this, the less earnest and now Europeanized Glen
had replied in a letter all sudden suavity; and in a strain of artistic
artlessness, mourned the apparent decline of their friendship; yet
fondly trusted that now, notwithstanding their long separation, it
would revive with added sincerity. Yet upon accidentally fixing his
glance upon the opening salutation of this delicate missive, Pierre
thought he perceived certain, not wholly disguisable chirographic
tokens, that the "My very dear Pierre," with which the letter seemed to
have been begun, had originally been written "Dear Pierre;" but that
when all was concluded, and Glen's signature put to it, then the ardent
words "My very" had been prefixed to the reconsidered "Dear Pierre;" a
casual supposition, which possibly, however unfounded, materially
retarded any answering warmth in Pierre, lest his generous flame should
only embrace a flaunted feather. Nor was this idea altogether
unreinforced, when on the reception of a second, and now half-business
letter (of which mixed sort nearly all the subsequent ones were), from
Glen, he found that the "My very dear Pierre" had already retreated into
"My dear Pierre;" and on a third occasion, into "Dear Pierre;" and on a
fourth, had made a forced and very spirited advanced march up to "My
dearest Pierre." All of which fluctuations augured ill for the
determinateness of that love, which, however immensely devoted to one
cause, could yet hoist and sail under the flags of all nations. Nor
could he but now applaud a still subsequent letter from Glen, which
abruptly, and almost with apparent indecorousness, under the
circumstances, commenced the strain of friendship without any overture
of salutation whatever; as if at last, owing to its infinite
delicateness, entirely hopeless of precisely defining the nature of
their mystical love, Glen chose rather to leave that precise definition
to the sympathetical heart and imagination of Pierre; while he himself
would go on to celebrate the general relation, by many a sugared
sentence of miscellaneous devotion. It was a little curious and rather
sardonically diverting, to compare these masterly, yet not wholly
successful, and indeterminate tactics of the accomplished Glen, with the
unfaltering stream of _Beloved Pierres_, which not only flowed along
the top margin of all his earlier letters, but here and there, from
their subterranean channel, flashed out in bright intervals, through all
the succeeding lines. Nor had the chance recollection of these things at
all restrained the reckless hand of Pierre, when he threw the whole
package of letters, both new and old, into that most honest and summary
of all elements, which is neither a respecter of persons, nor a finical
critic of what manner of writings it burns; but like ultimate Truth
itself, of which it is the eloquent symbol, consumes all, and only
consumes.
When the betrothment of Pierre to Lucy had become an acknowledged thing,
the courtly Glen, besides the customary felicitations upon that event,
had not omitted so fit an opportunity to re-tender to his cousin all his
previous jars of honey and treacle, accompanied by additional boxes of
candied citron and plums. Pierre thanked him kindly; but in certain
little roguish ambiguities begged leave, on the ground of cloying, to
return him inclosed by far the greater portion of his present; whose
non-substantialness was allegorically typified in the containing letter
itself, prepaid with only the usual postage.
True love, as every one knows, will still withstand many repulses, even
though rude. But whether it was the love or the politeness of Glen,
which on this occasion proved invincible, is a matter we will not
discuss. Certain it was, that quite undaunted, Glen nobly returned to
the charge, and in a very prompt and unexpected answer, extended to
Pierre all the courtesies of the general city, and all the hospitalities
of five sumptuous chambers, which he and his luxurious environments
contrived nominally to occupy in the most fashionable private hotel of a
very opulent town. Nor did Glen rest here; but like Napoleon, now seemed
bent upon gaining the battle by throwing all his regiments upon one
point of attack, and gaining that point at all hazards. Hearing of some
rumor at the tables of his relatives that the day was being fixed for
the positive nuptials of Pierre; Glen called all his Parisian
portfolios for his rosiest sheet, and with scented ink, and a pen of
gold, indited a most burnished and redolent letter, which, after
invoking all the blessings of Apollo and Venus, and the Nine Muses, and
the Cardinal Virtues upon the coming event; concluded at last with a
really magnificent testimonial to his love.
According to this letter, among his other real estate in the city, Glen
had inherited a very charming, little, old house, completely furnished
in the style of the last century, in a quarter of the city which, though
now not so garishly fashionable as of yore, still in its quiet
secludedness, possessed great attractions for the retired billings and
cooings of a honeymoon. Indeed he begged leave now to christen it the
Cooery, and if after his wedding jaunt, Pierre would deign to visit the
city with his bride for a month or two's sojourn, then the Cooery would
be but too happy in affording him a harbor. His sweet cousin need be
under no apprehension. Owing to the absence of any fit applicant for it,
the house had now long been without a tenant, save an old, confidential,
bachelor clerk of his father's, who on a nominal rent, and more by way
of safe-keeping to the house than any thing else, was now hanging up his
well-furbished hat in its hall. This accommodating old clerk would
quickly unpeg his beaver at the first hint of new occupants. Glen would
charge himself with supplying the house in advance with a proper retinue
of servants; fires would be made in the long-unoccupied chambers; the
venerable, grotesque, old mahoganies, and marbles, and mirror-frames,
and moldings could be very soon dusted and burnished; the kitchen was
amply provided with the necessary utensils for cooking; the strong box
of old silver immemorially pertaining to the mansion, could be readily
carted round from the vaults of the neighboring Bank; while the hampers
of old china, still retained in the house, needed but little trouble to
unpack; so that silver and china would soon stand assorted in their
appropriate closets; at the turning of a faucet in the cellar, the best
of the city's water would not fail to contribute its ingredient to the
concocting of a welcoming glass of negus before retiring on the first
night of their arrival.
The over-fastidiousness of some unhealthily critical minds, as well as
the moral pusillanimity of others, equally bars the acceptance of
effectually substantial favors from persons whose motive in proffering
them, is not altogether clear and unimpeachable; and toward whom,
perhaps, some prior coolness or indifference has been shown. But when
the acceptance of such a favor would be really convenient and desirable
to the one party, and completely unattended with any serious distress to
the other; there would seem to be no sensible objection to an immediate
embrace of the offer. And when the acceptor is in rank and fortune the
general equal of the profferer, and perhaps his superior, so that any
courtesy he receives, can be amply returned in the natural course of
future events, then all motives to decline are very materially lessened.
And as for the thousand inconceivable finicalnesses of small pros and
cons about imaginary fitnesses, and proprieties, and self-consistencies;
thank heaven, in the hour of heart-health, none such shilly-shallying
sail-trimmers ever balk the onward course of a bluff-minded man. He
takes the world as it is; and carelessly accommodates himself to its
whimsical humors; nor ever feels any compunction at receiving the
greatest possible favors from those who are as able to grant, as free to
bestow. He himself bestows upon occasion; so that, at bottom, common
charity steps in to dictate a favorable consideration for all possible
profferings; seeing that the acceptance shall only the more enrich him,
indirectly, for new and larger beneficences of his own.
And as for those who noways pretend with themselves to regulate their
deportment by considerations of genuine benevolence, and to whom such
courteous profferings hypocritically come from persons whom they suspect
for secret enemies; then to such minds not only will their own worldly
tactics at once forbid the uncivil blank repulse of such offers; but if
they are secretly malicious as well as frigid, or if they are at all
capable of being fully gratified by the sense of concealed superiority
and mastership (which precious few men are) then how delightful for such
persons under the guise of mere acquiescence in his own voluntary
civilities, to make genteel use of their foe. For one would like to
know, what were foes made for except to be used? In the rude ages men
hunted and javelined the tiger, because they hated him for a
mischief-minded wild-beast; but in these enlightened times, though we
love the tiger as little as ever, still we mostly hunt him for the sake
of his skin. A wise man then will wear his tiger; every morning put on
his tiger for a robe to keep him warm and adorn him. In this view, foes
are far more desirable than friends; for who would hunt and kill his own
faithful affectionate dog for the sake of his skin? and is a dog's skin
as valuable as a tiger's? Cases there are where it becomes soberly
advisable, by direct arts to convert some well-wishers into foes. It is
false that in point of policy a man should never make enemies. As
well-wishers some men may not only be nugatory but positive obstacles in
your peculiar plans; but as foes you may subordinately cement them into
your general design.
But into these ulterior refinements of cool Tuscan policy, Pierre as yet
had never become initiated; his experiences hitherto not having been
varied and ripe enough for that; besides, he had altogether too much
generous blood in his heart. Nevertheless, thereafter, in a less
immature hour, though still he shall not have the heart to practice upon
such maxims as the above, yet shall he have the brain thoroughly to
comprehend their practicability; which is not always the case. And
generally, in worldly wisdom, men will deny to one the possession of all
insight, which one does not by his every-day outward life practically
reveal. It is a very common error of some unscrupulously
infidel-minded, selfish, unprincipled, or downright knavish men, to
suppose that believing men, or benevolent-hearted men, or good men, do
not know enough to be unscrupulously selfish, do not know enough to be
unscrupulous knaves. And thus--thanks to the world!--are there many
spies in the world's camp, who are mistaken for strolling simpletons.
And these strolling simpletons seem to act upon the principle, that in
certain things, we do not so much learn, by showing that already we know
a vast deal, as by negatively seeming rather ignorant. But here we press
upon the frontiers of that sort of wisdom, which it is very well to
possess, but not sagacious to show that you possess. Still, men there
are, who having quite done with the world, all its mere worldly contents
are become so far indifferent, that they care little of what mere
worldly imprudence they may be guilty.
Now, if it were not conscious considerations like the really benevolent
or neutral ones first mentioned above, it was certainly something akin
to them, which had induced Pierre to return a straightforward, manly,
and entire acceptance to his cousin of the offer of the house; thanking
him, over and over, for his most supererogatory kindness concerning the
pre-engagement of servants and so forth, and the setting in order of the
silver and china; but reminding him, nevertheless, that he had
overlooked all special mention of wines, and begged him to store the
bins with a few of the very best brands. He would likewise be obliged,
if he would personally purchase at a certain celebrated grocer's, a
small bag of undoubted Mocha coffee; but Glen need not order it to be
roasted or ground, because Pierre preferred that both those highly
important and flavor-deciding operations should be performed
instantaneously previous to the final boiling and serving. Nor did he
say that he would pay for the wines and the Mocha; he contented himself
with merely stating the remissness on the part of his cousin, and
pointing out the best way of remedying it.
He concluded his letter by intimating that though the rumor of a set
day, and a near one, for his nuptials, was unhappily but ill-founded,
yet he would not hold Glen's generous offer as merely based upon that
presumption, and consequently falling with it; but on the contrary,
would consider it entirely good for whatever time it might prove
available to Pierre. He was betrothed beyond a peradventure; and hoped
to be married ere death. Meanwhile, Glen would further oblige him by
giving the confidential clerk a standing notice to quit.
Though at first quite amazed at this letter,--for indeed, his offer
might possibly have proceeded as much from ostentation as any thing
else, nor had he dreamed of so unhesitating an acceptance,--Pierre's
cousin was too much of a precocious young man of the world, disclosedly
to take it in any other than a very friendly, and cousinly, and
humorous, and yet practical way; which he plainly evinced by a reply far
more sincere and every way creditable, apparently, both to his heart and
head, than any letter he had written to Pierre since the days of their
boyhood. And thus, by the bluffness and, in some sort,
uncompunctuousness of Pierre, this very artificial youth was well
betrayed into an act of effective kindness; being forced now to drop the
empty mask of ostentation, and put on the solid hearty features of a
genuine face. And just so, are some people in the world to be joked into
occasional effective goodness, when all coyness, and coolness, all
resentments, and all solemn preaching, would fail.
II.
But little would we comprehend the peculiar relation between Pierre and
Glen--a relation involving in the end the most serious results--were
there not here thrown over the whole equivocal, preceding account of it,
another and more comprehensive equivocalness, which shall absorb all
minor ones in itself; and so make one pervading ambiguity the only
possible explanation for all the ambiguous details.
It had long been imagined by Pierre, that prior to his own special
devotion to Lucy, the splendid Glen had not been entirely insensible to
her surprising charms. Yet this conceit in its incipiency, he knew not
how to account for. Assuredly his cousin had never in the slightest
conceivable hint betrayed it; and as for Lucy, the same intuitive
delicacy which forever forbade Pierre to question her on the subject,
did equally close her own voluntary lips. Between Pierre and Lucy,
delicateness put her sacred signet on this chest of secrecy; which like
the wax of an executor upon a desk, though capable of being melted into
nothing by the smallest candle, for all this, still possesses to the
reverent the prohibitive virtue of inexorable bars and bolts.
If Pierre superficially considered the deportment of Glen toward him,
therein he could find no possible warrant for indulging the suspicious
idea. Doth jealousy smile so benignantly and offer its house to the
bride? Still, on the other hand, to quit the mere surface of the
deportment of Glen, and penetrate beneath its brocaded vesture; there
Pierre sometimes seemed to see the long-lurking and yet unhealed wound
of all a rejected lover's most rankling detestation of a supplanting
rival, only intensified by their former friendship, and the unimpairable
blood-relation between them. Now, viewed by the light of this
master-solution, all the singular enigmas in Glen; his capriciousness in
the matter of the epistolary--"Dear Pierres" and "Dearest Pierres;" the
mercurial fall from the fever-heat of cordiality, to below the Zero of
indifference; then the contrary rise to fever-heat; and, above all, his
emphatic redundancy of devotion so soon as the positive espousals of
Pierre seemed on the point of consummation; thus read, all these riddles
apparently found their cunning solution. For the deeper that some men
feel a secret and poignant feeling, the higher they pile the belying
surfaces. The friendly deportment of Glen then was to be considered as
in direct proportion to his hoarded hate; and the climax of that hate
was evinced in throwing open his house to the bride. Yet if hate was the
abstract cause, hate could not be the immediate motive of the conduct of
Glen. Is hate so hospitable? The immediate motive of Glen then must be
the intense desire to disguise from the wide world, a fact unspeakably
humiliating to his gold-laced and haughty soul: the fact that in the
profoundest desire of his heart, Pierre had so victoriously supplanted
him. Yet was it that very artful deportment in Glen, which Glen
profoundly assumed to this grand end; that consummately artful
deportment it was, which first obtruded upon Pierre the surmise, which
by that identical method his cousin was so absorbedly intent upon
rendering impossible to him. Hence we here see that as in the negative
way the secrecy of any strong emotion is exceedingly difficult to be
kept lastingly private to one's own bosom by any human being; so it is
one of the most fruitless undertakings in the world, to attempt by
affirmative assumptions to tender to men, the precisely opposite emotion
as yours. Therefore the final wisdom decrees, that if you have aught
which you desire to keep a secret to yourself, be a Quietist there, and
do and say nothing at all about it. For among all the poor chances, this
is the least poor. Pretensions and substitutions are only the recourse
of under-graduates in the science of the world; in which science, on his
own ground, my Lord Chesterfield, is the poorest possible preceptor. The
earliest instinct of the child, and the ripest experience of age, unite
in affirming simplicity to be the truest and profoundest part for man.
Likewise this simplicity is so universal and all-containing as a rule
for human life, that the subtlest bad man, and the purest good man, as
well as the profoundest wise man, do all alike present it on that side
which they socially turn to the inquisitive and unscrupulous world.
III.
Now the matter of the house had remained in precisely the above-stated
awaiting predicament, down to the time of Pierre's great
life-revolution, the receipt of Isabel's letter. And though, indeed,
Pierre could not but naturally hesitate at still accepting the use of
the dwelling, under the widely different circumstances in which he now
found himself; and though at first the strongest possible spontaneous
objections on the ground of personal independence, pride, and general
scorn, all clamorously declared in his breast against such a course;
yet, finally, the same uncompunctuous, ever-adaptive sort of motive
which had induced his original acceptation, prompted him, in the end,
still to maintain it unrevoked. It would at once set him at rest from
all immediate tribulations of mere bed and board; and by affording him a
shelter, for an indefinite term, enable him the better to look about
him, and consider what could best be done to further the permanent
comfort of those whom Fate had intrusted to his charge.
Irrespective, it would seem, of that wide general awaking of his
profounder being, consequent upon the extraordinary trials he had so
aggregatively encountered of late; the thought was indignantly suggested
to him, that the world must indeed be organically despicable, if it held
that an offer, superfluously accepted in the hour of his abundance,
should now, be rejected in that of his utmost need. And without at all
imputing any singularity of benevolent-mindedness to his cousin, he did
not for a moment question, that under the changed aspect of affairs,
Glen would at least pretend the more eagerly to welcome him to the
house, now that the mere thing of apparent courtesy had become
transformed into something like a thing of positive and urgent
necessity. When Pierre also considered that not himself only was
concerned, but likewise two peculiarly helpless fellow-beings, one of
them bound to him from the first by the most sacred ties, and lately
inspiring an emotion which passed all human precedent in its mixed and
mystical import; these added considerations completely overthrew in
Pierre all remaining dictates of his vague pride and false independence,
if such indeed had ever been his.
Though the interval elapsing between his decision to depart with his
companions for the city, and his actual start in the coach, had not
enabled him to receive any replying word from his cousin; and though
Pierre knew better than to expect it; yet a preparative letter to him he
had sent; and did not doubt that this proceeding would prove
well-advised in the end.
In naturally strong-minded men, however young and inexperienced in some
things, those great and sudden emergencies, which but confound the timid
and the weak, only serve to call forth all their generous latentness,
and teach them, as by inspiration, extraordinary maxims of conduct,
whose counterpart, in other men, is only the result of a long,
variously-tried and pains-taking life. One of those maxims is, that
when, through whatever cause, we are suddenly translated from opulence
to need, or from a fair fame to a foul; and straightway it becomes
necessary not to contradict the thing--so far at least as the mere
imputation goes,--to some one previously entertaining high conventional
regard for us, and from whom we would now solicit some genuine helping
offices; then, all explanation or palation should be scorned;
promptness, boldness, utter gladiatorianism, and a defiant non-humility
should mark every syllable we breathe, and every line we trace.
The preparative letter of Pierre to Glen, plunged at once into the very
heart of the matter, and was perhaps the briefest letter he had ever
written him. Though by no means are such characteristics invariable
exponents of the predominant mood or general disposition of a man (since
so accidental a thing as a numb finger, or a bad quill, or poor ink, or
squalid paper, or a rickety desk may produce all sorts of
modifications), yet in the present instance, the handwriting of Pierre
happened plainly to attest and corroborate the spirit of his
communication. The sheet was large; but the words were placarded upon it
in heavy though rapid lines, only six or eight to the page. And as the
footman of a haughty visitor--some Count or Duke--announces the chariot
of his lord by a thunderous knock on the portal; so to Glen did Pierre,
in the broad, sweeping, and prodigious superscription of his letter,
forewarn him what manner of man was on the road.
In the moment of strong feeling a wonderful condensativeness points the
tongue and pen; so that ideas, then enunciated sharp and quick as
minute-guns, in some other hour of unruffledness or unstimulatedness,
require considerable time and trouble to verbally recall.
Not here and now can we set down the precise contents of Pierre's
letter, without a tautology illy doing justice to the ideas themselves.
And though indeed the dread of tautology be the continual torment of
some earnest minds, and, as such, is surely a weakness in them; and
though no wise man will wonder at conscientious Virgil all eager at
death to burn his Æniad for a monstrous heap of inefficient superfluity;
yet not to dread tautology at times only belongs to those enviable
dunces, whom the partial God hath blessed, over all the earth, with the
inexhaustible self-riches of vanity, and folly, and a blind
self-complacency.
Some rumor of the discontinuance of his betrothment to Lucy Tartan; of
his already consummated marriage with a poor and friendless orphan; of
his mother's disowning him consequent upon these events; such rumors,
Pierre now wrote to his cousin, would very probably, in the parlors of
his city-relatives and acquaintances, precede his arrival in town. But
he hinted no word of any possible commentary on these things. He simply
went on to say, that now, through the fortune of life--which was but
the proverbially unreliable fortune of war--he was, for the present,
thrown entirely upon his own resources, both for his own support and
that of his wife, as well as for the temporary maintenance of a girl,
whom he had lately had excellent reason for taking under his especial
protection. He proposed a permanent residence in the city; not without
some nearly quite settled plans as to the procuring of a competent
income, without any ulterior reference to any member of their wealthy
and widely ramified family. The house, whose temporary occupancy Glen
had before so handsomely proffered him, would now be doubly and trebly
desirable to him. But the pre-engaged servants, and the old china, and
the old silver, and the old wines, and the Mocha, were now become
altogether unnecessary. Pierre would merely take the place--for a short
interval--of the worthy old clerk; and, so far as Glen was concerned,
simply stand guardian of the dwelling, till his plans were matured. His
cousin had originally made his most bounteous overture, to welcome the
coming of the presumed bride of Pierre; and though another lady had now
taken her place at the altar, yet Pierre would still regard the offer of
Glen as impersonal in that respect, and bearing equal reference to any
young lady, who should prove her claim to the possessed hand of Pierre.
Since there was no universal law of opinion in such matters, Glen, on
general worldly grounds, might not consider the real Mrs. Glendinning
altogether so suitable a match for Pierre, as he possibly might have
held numerous other young ladies in his eye: nevertheless, Glen would
find her ready to return with sincerity all his cousinly regard and
attention. In conclusion, Pierre said, that he and his party meditated
an immediate departure, and would very probably arrive in town in
eight-and-forty hours after the mailing of the present letter. He
therefore begged Glen to see the more indispensable domestic appliances
of the house set in some little order against their arrival; to have
the rooms aired and lighted; and also forewarn the confidential clerk of
what he might soon expect. Then, without any tapering sequel
of--"_Yours, very truly and faithfully, my dear Cousin Glen_," he
finished the letter with the abrupt and isolated signature
of--"PIERRE."